, born in 2011, WeChat was originally just an instant messaging tool, but now it has become an aggregate that integrates social, information, payment and other functions. And not just WeChat, "super apps" such as QQ, Alipay , Tik Tok , Kuaishou, Meituan , has also become a scenic spot in the domestic Internet industry. With China's super application, not only Musk tries to build Twitter into a super application, but Microsoft is also interested in creating a transcendent application.
Recently, an insider revealed that Microsoft is considering developing a one-stop smartphone "super application" and integrating shopping, communications, online search, news push and other services. Relevant reports show that Microsoft executives hope that this "super app" will promote the company's multi-billion-dollar advertising business and Bing searches, and attract more users to use Teams smart team collaboration tools and other services.
Why are American technology giants now starting to think about making super applications? In the view of many industry insiders, this is actually a "curse" brought by the United States' resource endowment as the world's largest consumer market. In the US market, where consumerism is most thoroughly implemented, per capita consumption capacity and willingness to pay are undoubtedly the best in the world. This means that American technology companies only need to achieve growth and expansion on their own track to obtain relatively beautiful financial data. Therefore, these companies have previously been created to often choose to deepen their own advantageous areas.
plus the Internet industry in the United States started earlier, and the competitive landscape of technology companies has been demarcated in the PC Internet era early, such as Google search, Meta social networking, Amazon e-commerce, Netflix video streaming, Microsoft software and games. In addition to the direct confrontation between Apple and Google in the field of smartphones, these giants are almost in a state of nowhere. The result of this is that the experience brought by mobile applications in the US market is relatively scattered, and different manufacturers have their own strengths, and users are used to downloading different applications to meet different needs.
However, the good years of continuous rapid growth of these American technology companies have lasted for too long, so that from the helmsmen like Zuckerberg to ordinary practitioners, they previously believed that continuous growth was a natural thing. But when growth can continue, the willingness of related companies to cross-border is certainly not high. But unfortunately, the myth that has been growing has become shattered. With the increasingly worse financial performance, Silicon Valley has now started a bloody layoff, and it has officially announced that the "good days" have come to an end.
Since the era of making a big cake is over, we will enter the stage of competing for stock, which makes cross-border competition inevitable. It is not difficult to find from the market competition pattern of the domestic Internet industry that the most favorable weapon for cross-border competition is super applications, such as WeChat’s video accounts, Douyin’s social networking and group buying, which also proves the correctness of this theory. In essence, super applications actually support a composable business ecosystem, which is like an existence similar to the "Swiss Army Knife".
But technology companies prefer super applications. In addition to providing users with one-stop digital life solutions, traditional applications are actually not "Internet", or the latter is a reversal of the spirit of the Internet, and this characteristic also prompted the birth of super applications.
Compared with web pages, the APP on mobile phones can be said to be free and open to reverse the network effect limit of isolated applications is obviously far lower than that of web pages.
But the problem is that on the one hand, these enterprises must maintain a certain degree of openness to achieve interconnection, and on the other hand, they also need controllable management and operations.At this time, the super-superapped appearance played the same role as browsers in the PC Internet era, and became a semi-open digital ecosystem of . It not only welcomes third-party developers to settle in the form of mini programs, but also allows manufacturers to use customized rules to achieve stronger control.
According to information technology research organization Gartner, estimates that by 2027, more than 50% of people around the world will become daily active users of multiple super applications. This means that technology companies have become the general trend to favor super applications. However, among these technology companies in the United States, Microsoft is actually the one that is most difficult to do super application.
Although Microsoft's market value is now dozens of times that of Twitter, and its business line is much larger than the latter, Microsoft lacks the soil for super applications.
What is the basis for making a super application? Judging from past cases, the success of Alipay, WeChat and Douyin is due to its huge user scale, and even the number of users exceeding 100 million has become the threshold for super applications in the domestic Internet industry. After all, the number of users is the basis of all Internet services. Without users, there will be no traffic, and without traffic, it will not attract third-party developers to make money. Although Microsoft, which owns a series of well-known software such as Windows, Microsoft365, has a huge user base, the connection between Microsoft and users is not very close.
Even if the number of users may not be the key, the user's attention or traffic is the biggest problem. Microsoft's problem lies in the overly successful platformization. Windows and even XGP, which are the most capable of playing in consumer scenarios, are currently in a trend of "pipelineization", while office software such as Office and Teams are limited to productivity scenarios rather than consumption scenarios. The result is that Microsoft can actually directly affect not many users.
Looking at Microsoft's current business towards C-end users, almost none of them can fight for time spent.
Not to mention XGP, after all, users subscribe to XGP to play the games in it, not to browse XGP. In other words, Microsoft lacks an application that "kills time", so there is no user retention for a certain amount of time, and the super application is rootless duckweed. Of course, this is a situation for the C-end market. What if Microsoft wants to rely on its advantages on the B-end to build a super application for enterprise-level users or productivity scenarios?
At first glance, this idea seems to be very good. After all, Microsoft has workflows, collaboration platforms, and cloud computing platforms. Most of the businesses that corporate users need, so it seems to be a good choice to aggregate these together. But in fact, if you put your perspective on corporate users, you will find that a super APP for B-side means that you need to completely tie your "family and life" to Microsoft, but this is tantamount to gambling. After all, it is normal not to put eggs in the same basket.
Compared with other American technology companies, although Microsoft has outstanding influence in the B-end market, it is actually more like a lame duck on the C-end, and lacks a tool to build super applications.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-