China's Mobile IM is white
hot right now. But the development of cooperation between Netease and China
Telecomm represents something even bigger. This development had captivated the
attention of China (even for those who have no intention of ever using mobile
IM).
Part 5 of this series can
be found here:
YiChat is for real!
Both China Telecom and Netease are devoting true and
significant resources on YiChat. It is clear that, from the amount of new
customers, the freebies from China Telecom is not going to be just from spare
capacity. China Telecom is taking up real resources to give YiChat users free
Short Messaging Services, free Mobile Bandwidth, etc.
For Netease, its technical excellence is shining through.
After the first day of YiChat, there are signicant
complaints from Chinese users. The two biggest complaints are people can't
register and SMS messages take a long time to deliver.
It is clear it is largely a capacity problem. Netease and
China Telecom didn't anticipate the amount of user adoption.
The biggest YiChat tester is none other than CEO of
Netease itself:
From the following images, it is clear the CEO of Netease
is testing the YiChat:
Above is Netease CEO's
YiChat account. Where he is doing his accounting of his YiChat usage
experience. "Too many people, we were not prepared...". "Machine
crashed..." A big Yellow "SORRY" sign with an emoticon show he
kneel down on all four begging for forgiveness. "Emergency Capacity
expansion."
One can follow his
account. It is easy to see he is testing YiChat's service all day and all
night.
Netease's CEO is a serious
person. He is an engineer by heart and can be obnoxious toward people in
finance or budgeting. For him to use that emoticon to apologize to YiChat
users. Even though it is through an emoticon, it is clear he felt a little
humiliated and he is putting his personal prestige in this product.
Netease's vaulted
technical team are doing double or triple shift. Within 3 days of launching the
product, 3 updates had been generated to eliminate all the software bugs that
came up. See the following images:
As of Friday (4 days after
the launch), YiChat had already gone from v1.0 to v1.0.1 to v1.0.2 to 1.0.3.
With each version update, significant bugs had been squashed.
At this point, it is clear
that YiChat is real. Both China Telecom and Netease are sparing no resource for
it.
China Telecom is devoting
whatever resource to give Chinese users free stuff while Netease's technical
team is delivered its end of bargain.
Netease's CEO can be hard
to get alone with (he used to like to snicker at Wall Street analysts). But he
is an engineer in nature and he build his company devoted to be excellent in
engineering. I always thought Netease is number 1 by far in excellence in
engineering in China's internet sector. So far, Netease is delivering.
Finally, this story had
create something more than just YiChat alone. This thing had create a life of
its own. The story had becomes whether a new model had been created. A model
that one day may breaks down China's state dominated market economic system.
This story had just
becoming a lot more interesting than just China's Mobile IM market.
end.
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