On May 15th, the second important new product launch conference of Xiaomi Company finally came to an end. The second generation of Xiaomi TV and the rumored Xiaomi tablet finally showed their true colors, while Xiaomi 3S continued to be absent.
On the surface, Xiaomi TV and Xiaomi Tablet are undoubtedly the absolute "protagonists" at this conference, but there is actually a "supporting role" throughout the conference. Although there are not many scenes, it is essential. It is MIUI.
At the press conference, Xiaomi Tablet was introduced. Due to the tight time, an important PPT was passed by Lei Jun, and the information it conveyed was immediately submerged in the restless atmosphere created by the release of two heavyweight new products, which did not get the attention of the audience. What this PPT shows is that MIUI has more than 50 million users worldwide.
MIUI is praised as "the soul of Xiaomi" by rice flour, and is widely regarded as the core competitiveness of Xiaomi mobile phone. This ROM based on the secondary development of Android operating system was released one year before the first generation of Xiaomi mobile phone, which made great contributions to the company’s early expansion and brought the earliest seed users to Xiaomi.
Since its release, the MIUI development version has maintained the tradition of updating every Friday, and has iterated nearly 200 versions so far. Within Xiaomi Company, a huge team of more than 400 people is responsible for its development and daily maintenance.
An interesting phenomenon is that even the most "mean" opponents often show a considerable degree of respect when mentioning MIUI, which is in stark contrast to their attitude towards Xiaomi mobile phone. The most severe criticism of MIUI is limited to its "bloated". Due to a lot of optimization and functional innovation on the native Android system, MIUI is huge and occupies memory, and sometimes it will run poorly on some low-profile models.
In fact, on the front line of smart phones, Xiaomi’s once proud cost-effective advantage has almost been eroded by his opponents. ZTE Nubia, Huawei Glory, Meizu and other enterprises are all competitive competitors. In addition, there are a number of new manufacturers such as Yijia and IUNI. Aside from marketing, brand and other factors, MIUI is the last line of defense for Xiaomi’s mobile phone only from the product level.
However, for all manufacturers who regard Xiaomi as an imaginary enemy, it is not easy to break through this last line of defense.
MIUI ecosphere
Before Android 4.0, the poor user experience of Android phones gave many third-party Roms living space, and MIUI was one of them. For a long time, MIUI has been advertised as the most suitable ROM for China people.
However, if you still only regard MIUI as a ROM with a good user experience, it obviously underestimates its strength and role. After four years of development, MIUI has already surpassed the meaning of a ROM and initially built an independent ecosystem.
The reason why it can be called "ecology" is that in the MIUI system, some functions and services are extending attractive opportunities for realizing cash, and attracting more and more resources and forces other than Xiaomi to enter it.
This statement may be somewhat abstract, and an analogy with Apple’s iOS ecosystem may help you understand. The App Store based on the iOS ecosystem has attracted tens of thousands of developers, and many people rely on it to make a living and even become billionaires.
Although Xiaomi can’t be completely compared with Apple, MIUI is showing such potential. On the basis of MIUI, Xiaomi has built its own application store, theme store, game center, browser, video center and cloud service. We can regard the above as the middle section of MIUI pyramid, and then go up one level, which is an independent application that can survive without MIUI by reading more and chatting more. In addition, Xiaomi has also launched its own virtual currency-rice coin, which can be used to recharge games, buy themes and read more books.
The case that best illustrates that MIUI has formed an ecology is Xiaomi’s theme store. At present, the theme store has been able to bring millions of water to Xiaomi every month. According to Xiaomi, some top designers can earn 70,000 to 80,000 yuan per month by relying on theme sales, and some designers have identified their superiors, so they set up a company to operate professionally.
Not only that, the distribution ability of Xiaomi theme even attracted the attention of many businesses. Not long ago, when the Hollywood blockbuster Captain America was released, Guevara cooperated with Xiaomi to launch the theme of Captain America, and the download volume reached 550,000 times in the first week after its launch. Previously, Xiaomi estimated that the total download volume could reach 200,000 times, which was already remarkable.
According to Hong Feng, co-founder of Xiaomi and head of MIUI, the profit model of Xiaomi theme store in the future may be To B, because the theme is a very good way to promote corporate culture. Previously, MIUI has cooperated with Coca-Cola Company to launch the theme. Compared with the payment ability of the C-end market, the enterprise-level market is undoubtedly a bigger cake. "If it is commercialized in the future, it is possible that this piece is several times larger than To C." Hong Feng judged.
What can better show the strength of MIUI is the app store.
Xiaomi’s app store has been recognized as one of the top five distribution channels of Android in the industry, followed by Baidu, 360, Tencent and pea pods. Xiaomi is the only company with hardware background in the first camp. A marketer with a user volume of over 100 million apps told reporters that Xiaomi App Store is rapidly embarking on the road of commercialization, such as starting to sell a large number of advertising spaces. However, in Xiaomi’s view, the commercialization of the app store has actually been quite restrained compared to the opportunities that have already appeared in front of Xiaomi. "We have been controlling the proportion of positions we sell." Xu Fei, director of MIUI products, said.
Different from the application market dominated by mobile phone manufacturers, Xiaomi users are generally heavy users of the Internet, which also makes the user activity of Xiaomi application market much higher than that of rivals. "We sell 3 million active users, which is equivalent to 10 million active users of other manufacturers."
Compared with the other four major channels, the greater horror of Xiaomi App Store is that with the steady increase of Xiaomi’s mobile phone shipments, its distribution capacity will continue to grow at a high speed.
To measure the value of Xiaomi App Store, just make a horizontal comparison and you will have an idea-in January 2014, pea pods got a series B financing from Softbank with a valuation of more than $1 billion. Previously, Baidu had spent $1.85 billion to acquire 91 Wireless.
MIUI’s native browser can’t be underestimated. For most smart phones in the Android ecosystem, the native browser built by manufacturers is often a display. Users usually download UC or other third-party browsers to meet their online needs, but MIUI’s native browser is the first choice for many Xiaomi users.
A number of surveys on Xiaomi users in MIUI Forum show that MIUI browser is the second largest browser among Xiaomi users after UC. Among them, about 40% of users use UC browser, while 30% use native browser.
But at present, it is still the business of game intermodal transport that contributes most of MIUI’s income. In fact, in the era of mobile internet, mobile advertising has never formed a scale, and the industry has not explored a better business model. In contrast, games are still the easiest and most mature means of realizing cash.
In February this year, Xiaomi announced the establishment of "Xiaomi Mutual Entertainment", integrating its game center, video and rice chat business lines, and Shang Jin, the former CEO of Kirin Games, became the general manager of the new company. Just a week before the establishment of Xiaomi Mutual Entertainment, Xiaomi announced the strategic investment in Xishanju, a game company. Mobile games are the most important force point for Xishanju at present. With the launch of Xiaomi tablet, the role of Xiaomi’s mutual entertainment will become more and more important in the future, because for most users, the tablet carries entertainment functions, in which games and videos have great commercial imagination.
The reason for setting up Xiaomi Mutual Entertainment, Hong Feng explained: "Because it can run faster. Although each of our small teams runs fast, we can always run faster. "
Today, MIUI has been able to contribute more than 30 million yuan to Xiaomi every month, and it still maintains a rapid growth momentum.
Invisible "secret" troops
These are actually the most obvious parts of the MIUI ecosystem, and beyond them, MIUI has many "hidden" skills that have not really been opened. These functions are hidden in the development version of MIUI weekly iteration, and most ordinary users can’t experience them in the first time.
This operation mode is the strategy that MIUI has been adhering to. The weekly iteration version of MIUI is mainly aimed at those feverish users who are willing to toss. They are real rice noodles, and because they know smart phones very well, they will be relatively tolerant of various bugs. MIUI’s development team will constantly polish and correct the functions of the products according to the feedback from these brush users every week. Only when the product is polished relatively maturely will Xiaomi release a stable version of MIUI for all users.
At present, the "secret" troops hidden in the development version are Xiaomi Yellow Pages. Xiaomi is trying to deeply integrate the dialing function with the Yellow Pages, making the phone call more barrier-free.
In the cognition of most users, making a phone call seems to be quite convenient, and there is no need for any improvement at all, but the MIUI team obviously doesn’t think so.
In the matter of making a phone call, the so-called "convenience" refers to the conversation between acquaintances, but in fact this is not the whole thing. The conversation with strangers also accounts for a considerable proportion of people’s daily calls.
I believe everyone has this experience. Whenever they see an incoming call from a strange number, they will feel more or less entangled, especially in some occasions where it is inconvenient to answer the phone. On the one hand, they don’t want to be harassed by sales advertisements, on the other hand, they are worried about missing some important information, such as interview notice or cooperation opportunities.
Another kind of scene is also common. When you want to order takeout, you can’t find the take-out list of the restaurant, so you can only go online to search for the phone number of the restaurant on the public comment.
These are actually the pain points of users in making phone calls. MIUI’s goal is to eliminate strange numbers.
MIUI has been working hard for this for a long time. For example, if you want to order McDonald’s take-out, you can display McDonald’s ordering hotline by directly inputting McDonald’s pinyin on the dial-up interface, and you don’t need the user to remember or save this number. In the development version, the yellow pages function has been further optimized. MIUI can recommend restaurants around you according to your location, and even access the public comment service, which can help users make better choices.
For merchants, this is undoubtedly a very good promotion opportunity, and from the perspective of MIUI, this kind of resources and services can naturally lead to business opportunities in the future, for example, the location of merchants can be sold like an application store.
Most mobile phone manufacturers with traditional backgrounds still stay on the product itself, but for Xiaomi, its vision is obviously broader.
A convincing example is the cooperation between Xiaomi and Maiwaidi, which is a company that helps businesses build WiFi networks and then provides users with free Internet access services. If you often surf the Internet in places like Starbucks, you will definitely hear about this company. In September last year, Maiwaidi completed the B round of financing, and the investor was Xiaomi. In March of this year, Xiaomi officially cooperated with Maiwaidi to launch a one-click Internet service for MIUI users.
Surfing the Internet in a public place like a coffee shop is a very bad experience, especially in the process of asking the waiter for the WiFi password, which always takes a lot of time, and MIUI has helped users solve these troubles through cooperation with Maiwaidi. For example, when a user enters a Starbucks and wants to connect to wifi, he will find that MIUI automatically prompts that there is free WiFi provided by Maididi, and the user can click the connection according to the prompt, eliminating the step of entering the password.
Although these functions and services may not seem as gorgeous as app stores and theme stores, they are also a very important part of the MIUI ecosystem.
"Now users are doing all kinds of things with their mobile phones. As long as they are the service providers behind these things, they may be part of our ecosystem. What we want to do is to help users better when this service can help users. " Hong Feng said, "In the traditional sense, Maiwaidi doesn’t seem to be a partner of Xiaomi Ecology, but in fact it is."
The more you know about MIUI, you will find that although the hardware part of Xiaomi’s mobile phone is no longer advantageous, the existence of MIUI allows Xiaomi to face external challenges calmly. MIUI is like the shield in Captain America’s hands. On the one hand, it can help Xiaomi resist fierce attacks from opponents, and at other times, it can also serve as an offensive weapon.
New weapons and new imagination
In early April, on the eve of the annual rice noodle festival, Xiaomi released a new application-Xiaomi system. According to the official statement, Xiaomi system is a product between MIUI ROM and Xiaomi Desktop App. In addition to the beautification function similar to Xiaomi desktop, it also integrates MIUI’s dial-up management, address book, cloud service and other special functions, which greatly reduces the use threshold of MIUI. On the publicity page of Xiaomi system, Xiaomi simply defines it as "MIUI without brushing". Of course, the name "Xiaomi system" has also attracted many criticisms for it.
Creating such a product is not a whim of Xiaomi. In fact, Xiaomi has great ambitions for it.
Before the Xiaomi system, the Xiaomi desktop App had been launched for nearly two years and gained 5 million users, but this achievement did not satisfy Hong Feng.
"Many people have done desktops, including Go Desktop, 360 and Tencent, but gradually you will find that the desktop is not a pain point for users. It mainly meets the needs of users for beautification, but how important is this demand? How big is its audience? In fact, we see that it has a ceiling. " Hong Feng told Business Value, "It’s not easy for such a product to reach 10 million to 20 million active users in China. If we do our best, then why should Xiaomi do this?"
In his view, Xiaomi’s annual shipments are more than the number of people covered by desktop products. "If we can do more than one pure software thing through hardware means, then it proves that this thing is a failure."
For this reason, Xiaomi hopes to break through the bottleneck of the desktop in another way, and it hopes to bring more experiences to those non-Xiaomi mobile phone users besides beautification. "Compared with people who brush machines, installing an application is at least 10 times. Now that 6 million people have brushed MIUI, does it mean that the Xiaomi system has at least 100 million users with potential? "
Although the Xiaomi system is still in the public beta stage, Hong Feng has already seen the potential from it. Two weeks after the public beta of Xiaomi system, the user feedback it received exceeded the user feedback obtained during the whole life cycle of Xiaomi desktop. "We have 3 million active users on Xiaomi desktop, and the feedback of 3 million active users for two years is no match for the feedback of 300 internal beta users for two weeks. This is the difference. "
For Xiaomi, the Xiaomi system may become a new killer of Xiaomi, invading the opponent’s territory in such a way. Moreover, in the future, MIUI is likely to integrate more functions into the Xiaomi system, such as its own application store and so on.
Today’s MIUI has almost become synonymous with intimacy, and this brand effect is even more terrible than the product itself. For example, the tablet computer just released by Xiaomi, the biggest selling point is actually the Pad version of MIUI. The user experience of Android tablet has been criticized by users, and the entry of MIUI at least gives Xiaomi fans a reason to give up the iPad mini. Because in the eyes of MIUI fans, MIUI can solve the problem of poor user experience of Android tablet.
Lei Jun said at the press conference that Xiaomi hopes to promote the development of the Android tablet ecosystem through MIUI’s app store, game center and open platform. In other words, MIUI is Xiaomi’s hope to open the situation in the Android tablet market.
It is also worth mentioning that from the Pad version of MIUI, Xiaomi’s thinking seems to be undergoing some subtle changes. After the public beta version of MIUI for Pad was released in mid-March, Lei Jun said at the Weibo that he would open cooperation with third-party Pad manufacturers. In other words, tablet manufacturers have the opportunity to pre-install MIUI system on their products. In the mobile phone market, MIUI has been exploring markets other than Xiaomi by fans’ independent brushing.
Xiaomi’s latest two flagship products, Xiaomi 3 and Xiaomi Tablet, both use Tegra 4 and Tegra K1, the most advanced new products in NVIDIA in the same period, and both are the first models. With MIUI, Xiaomi and NVIDIA may form a "wintel alliance" similar to that of Intel and Microsoft in the future. Who said that such a thing must be a fantasy? In a commercial society, everything is possible. In fact, a careful analysis of the temperament and culture of these two companies reveals that the two companies actually have many similarities. NVIDIA’s GPU is famous for its high performance and has a large number of loyal fans among gamers. Both companies are also rich in engineer culture, which also leaves room for various forms of deep cooperation between the two companies in the future.
Looking at Xiaomi from the perspective of selling hardware, you may think that this company is "in name only" and only relies on marketing, but only by looking at this company as a whole can you appreciate its strength. In fact, Lei Jun repeatedly stressed that Xiaomi should be a triathlon, that is, hardware, software and services, from the very beginning when he founded Xiaomi, and stressed that he did not expect hardware to make money. Only in the past three years, Xiaomi has always regarded cost performance as its biggest selling point, which also makes the outside world pay attention to it most of the time on the hardware.
However, with Xiaomi’s "primitive accumulation" in hardware, Lei Jun’s next step will definitely focus on software and services. From Xiaomi’s various initiatives in the past six months, such changes can already be clearly felt. Fundamentally speaking, it is difficult to widen the gap between hardware, and now the competition in the industry has gone astray, which has become a comparison of component grades. This trend is already very obvious. With the further convergence of various products, if you want to attract users in the future, you must work hard on software and services.
For the manufacturers who want to kill Xiaomi, at this time point, they should realize that the best components and industrial design are not enough to defeat Xiaomi, and the imitation at the ROM level can only learn the fur of MIUI. So far, the thinking of traditional manufacturers still stays on how to build a high-quality mobile phone, while Lei Jun has designed a more magnificent blueprint for Xiaomi. He wants to build a mobile Internet ecosystem covering hardware, software and services. In this blueprint, the mobile phone is at the core, but it is only a part of it. To some extent, the significance of MIUI is far more important than the hardware of Xiaomi’s mobile phone. (Text/"Commercial Value" Yang Zhao)
Related: [exclusive interview] MIUI Hongfeng: We don’t brush the sense of existence.
