"Chinese disciples" bid farewell to Jobs

Source: Alphabet List (id:wujicaijing)

Written by: Yan Fei

Editor: Wang Jing

On October 5, 2011, when Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away, Lei Jun, a veteran fan on the other side of the ocean, was being overwhelmed by the surging public opinion.

In mid-August of that year, the first generation of Xiaomi mobile phones was officially released. When Lei Jun was chatting with a magazine reporter, he unexpectedly talked about Steve Jobs, who was suffering from cancer.

"Steve Jobs will die one day, so we still have a chance," Lei Jun said. "The meaning of our existence is to wait for him to die."

Of course, Lei Jun didn’t really want Jobs to die. But after hearing this discussion, the reporter chose the most popular way to write, and compiled the chat into a 1,000-word article, which was published two weeks later in the form of "Lei Jun's dictation" with the title "Lei Jun: Jobs will die one day, so we still have a chance."

When this article came out, public opinion was in an uproar. Lei Jun had to apologize and explained that the reporter asked a few questions and he answered them randomly, but they were recorded and published.

More than a month later, Jobs died. Some media tried to bring the two together and gave the article an unethical title: "Jobs died as Lei Jun wished."

Jobs

Lei Jun got into a lot of trouble because of his big mouth, while Luo Yonghao, another loyal follower of Jobs, was waving a hammer and having a passionate confrontation with the German home appliance giant Siemens because the refrigerator door was not closed tightly.

It would take another half a year for Luo Yonghao to found Smartisan Technology and officially enter the mobile phone industry. But on Weibo, he never concealed his admiration for Jobs and Apple, agreeing with the concept of software first and the combination of software and hardware, and especially the searchlight-style innovation philosophy that does not cater to the masses.

After Smartisan Technology was founded in May 2012, Luo Yonghao hung a large framed photo of Steve Jobs in his office and publicly declared that "there is no doubt that I will succeed Steve Jobs, but I am not sure whether I can surpass him in the future." A few months later, he revised this statement, believing that with ten years, surpassing Jobs would not be a problem.

The following year, as Smartisan Technology initially gained a foothold, Luo Yonghao's worship of Jobs began to go to extremes: he announced that Smartisan Technology would acquire Apple, which was "inevitably declining," and would make Cook understand "who is the only successor who truly inherited Jobs' mantle in spirit and methodology."

Compared with Luo Yonghao who claims to be the destiny, Jia Yueting only forwarded a famous quote of Jobs as a memorial after his death. He prefers to "pay tribute" to Jobs through practical actions.

The five or six years after Jobs' death were the highlight of LeEco, with large and small press conferences held one after another every year. From the content of the speech to the design of the PPT, from the dress to the gestures, Jia Yueting in the center of the stage seemed to have become a Chinese replica of Jobs, and was nicknamed "Jia Busi" by many people.

In addition to his personality, Jia Yueting also tried to "bump into" Apple in business. In April 2015, LeTV released its first mobile phone, and its commercial imitated Apple's classic advertisement "1984", describing the latter as "Big Brother" and itself as the challenger. According to Jia Yueting, this advertisement came from his idea.

Lei Jun, Luo Yonghao and Jia Yueting are the three most famous "Steve Jobs disciples" in China's technology circle. In the early days of their business, they imitated and borrowed some of Steve Jobs' abilities, and once achieved remarkable business success, becoming a story that the media and the public talked about with relish.

But after a short period of rapid progress, the three Chinese students were soon hit hard by reality and had to undergo a painful transformation. In the end, only Lei Jun truly soared to success, while Jia Yueting fell from grace, and Luo Yonghao paid off his debts through live streaming, and all of them left the mobile phone industry.

After a decade of ups and downs, the three have little trace of Jobs left. The "Jobs worship" in China's technology circle has also come to an end , and people are following younger and more local entrepreneurial heroes.

In 2010-2011, when Xiaomi was just founded, Lei Jun often mentioned Jobs. According to statistics from the Beijing News, during that period, Lei Jun posted thousands of Weibo posts, many of which were related to Jobs and Apple.

In terms of dress and behavior, Lei Jun is also moving closer to Jobs, often hosting press conferences in a T-shirt and jeans. Even his posture and gestures are similar to Jobs.

Lei Jun

But this is just the surface. The most important thing Lei Jun learned from Jobs is marketing.

Apple is not the originator of hunger marketing, but it has mastered it through the iPhone. In particular, when the iPhone 4 was launched in the Chinese market in 2010, long queues appeared in Apple retail stores due to the scarcity of stock, and scalpers once raised the price by more than 10,000 yuan.

In 2010, when Samsung and Nokia played the leading role, consumers were accustomed to buying products on demand. The iPhone, which required online reservations and offline pickup, and was limited to one per person, seemed unique and extremely scarce.

Lei Jun quickly learned how to play this game. The first batch of Xiaomi phones had only tens of thousands of units in stock, and they were snapped up by Mi fans as soon as they were opened for pre-order. The long-awaited shortage even led some people to resell Xiaomi phone purchase qualifications.

In response to user complaints, Xiaomi admitted that its production capacity was insufficient, but did not admit to hunger marketing. This may make sense, after all, it takes time and effort to build a supply chain system; but around 2015, some Xiaomi models were still frequently out of stock, and the lack of production capacity did not seem to be the only explanation.

Luo Yonghao entered the mobile phone industry relatively late, and the main thing he learned from Jobs was that software comes first.

In 2007, Steve Jobs said in a conversation with Bill Gates at a forum that iPod, Mac and iPhone are essentially software, but they are just packed in beautiful shells. Luo Yonghao agrees with this; after the establishment of Smartisan Technology, it has spent a lot of energy on the research and development of Smartisan OS.

When this operating system was officially launched in early 2013, it was indeed eye-catching: the innovative interactive design, the simple and exquisite, detailed skeuomorphic UI, and small features such as "big bang" and "flash capsule". Although it was still just an Android skin, Smartisan OS was one of the best operating systems at the time.

However, the praise of Smartisan OS by the media and users led Luo Yonghao to overestimate the pricing power of Smartisan phones. The Smartisan T1 released the following year had hardware specifications comparable to other high-end models, but was priced at more than 3,000 yuan, nearly 1,000 yuan higher than its competitors, laying the groundwork for future failure.

Luo Yonghao

Compared with Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao, what Jia Yueting learned was even more illusory: Steve Jobs's "reality distortion field" . Translated into plain language, it is roughly equivalent to the ability to "fool".

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs was very good at persuading employees to achieve seemingly impossible goals. His "weapons" included an oppressive communication style, a strong will to never give up until the goal was achieved, and even nonsense that ignored the facts when necessary.

Jia Yueting also learned this trick, but he mainly used it on the media, partners and investors.

Over the past six or seven years, Jia Yueting has thrown out a dazzling array of new concepts, such as "Super XX", "Free Hardware", "Ecological Counterattack", etc., and through one or two hundred press conferences every year, he has painted one big pie after another and stuffed it into the mouths of people who are "suffocating for their dreams".

In the past five or six years, LeEco has transformed itself from a second-tier video website into a new giant spanning multiple sectors. In 2015, LeEco's market value reached 170 billion yuan, becoming the largest weighted stock on the Growth Enterprise Market; Jia Yueting's net worth exceeded 40 billion yuan.

But behind the booming business and flourishing careers, the careers of three Jobs fans were about to hit an icy reef.

Xiaomi's crisis began to emerge in 2015. That year, Xiaomi sold more than 70 million mobile phones, ranking first in the domestic market, but failed to reach the established goal of 80 million units.

In May of the following year, reports from market research organizations such as IDC showed that Xiaomi's global market share had fallen out of the top five in the first quarter, with OPPO and vivo catching up.

The main reason for the sluggish sales is that Xiaomi’s disadvantage of over-reliance on online channels is being sharply magnified.

At that time, Xiaomi had very few physical stores and it was difficult to reach consumers in third-tier cities, counties and rural areas; however, competitors such as Huawei, OV and others had already opened stores in the streets and alleys across the country. As the first-tier city market became saturated, it was not surprising that Xiaomi's growth slowed down.

Xiaomi Experience Store

这显然不是小米擅长的饥饿营销所能化解的难题；而在乔布斯留下的遗产中，雷军也不可能找到破局之道，只能沿着对手蹚出来的路拼命追赶。

But building offline channels takes a lot of time and effort. It was not until the end of 2020 that Xiaomi President Lu Weibing launched the "Thousand County Plan" and Xiaomi's channel sinking made substantial progress. As of April this year, Xiaomi has opened more than 5,000 Mi Homes across the country, and sales have gradually recovered from the trough.

After hitting rock bottom, it took Xiaomi five years to escape the quagmire. Luo Yonghao's Smartisan Technology was not so lucky.

Luo Yonghao is obsessed with the so-called "craftsman spirit" and strives for perfection in product design. This is quite consistent with Jobs' perfectionism; but the difference is that Jobs had a strong industrial design team, the world's top suppliers and foundries, and a huge cash reserve, which was enough to turn seemingly outrageous requirements into reality; Luo Yonghao has almost nothing .

This contradiction between ideas and capabilities began to be exposed from the first Hammer phone T1.

Despite the highly acclaimed Smartisan OS, the T1 had many defects in workmanship and quality, including high heat generation, stiff buttons, unstable network connection, etc. Only 250,000 units were sold in a year, which was an order of magnitude short of the passing line.

Between 2012 and 2018, Luo Yonghao launched a total of 7 mobile phones, with cumulative sales of about 5 million units, but none of them were truly hits. The sluggish sales made it difficult for cash flow to turn positive, and continued to consume Hammer's already tight funds.

By the end of 2018, Hammer had basically ceased operations and was sold to ByteDance half a year later. Luo Yonghao and his company were saddled with 800 million yuan in debt and had to make money through live streaming to pay off the debt.

Jia Yueting’s fall was even more tragic.

In the development history of LeTV, Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field" has helped Jia Yueting time and time again, making Sun Hongbin, Xu Jiayin and other bigwigs, as well as countless investors, suppliers and partners involved in the game without knowing it until the crisis broke out.

In October 2015, LeTV held a new product launch conference in Beijing

But the reason why Jobs never failed was that he only applied this force field to his subordinates, with the goal of squeezing out more work enthusiasm and achieving previously impossible goals; while Jia Yueting tried to deceive everyone with this, and then use rapid growth to solve or cover up the problem.

In other words, Jia Yueting learned Jobs' "skills" but disdained the latter's "Tao".

Since the second half of 2016, rumors about LeEco's lack of money have been circulating in the industry. In November of that year, Jia Yueting issued a letter to all employees, admitting that the company had expanded too quickly and its capital chain was very tight. For the first time, LeEco's crisis was exposed to everyone.

Six months later, the LeEco fraud scandal was exposed, and Jia Yueting's business empire collapsed. The former "Jia Busi" became a deadbeat, his credit was completely bankrupt; Jia Yueting stayed in the United States for a long time, leaving only the joke of "returning to China next week".

Ten years ago, when Steve Jobs passed away, one of the hotly discussed topics in domestic public opinion was: When will China have its own Steve Jobs?

In the endless reports and inquiries, many entrepreneurs were named as the Chinese successors to Jobs, and Lei Jun, Luo Yonghao and Jia Yueting were the three most popular candidates.

Except for Luo Yonghao, the other two have never publicly expressed their intention to inherit Jobs' mantle; but with the media and public hype, they seem to have no objection to the title.

Ten years later, Jobs' halo has gradually faded, and Zuckerberg, Musk and others have taken his place. In China, Lei Jun and others have experienced ups and downs in their careers, some good and some bad, but they are all gradually moving away from the "Chinese Jobs" .

From the perspective of technological history, this may not be a bad thing.

The last ten years of Jobs' life were also the decade of his most creative and fruitful achievements. Apple, which constantly broke traditions and pushed the boundaries of cognition, became a spiritual sanctuary for technology entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and even around the world, and Jobs naturally became an object of study and imitation.

During the same period, the overall scale of China’s technology industry was very small, and many of the companies and products that are now well-known were in their infancy, with minimal user base and influence.

When Steve Jobs died, Tencent’s WeChat had only been online for nine months and the public’s impression of it was “free text messaging”; Meituan had just celebrated its first birthday and was busy fighting a “thousand-group war” with other players in the group-buying industry; and although Bilibili had been online for two years, it was still confined to the small circle of two-dimensional enthusiasts.

Kuaishou was launched in March of this year. At that time, it was just a GIF image production tool. It would take another year for Zhang Yiming to release the 1.0 version of Toutiao, and Douyin would have to wait another five years.

This is the historical background of the "Jobs fever" in China's technology circle . But ten years after Jobs' farewell, the macro environment has changed dramatically; although Chinese technology companies have experienced twists and turns, they have still achieved tremendous development as a whole.

This is reflected in the fact that the leading companies have narrowed the gap with Apple: Tencent's share price has risen from HK$40 to HK$770 in ten years, an increase of nearly 20 times; during the same period, Apple's share price has risen by about 7 times, and the gap between the two has narrowed significantly.

On the other hand, with the rise of local startups such as ByteDance, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Didi, Zhang Yiming and others have become new entrepreneurial heroes, and the public's blind admiration for Jobs has been significantly weakened.

Zhang Yiming

What is more noteworthy is that the careers of Zhang Yiming, Lei Jun, Wang Xing and others have almost no equivalent counterparts on the other side of the ocean, reflecting that the Chinese technology industry has already gotten rid of the C2C (copy to China) path of "imitation-surpassing" and is actively exploring business logic and business models that are more suitable for the Chinese market.

This also shows that Jobs is great and unique, but if he is simply imitated mechanically and copied exactly, even if it is a pixel-level replica, he is doomed to fail in the Chinese market.

Ten years after Jobs' death, Jobs, Apple, and even the entire Silicon Valley have gradually lost their charm in the eyes of China. The new generation of entrepreneurs may still be learning from their American counterparts, but almost no one calls themselves "China's Zuckerberg" or "China's Musk". This is a kind of modesty, but also a kind of self-confidence.

In the past ten years, Jobs' "Chinese disciples" have lost their charm and resolutely left the scene. The unique charm of Jobs, a madman and genius, is still remembered by some people, but no one is trying to replicate it anymore.