New Killer application from Netease and China Telecom against Tencent's WeChat, part 4 A Quick Update

One can find my previous article on this subject here:

part 3 here

It is the first day after the official announcement. There are good news and bad news... and surprising development also. So this is a quick update.

First, I am a little surprised by how aggressive Netease and China Telecom are promoting YiChat. They are blanketing China's internet with ads right now. The following are screenshots of China's four internet portals (the red brush indicated YiChat ad).

Sina's Front Page:

Sina Front Page

Netease's Front Page:

Sohu's Front Page:

Tencent's Front Page (not surprisingly, no YiChat ads here):

YiChat's ads are completely covering Sina, Netease and Sohu portals. As expected, there is no YiChat ads on Tencent.

Tencent's WeChat may be monopolized China's mobile instant messaging space. But they content. It is companies like China Telecom that control the pipeline that these content goes. Companies like China Telecom are true monopolistic and behaving like one. They definitely have no problem in conducting monopolistic tactic that are completely illegal in most other countries.

They can always cut off the pipe that support Tencent's WeChat. Surprise, surprise, the same day YiChat is announced to the public, Tencent's WeChat suffers a major breakdown in service.

Major WeChat breakdown (in Chinese)

After the first 24 hours, there are quite a few technical issues that crop up facing YiChat. But a lot of it are because of the significant traffic YiChat is facing in its first day.

YiChat after 24 hours (in Chinese)

Most of these issues had been fixed already. But some non-China Telecom users (it is not if it is China Unicom or China Mobile users) still have problem in SMS service and telephone messaging services. But most of them are promised to be fixed in 1 week.

So far, within the first 24 hours, YiChat already accomplished the following:

700000 new registered users.

20000 new circles of friends.

300000 pictures uploaded.

1 million SMS delivered.

400000 phone messages delivered.

I am a little surprised at how fast they are promoting YiChat. Usually, for a nationwide service that provides so many functions to so many people, there are always great amount of technical issues.

I am a little surprised at how little those technical issues came up and how fast the early adoption there is. It is clear they already had significant amount of beta testing done. Yet no information on those beta testing were ever leaked.

So far, I will say they are doing great. I will have to say Netease is great at execution.

end.