Riding the wind of rebirth

"Of these 50,000 applications, the vast majority are small tools developed by system developers to facilitate their own work. Although they have their own advantages in databases, peripheral device adaptation, office software, and the development and use of group-type work task systems, they have not yet ventured into the vast market of personal user applications," Zhou Zhi said. "This lack of ecosystem has led to the core obstacle to market promotion."

"From the developer's perspective, the current developers face three major pain points: an incomplete toolchain, insufficient technical community support, and an unclear revenue model."

"In terms of development tools, we have already equipped C and JAVA language development tools based on the LINUX system, and have a large number of rich basic technology libraries. Furthermore, by leveraging the advantages of VC, we have carried out a comprehensive transformation into visual controls, which has been widely praised."

"However, there is a serious lack of specialized development software on top of this, such as office automation suites, audio and video non-linear editing suites, web application development suites, and database suites. There is a severe deficiency in the availability of domestic alternatives."

"In terms of database support, although our graph database has become one of the most superior non-relational databases in the world, similar to the world's leading database vendors, there are still considerable deficiencies in peripheral control products that can greatly enhance capabilities, such as access control, resource allocation, and dynamic management. As far as database product developers are concerned, unless you are highly specialized, you can only appreciate the great advantages of our database. If you stay at a basic level, the user experience will be far inferior to that of mainstream relational databases."

"Fortunately, thanks to our efforts so far, we are not lagging behind in terms of development frameworks, and even have a considerable advantage. Our weakness in this area is mainly reflected in the smooth 'advancement' platform between senior and junior developers. In other words, we have a very good development framework, but we still lack a development tool platform that all developers can use comfortably. How to build this platform will be our primary task in the future."

"The second pain point is the lack of support from the technical community," Zhou Zhi continued. "The so-called technical community is a technical environment where we study the system's ecosystem together."

"The operating system ecosystem covers the entire upstream and downstream industry chain, so this ecosystem is quite complex and professional. Therefore, this technical community should also be quite complex and professional."

"Thanks to the fact that LINUX is an open-source system, we do have a technical community now. From an architectural perspective, it is quite mature and comprehensive, but in terms of content, it is still relatively singular, especially in terms of cross-platform development and upper-level application tools. It is difficult to achieve comprehensive ecosystem support. Currently, developers rely more on the official Clover documentation and papers published on the Clover technical talent forum to advance their skills and obtain information. However, self-growing community talents or small technical teams have not yet been formed."

"The third pain point is the unclear revenue model. The most serious manifestation of this is the prevalence of piracy in China and the immature habit of paying for software, making it difficult for developers to obtain stable income through application distribution."

"This is the most painful point, and it is also the fundamental reason why many small software companies in China are struggling to survive," Zhou Zhi said. "Of course, there are many reasons for this situation. If the country wants to catch up with international standards in the information industry and strictly follow internationally popular requirements, it will be directly crushed and it will be difficult to seek development."

"This is also why Clover Group has been pursuing overseas profit models until it has formed its own product line that is difficult to replicate before daring to develop vigorously in China. It's very simple: before it has the ability to prevent piracy, it dares not venture into this market with a relatively 'barbaric' behavior pattern, otherwise the input and output will not be proportional."

"Fortunately, the Clover has now grown to a considerable size and should be able to shoulder some of the responsibility for ecological construction. Therefore, we have begun to explore some models to solve this problem." "Now we have established a small circle consisting of upstream and downstream partners. Every year, we release some R&D tasks on the forum and implement a 'challenge-based' system, which is equivalent to pointing out the direction of development and providing key support to companies that are willing to develop in the same direction, have the strength, and dare to take on the challenge through investment, equity participation, and technology investment."

"Our initial support came from several portal websites. Currently, we have found partners in several areas, including search engines, chat tools, film and television, games, e-commerce, and online shopping. We have also shared Clover Group's patent portfolio with them so that they can continue to develop on this basis."

"You're looking for Lei Er Martin, right? Their names are making a name for themselves in the industry," Hu Zhengfeng said with a smile.

"I believe they can succeed," Zhou Zhi said with a smile.

These individuals were all prominent figures in the internet industry in their previous lives. Zhou Zhi had a close relationship with them in the early stages, providing financial assistance to those who lacked money, technical support to those who lacked technology, and patent packages to those who had neither. Through these methods, a bond of mutual benefit was formed, and so far, the results have been quite good, with each individual showing the potential to develop into a unicorn.

Originally, Zhou Zhi only wanted to benefit from the legacy of future generations, but in the eyes of industry professionals today, it has become something else entirely. It represents AXA Fund's unique vision, generous investment, and special attention to the industry. The rise of these five individuals has ironically made AXA Fund the "King Zhao of Yan" of the industry, and their success story has now become a model of "spending a fortune to buy a horse's bones."

As for the horse bone, it seemed to have been blessed with sweet dew and transformed into a true thoroughbred, which everyone considered to be a "blessing" that AXA Fund deserved.

Such positive word-of-mouth benefits were something Zhou Zhi hadn't expected.

After chatting briefly with Hu Changfeng about the development of these individuals and the overseas scientists who, inspired by this, are planning to return to China to start their own businesses and have established connections with AXA, Zhou Zhi brought the topic back to the present: "The developer ecosystem is currently like this, so you can imagine what the user ecosystem is like. To put it simply, apart from a few highly acclaimed Chinese-style games, the rest of the software is still in the 'usable but not very user-friendly' stage due to the lack of support from the development ecosystem. And those few highly acclaimed game software are suffering from piracy and copyright infringement, resulting in significant losses of profits."

"On the contrary, several small utility software programs have become the highlights, namely antivirus tools, resume download tools, resource management tools, and resource sharing tools. These are inexpensive, effective, and have generated decent revenue for the developers." (End of Chapter)