On Twitter, I came across this recent essay on 'Tencent + AI Strategy' that's viral in China.
Excerpt: "Tencent is now fighting major wars on two fronts: one is with Alibaba (of course, the war with Alibaba is far from just this front) in the new retail field, and another is with Douyin in the content field. I read a lot of analysis articles and felt that they all didn’t discuss the most important points: the essence of these two wars is the battle of data and algorithms! Alibaba is relying on the retail industry's entire industry chain of data and corresponding algorithms and Toutiao is relying on the content industry’s data and corresponding algorithms to fight hand-to-hand with the middle-aged penguin who has put on weight. Tencent's data strength is very strong, but unfortunately it is not used well, and its algorithms have not made breakthroughs to this point. As an ironclad fan of Pony, taking it all in, I am anxious in my mind and heart."
As a Westerner with an 'outside' perspective, I've been watching Tencent closely for near a decade (I remember in 2010 when they were offering 1TB of cloud storage for free, a massive amount at the time), but I'm aware that as a Westerner it's hard for me to fully understand the company, its context, its goals, and the Chinese business environment (just as I'm sure harder for native Chinese to understand the American business landscape). I found this essay extremely informative on multiple levels and thought I'd share.
All credit to the original tweet by which I discovered this essay.
Submitted October 28, 2018 at 06:33PM by TipasaNuptials https://ift.tt/2Sra2dS
