Huawei recently launched Huawei Search, another major move Huawei has made in the software ecosystem following the launch of Harmony OS, HMS services, and Huawei Maps.
In the second quarter of 2019, after Huawei's mobile phone business was unilaterally restricted by Google overseas, Huawei has been looking for an alternative to Google.
Tencent Tech quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that in order to respond to Google's sanctions, Huawei has prepared several solutions, which are mainly related to the extent of Google's restrictions on Huawei.
Initially, Huawei hoped to find a compromise by not negotiating by itself, but now the form is that Huawei must find a way to completely replace Google.
In fact, Huawei is not the first company involved in the software ecosystem as a hardware manufacturer in terms of system and ecology.
As early as 2010, Samsung, the world's largest mobile phone market, had been involved in the mobile phone operating system and software ecosystem business, and Samsung had also missed the founding team of the Android operating system.
Only limited by various external factors, Samsung has not achieved the grand vision it once set.
From hardware companies to software companies, what kind of hard power does Huawei fight behind? Why did Samsung fail that year? A full-scale battle with Google, where is the opportunity for Huawei?
Tencent Technology provided an interpretation in this article.
Huawei forced to go
In October 2019, after long-term negotiations with Google to no avail, Huawei officially announced the existence of Harmony OS at the developer conference.
In the days before that, based on the premise that it could continue to cooperate with Google, Harmony OS existed in a way of folk rumors in disputes and conjectures with major media.
After the release of Harmony OS, Huawei's HMS, Huawei Maps, Huawei Play, and Huawei Search, which have completely replaced Google and even directly competed with the app, were subsequently exposed.
From the HMS, maps, app stores, and search that Android doesn't need, Android and Huawei may be looking for the layout of many overlapping areas such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and car travel, which Google and Huawei are betting on. Become the second Google.
The motivation for Huawei to start nearly full competition with Google comes from the pressure of Huawei's consumer business on the one hand and the inevitable bet on Huawei's future industries such as AI and cloud computing.
According to Huawei's financial report released in the first half of 2019, Huawei's revenue pillar is mainly based on operator business, consumer business and enterprise business. The three major businesses account for 99.4% of Huawei's total revenue.
Of these three businesses, the consumer business alone alone accounted for 55% of the total revenue, which overwhelmed the once king operator business (36.5%) and became the largest source of Huawei's overall revenue.
The Technology Research Institute learned from Huawei's financial report that as early as 2018, Huawei's consumer business had surpassed the operator's business. After 2015, as the global 4G network construction enters its final phase, Huawei's carrier business has maintained a level of 290 billion yuan for four consecutive years, and its growth has stagnated.
Therefore, as early as 2016, Huawei's main revenue pressure at this stage has become consumer business. This makes Huawei's involvement in Google's monopoly fields such as HMS, maps, and app stores, and it has become an inevitable act of self-help.
On the bets on AI and cloud computing, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei once said: "In 5 years, Huawei will build a winning team, but 5G is only a pediatrics, artificial intelligence (AI) is the big industry, it is Huawei A strategic place for development. "
Regarding Huawei's domestic bet, Google has been suppressed by Amazon and Microsoft despite its cloud computing business.
But as a future business consensus, through Google's frequent personnel adjustments of cloud computing business and expansion of talents, Google has never stopped chasing the two cloud computing giants.
Therefore, the competition between Huawei Cloud and Google Cloud and the two companies' AI layout has become inevitable for the two companies to break through. The coincidence of these history and opportunities in the future will make Huawei's software ecological path more and more similar to that of Google.
It is just different from Google's background in relying on programmers to settle down. Huawei's start-up history is related to manufacturing, which makes Huawei still have a certain gap with Google in the strength of software development.
Huawei's efforts in software systems and ecology, according to the investigation by the Science and Technology Research Institute, will start from the establishment of Cloud BU (cloud computing business) in 2017.
It was in 2017 that after Huawei had plans to recruit tens of thousands of engineers to add cloud computing, some of Huawei's new software technologies on mobile phones were gradually born.
In December 2018, before Google had launched the Huawei phone, Ren Zhengfei, who probably smelled some red flags, personally issued an open letter saying that he would invest 2 billion US dollars to comprehensively improve the quality of Huawei's software and build credible high-quality products.
In the content of the open letter, Ren Zhengfei mentioned that Huawei should start with the most basic coding quality and regard high-quality codes as dignity and personal reputation; it should reconstruct the corrupted architecture and historical codes that do not meet software engineering specifications and quality requirements; Create a higher-level community of Committer characters.
Therefore, combined with the actions of Huawei's launch of Harmony OS, HMS, Huawei Maps, and Huawei Search from 2019 to 2020, this is not only the conflict between Huawei and Google, but also the common choice for all technology giants to face the growth dilemma, it is only Huawei Restrictions on the mobile phone business have given Huawei one more reason to go online.
Because for Huawei, losing is not only about the future, but also largely determines the life and death after 5G.
Huawei's weakness and plan B
Speaking of Huawei, this Chinese mobile phone brand that has entered the world's top three because of Hisilicon Kirin always impresses us with its hardware. Because apart from the mobile phone business, Huawei's founding history is a company starting from base station R&D
Based on this historical gene of Huawei, the EMUI of Huawei's mobile phone business has also been criticized for its poor experience.
In fact, Huawei's weakness in software has been debated internally since 2016. Based on this small history, although Huawei seems to have a relatively shallow layout in software construction, Huawei's hard power in software construction is not weak.
In August of that year, a returnee programmer named "Niwake" deployed in Huawei wrote an article "It's time for Huawei to blow up the research and development pyramid", pointing directly at Huawei's software industry and China's leading Internet. Products, huge gaps in ease of use, closeness to users and rapid product iteration.
Huawei before 2016, because Huawei's main sources of profit are from the hardware field, and hardware is often more valued by Huawei than software. Therefore, Huawei's hundreds of billions of R&D are mainly focused on the training of hardware and hardware talents. .
According to the "Niwake" spit, at the time of Huawei's software development, the staff of Huawei's architecture design department focused on meetings, films and documents, so that the programming ability was basically lost, and opportunities for new technology learning were limited . For example, a mobile development employee has no idea how to develop on Android or iOS.
According to the media description: "This article was forwarded to the Huawei Voice Community and caused heated discussions, which even shocked Ren Zhengfei himself."
Huawei is a crisis-conscious company. After Huawei became the top 100 industrial company in China in 2000, Ren Zhengfei directly posted a post about the Huawei crisis.
After fully entering the smart phone market, in order to gain autonomy, the SOC chose the path of completely self-research.
Therefore, based on the relative weakness in software research and development, Huawei also made preparations as early as 2016. According to Ren Zhengfei himself after losing Google's support: "We have been preparing for today for more than a decade."
The related fact is that the EMUI 5.0 carried at the 2016 Mate 9 domestic press conference has achieved 18 months of non-stuck by rewriting the underlying code, while achieving system information fragmentation, intelligent perception and behavior prediction (pre-loading) .
In 2018, Richard Yu personally introduced GPU Turbo technology at the Honor Play conference. In February 2019, Huawei released the Ark compiler at the P30 series domestic conference.
Regarding Huawei's accumulation of software hard power, in 2017, the shopkeeper Zhou mentioned in the article "The Glory and Dream of Huawei Mobile Phones":
"From the perspective of technology accumulation, the only companies in the world that can operate on Android are Google and Huawei. The number of experts who can" operate "on the bottom of Android should not exceed 100 people worldwide. One third of them are at Google. One third is in Huawei. "
In addition, Li Xiaolong, vice president of Huawei's terminal product line, also revealed at a conference: “Huawei's mobile phone team contributed to the Android low-level code. Tens of thousands of engineers have replaced the unreasonable code in the Android low-level code in order to make Mobile phones are more efficient and smooth, and even after Huawei phones are optimized every year, Google will take it and integrate it into the latest version of Android. "
The only difference from Huawei's "prepare" is that in the second quarter of 2019, the way Google restrained Huawei did not come from the system, but appeared in the software ecosystem such as GMS, maps and YouTube, which were deeply tied to the system.
Although Google's first attack made Huawei fail to deal with these issues, in the second quarter of 2019, sales of overseas mobile phone markets plummeted. However, the war itself is not a superficial game about service forms and system ecology, but a long-term assessment of Huawei's Chinese company's talent mobilization ability and talent reserve.
In fact, with the official announcement of Harmony OS in 2019, Huawei's counterattack has begun.
Lessons from Samsung
As a company that broke into the software ecosystem from the hardware field, Huawei is not the first pioneer to eat crabs.
Among these historical cases, Samsung, which is also a mobile phone manufacturer today, is more worthy of reference. For example, as early as 2012, Samsung tried to build its own operating system ecosystem by purchasing the Tizen system from the Linux Foundation.
From 2012 to 2019, Samsung introduced major updates for the Tizen system, such as Caique, Magnolia, and Nectarine.
However, based on the objective conditions of the weak Internet gene in South Korea, Samsung has only launched less than 5 Z models for this Tizen system that is competing with Android.
In 2014, with the absolute lead of Android, the Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo, one of the Tizen system founding members, officially withdrew from the Tizen Alliance.
After 2015, Samsung abandoned the application of the Tizen system in mobile phone systems and instead turned directly to use Tizen's scenes directly in cameras, smart watches, smart TVs, media players, set-top boxes, and smart homes (including air conditioning systems, refrigerators, Lighting control, etc.) and other markets.
Samsung's failure in the operating system mainly stems from three aspects: First, to this day, South Korea still does not have its own complete network service system, which makes South Korea lack the talent base to support Samsung to make new systems.
The second is that the new system launched by Samsung chose a strategy that competes positively with Android. For a new system lacking ecological applications, this is equivalent to locking itself into a dead end.
Third, Samsung's launch of the system did not pay enough attention. Samsung's new system was only used on the low-end models of the Z series, and it was not all in as a key decision for Samsung to break the game.
Compared with Samsung's Tizen system at that time, Huawei's layout on Harmony OS and search does not need to worry about the talents of system construction, because only China's Internet system was once called the Chinese version.
Huawei only needs to solve the first step of how to attract talents to enter the ecological construction and the subsequent second step of how to make these constructions profitable.
Secondly, with regard to Huawei's HMS service and search and system issues, Huawei has repeatedly said that it will not abandon Android. From the same screen interaction of EMUI10, Huawei is doing Android-based transformation of Android.
Even if it is Harmony OS, the current information indicates that Harmony OS is more an IoT system used with Android than a mobile phone operating system, so less than a last resort, Huawei will not compete directly with Android.
This strategy allows Huawei to build its own intelligent networking island with minimal investment.
In the end, whether it is searching, Harmony OS, or HMS services, it is a big problem that Huawei must solve in order to survive. Through these software ecological construction, betting on the new future of intelligent networking is the inevitable path for Huawei to move into the future. There is no such problem as Samsung Tizen.
In order to fight this long-term war, on June 27, 2019, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said directly through the community of voices: "This year we will recruit 20-30 talented young people from all over the world. Next year we also want to recruit from the world. Enter 200-300. These talented teenagers are like 'muddlers', digging into our organization and activating our team. "
In the next 3-5 years, I believe that the company will be completely renewed, all "changing guns and changing guns", we must win this "war."
Although Huawei today has many new changes that are beneficial to Huawei compared to Samsung, Huawei's R&D expenditures are at the same level as companies such as Google and Samsung. At present, Huawei's competition in hardware and software with the world's giants will be more Some pressure from Huawei exists.
But compared with the compromise between Samsung and the retreat, Huawei's biggest difference today is that Huawei has no retreat.
This makes this retrograde war a test of Huawei's talent potential and corporate organization's vitality, rather than a comparison on the surface.
According to a friend inside Huawei, "After the restrictions from the United States appeared, Huawei encountered a short-term dilemma, but let Huawei know which aspects of its shortcomings should be made up. Huawei's reform of software development efforts should be carried out For several years or even decades, this external intervention directly broke Huawei's old tradition of not paying attention to software construction. This is one of the things that President Ren hopes to promote most. "
Battle with Google, where is Huawei's opportunity?
As a manufacturing company, Huawei has a mature Internet today. Is there really a chance to challenge Google's position through Google's strongest projects such as search, HMS, and maps?
Tencent Tech believes that opportunities exist:
The first is that 5G has opened a new era of cloud computing, AI and the Internet of Things, and the experience of mobile phones and Internet of Things electronic products has started to move into the no-man's land.
This process will produce many unknown things, such as new things that have already appeared in folding screens, VR, AR, and cloud games. If a technology breakthrough occurs, it will bring pandemic and industry innovation.
These new gadgets and unknown technologies that may appear in the future will become disruptors to the existing pattern.
Secondly, after 2016, with the stability of the Internet landscape, Google's innovation in search, GMS services, and maps has become less and less. This has caused the original fast-evolving service method to stagnate. The stagnation means that new forces can be quickly approached Opportunity.
This opportunity is difficult to achieve outside of mobile phone manufacturers, because the new experience and ecology require high habit formation costs.
However, for mobile phone manufacturers that already have hundreds of millions of users, as long as the profit on the mobile phone is appropriately lowered and a targeted model is provided for a target user, there will be an opportunity to break the ice.
However, the potential risk of this action is that it is necessary to make a positive impression on the mobile phone experience. If early word of mouth collapses, it is likely to cause market users to reject subsequent models.
Therefore, Huawei's challenge to Google still has to return to the competition for talent.
Only by building a team that can maintain Huawei's software ecological experience and compete with mobile phones with Google services is Huawei's final destination for challenging Google.
In this special period of 2020, the favorable external environment for Huawei is that after more than 20 years of baptism of the Internet wave in China, there is no shortage of outstanding software development talents in China.
And China has also formed a relatively complete education chain for software development talents, which has created a human foundation for Huawei to enter the software ecosystem.
In 2014, a report released by IDC showed that of the 18.5 million programmers worldwide, the Chinese family alone accounted for 10%.
Over time, even if we still only calculate at 10%, driven by the demand of Alibaba and Huawei Global 500 companies, China with top programmers can be regarded as a world-class programmer powerhouse.
Another data related to the speculation of high-end programmer talent is that the top five countries in the world for AI talent are the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. Among them, China is firmly in the second position.
Another fact related to the talent base is: As early as 2019, because of the disappearance of mobile Internet dividends and the decrease in app development needs, a large number of programmers faced the risk of unemployment.
In an interview with a game developer, the old programmer bluntly said: "Now many game development companies live by contracting APP overseas projects.
Everyone is waiting for an opportunity. 5G is currently an opportunity, but this opportunity is currently in a state of chaos. A guider like Jobs has not yet appeared. "
Similar to Huawei's entry into the software industry to challenge Google, as early as a few years ago, Google has already entered the mobile phone manufacturing hardware market through software.
The reason for Google to enter the mobile phone field is very simple. The current Internet is forming an information island. The practice of possessing both software and hardware to create a closed-loop ecosystem, like the iPhone, is becoming a target for more latecomers.
One conceivable future is that until the day when the Internet of Things becomes widespread, the use of Google phones and the supporting Internet of Things hardware and software services will become a systematic choice for consumers.
In order to break the island, either build a new island or become an accessory of another island. This is obviously an unwise option for Google and Huawei, which currently have the ability to build silos.
Therefore, behind the launch of new software such as Huawei Search, HMS and Maps, Huawei is actually improving the software experience of the island through the driving role of hardware.
And Google is a gradual transition from software to hardware.
One of the challenges of convergence with the island construction is that we have not yet found an industry solution that perfectly integrates the software ecology and hardware R&D. Huawei's Harmony OS and Google's Fuchsia OS (Google's Internet of Things System) are both for realization The layout made by this goal.
It is foreseeable that the competition between Huawei and Google is a battle of at least three years, and the opponents in the future will be far more than Huawei and Google.
The bonus of the island era is that the winners will have far stronger influence than today and stand on the new throne of the forest of enterprises to accumulate 6G war chips.
