In the second half of the Internet, will ARM Cloud be a new way out? | rtp dota88, raja123, virtus play

Looking at 2018 again, it was thrilling and unforgettable.

In the past two decades, there has never been a year when Internet practitioners were so entangled. From the beginning to the end of the year, one storm passed by, the giants tried to exercise restraint as much as possible, capital tightened their pockets, and entrepreneurs were no longer sexy. Almost everyone started discussing the second half of the Internet, trying to whitewash the bad reality with a better future.

Some people say that the first half is the consumer Internet, and the second half is the industrial Internet; others say that the first half is social + graphics and text, and the second half is smart + video... All the rhetoric is to explain the seemingly "weird" phenomenon, as if a giant that is prosperous on the C-end suddenly must muster the courage to go to the B-end market.

"Anxiety" may be the root of all problems, so much so that it obscures the nature of the evolution of the Internet.

The Lewis Turning Point of the Internet

There is a term in economics called "Lewis turning point", which means that in the process of industrialization, as the rural surplus labor force gradually transfers to non-agricultural industries, the rural surplus labor force gradually decreases and eventually reaches a bottleneck state.

There is no shortage of labor on the Internet. Computer-related majors in various universities are sending hundreds of thousands of programmers every year. The concept positively related to the Lewis turning point is the demographic dividend. The emergence of the turning point is often a precursor to the gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend, and the Internet is no exception.

The result of the Lewis turning point is a shift from low-end production to high-end manufacturing. What will happen to the second half of the Internet?

Someone has already given the answer, which can even be summarized into four ways out:

1. Tapping offline dividends, from e-commerce to new retail;The perception of e-commerce platforms may be the most obvious. The strong willingness of users to pay directly determines the growth rate of e-commerce. The concept of "new retail" was born as early as two years ago. E-commerce companies began to connect offline and opened offline stores under the banner of new retail. In essence, they wanted to bring offline traffic to online.

2. Explore the B-side market and transform from ToC to ToB; Ma Huateng said, "The consumer Internet without the support of the industrial Internet will only be a castle in the air." Then came Tencent's structural adjustment and bold transformation to the industrial Internet. After all, consumers on the C side are close to the bottleneck, and the B side is still almost a blank sheet of paper.

3. Create overseas opportunities and develop overseas blue ocean markets;The domestic market has become a red ocean. Those markets where the Internet penetration is not as popular as China's and the level of economic development is not as good as China's are likely to remain blue oceans. Mobile phone manufacturers have already tasted the benefits, and entrepreneurs and capital are also eager to try.

4. Promote the integration of software and hardware, eat software and eat hardware;A popular concept in 2018 is that the integration of software and hardware can provide a better experience. Companies that were originally engaged in solutions began to get involved in hardware, companies that were originally in the content business began to get involved in hardware, and companies that were originally engaged in service output also began to get involved in hardware, such as smart speakers.

If you can figure out a logic for the evolution of the Internet: find the market——Exploring needs—Media evolution—Technological changes are probably the thinking of current Internet practitioners. The above four ways out are nothing more than focusing on the first two points. On the one hand, we continue to look for incremental markets, and on the other hand, we dig deeper into market demand.

If we focus on the latter two points, will our understanding of the second half of the Internet change?

The second half may compete for "two clouds"

The evolution of the Internet has always been hardware first, and the consumer Internet and the industrial Internet are no exception.

Had it not been for the push by enterprises to move to the cloud, Tencent and others would have struggled to find a way to connect the industrial Internet and the consumer Internet. Compared with the skepticism when Amazon first launched AWS, the current understanding of cloud computing is a great revolution: cloud computing is infrastructure, the water, coal and electricity of the Internet era.

While Internet giants are accelerating industrialization, cloud computing has also begun to reshape the rules of the consumer market, especially ARM cloud computing, which has begun to emerge.

Different from X86 architecture cloud computing, Alibaba and Huawei have successively launched ARM architecture chips, and Amazon has launched the first self-developed ARM architecture cloud server CPU Graviton. Entrepreneurs related to ARM cloud services have also begun to be known to the outside world, such as domestic Red Finger, Israel's Nubo, and the United States' SierraWare.

Just like AWS, which was constrained in 2006, the application scenarios of ARM cloud services are still relatively primitive. Due to Nubo's lack of virtualization technology, the high cost has discouraged many companies; SierraWare mainly serves the data security of governments and enterprises, and its product planning for the C-side is almost blank; Red Finger chose to break through on the C-side and launched ARM private cloud services such as cloud games, game trials, and cloud mobile phones.

Among them, the cloud phone product is particularly eye-catching. Simply put, it provides an Android system running on the ARM cloud, which can chat on WeChat and play games without consuming local resources. Cloud desktop is a typical application at the beginning of the popularization of cloud computing, and the emergence of cloud mobile phones has a similar logic. But for now, limited by many factors such as network speed, cloud mobile phones are not strictly needed. However, among all ARM private cloud services of Red Finger, cloud games that can be online 24 hours a day have already welcomed around one million monthly paying users, which seems to be a positive sign.

In the new round of industrial Internet process, cloud computing can be said to be the foundation for all players to take off, including Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei.

If we follow the evolutionary logic of the Internet in reverse, a revolution in the consumer Internet seems to be brewing: the technological changes of ARM cloud services will change the competitive form of smartphones to some extent. For example, the cloud will have flexibly allocated computing power, and users will not need to pay for expensive high-performance processors. At the same time, the migration of some large-scale games and software from terminals to the cloud will inevitably change the existence of "media", thereby exploring different user needs and even reshuffling the market.

Looking at it this way, the second half of the Internet may be two clouds, one is the X86 architecture suitable for the industrial Internet, and the other is the ARM architecture used for the consumer Internet, but the latter is still a small spark away from the explosion.

ReinventionThree possibilities of wheels

The business ecosystem of the consumer Internet can be divided into three layers. The first layer is the entrance layer that is firmly controlled by smartphone manufacturers. In addition to selling hardware, mobile phone manufacturers also embrace personal cloud services such as cloud storage. The second layer is the application layer, such as super APPs such as WeChat, Alipay, JD.com, and Baidu. The core of competition is traffic. The third layer is the service layer, which includes sellers on e-commerce platforms, applets on WeChat, and other service providers built on the giant business ecosystem.

If the assumption of the ARM cloud is true and it becomes the entrance layer parallel to the terminal, it is likely to "reinvent the wheel". The impact of this change is no less than the transition from the PC Internet to the mobile Internet, and there are three trends evolving in this direction:

1. The arrival of the 5G era.

According to the time points given by China Mobile and China Telecom, commercial 5G networks will begin during the National Day in 2019. OPPO, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc. have all stated that they will release their first 5G commercial mobile phones in 2019. The large-scale commercial use of 5G networks may only be two to three years away.

No one can give an accurate answer to what changes the 5G era will bring. Just like in the early days of 4G commercialization, few people asserted the popularity of short videos. However, changes in network speed are destined to change the service form of the Internet. User needs such as what you see is what you get are exactly the benefits of ARM cloud services. Take cloud gaming as an example. When a user wants to play a large game, he does not need to spend time downloading and installing it, nor does he need to consider storage space. He can just click on the icon in the cloud game to start the game.

2. Popularization of IoT products.

The wide connectivity of 5G networks has long been a talk of Internet of Things evangelists. However, factors that influence the popularity of IoT include cost, energy consumption and other factors. Discussions around Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee and other networking modes have yet to have answers. The concept born from this is edge computing.

After entering 2018, edge computing began to move from concept to implementation. An important idea is that the terminal performs some real-time processing and at the same time uploads the data to the cloud for high-computation processing such as machine learning. Similar ideas may be the starting point for the expansion of the ARM cloud market. The terminal does not require powerful configuration. All large-scale calculations are transmitted from the cloud to the terminal, thereby reducing terminal costs and improving battery life, such as smartphones, VR, AR, etc. Of course, competition between the ARM cloud and the X86 cloud in the IoT field is not ruled out.

3. The implementation of artificial intelligence.

The commercialization of the Internet has always had a tendency to eliminate borders. Baidu Direct Accounts in previous years and popular mini programs in 2018 have continued this logic. When users need a certain service, they don't need to find a specific website or APP, but can get it immediately by searching, or just use it in a social scene and go.

The most important implementation of artificial intelligence at present is voice interaction, which is commonly seen in the Internet of Vehicles, smart speakers, smartphones, etc. From interface interaction to find services, to voice interaction services to find people, users do not need to install this or that APP, which has already challenged the existing business form. From this perspective, ARM cloud services have inherent advantages. Developers do not need to carry out specific development and can directly move ready-made APPs to the ARM cloud, which undoubtedly helps to a large extent.It saves service development and adaptation costs.

Perhaps at a certain point in time, three "possibilities" become three sparks.

Endnote

To answer the question at the beginning of the article, the evolution of the Internet has never been one-dimensional. Offline, ToB, overseas and other outlets are only considered from a business perspective. There may be another second half in the technical dimension.

You must know that the correct answer to the Lewis turning point has never been to avoid the important and take the easy. It is a technological change that brings new infrastructure, new business models, and new service logic. The explosion of ARM cloud is not a possibility.