China Mobile IM battle
field is white hot right now. There are shattering news every few days now. My
last update is on Netease's YiChat, see the following:
Today, Sina is announcing it is launching its own version
of Mobile IM application, WeMeet. See the following:
Quick observations from this announcement:
1. WeMeet is certainly a catchy name. Except it is catchy
for English speakers. WeMeet actually sounds like "Micro-Rice" in
Chinese. Sina needs to learn some basic marketing. Needs to know your audience.
WeMeet is developed for Chinese (not English speaking customers). I am certain
Sina can find another more catchy name for their product.
2. It is integrated with Weibo. I think this is the
calling card for this application. If it has any chance of being popular, this
is it.
3. Feature wise, it is not impressive at all. It didn't
have any features of importance that current dominant application (Tencent's
WeChat) doesn't have. Compared to Netease's YiChat that has quite a few significant
features that are clearly superior to Tencent's WeChat.
4. It also didn't get a tie up with a telecom service
provider unlike that of Netease's YiChat tie-up with China Telecom. Customers
will not get any freebies from any of China's big three telecom service
providers.
5. The application itself was not developed by Sina
itself. The company that develops this product has some investment from Sina.
It is not clear at this point whether this company is majority owned by Sina.
For almost all cases, it would be a bad arrangement. Integration and
inter-office politics usually doom those type of arrangement.
But for this case, I think it is good. Sina is terrible
in developing technologies. Its own inter-departmental politics are terrible.
This new company will encounter significant resistance
from Sina's many departments. But it is still a better arrangement than having
Sina does it itself.
For me, I would rather have a company that I never heard
of to develops a new technology product than having Sina itself develops it.
6. The timing is terrible. At this point, everybody is
talking about Tencent's and China Telecoms' YiChat. It represents a truly
significant event not just in China internet industry, but it is significant in
China's overall economic development. It is a first time that a Chinese state
own monopoly (China Telecom) cooperates with a private industry (Netease) and
giving all execution power to that private company.
For Sina's announcement, it only has average Chinese
customers' attention for a few hours. Vast majority of Chinese is much more
interested in how the Netease/China Telcomm venture works out. Even those who
don't care about Mobile IM products, they pay attention to Netease/China
Telecomm venture because it represent a monopoly deliberately giving up power,
a truly rare event.
I guess for Sina to pick this horrible timing, they are
probably stuck between a rock and hard place. For Sina, now is the least worst.
In summary, under normal circumstances, Sina's WeMeet
would represent the most formidable competitor Tencent's WeChat would face.
But this is not normal circumstance. Next, I would give
another quick update on Netease's YiChat development.
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