Electronic enthusiasts take note: On July 20th, Lenovo is set to host its third Lenovo Tech World in Shanghai. Back in 2015 and 2016, Lenovo's Global Technology Innovation Conference took place in Beijing and San Francisco respectively.
On July 12th, Lenovo officially unveiled the theme poster for the upcoming conference, titled "Let the World Be Filled with AI." In the poster, a robot-like figure is depicted reaching out to hold a child's hand.
AI here serves as a clever play on words. It can be interpreted as the Mandarin pronunciation for "love," and it also stands for artificial intelligence. This could suggest that Lenovo might be focusing more on artificial intelligence moving forward.
Since November 2016, Yong Yong, formerly the vice president of Microsoft Research Asia, has joined Lenovo as the Chief Technology Officer. Under his leadership, Lenovo’s new technology strategy, "Intelligently Driven Equipment + Cloud," has started to take shape. On March 20th of this year, Lenovo's Research Institute established an artificial intelligence lab and recruited AI expert Xu Feiyu from the German Artificial Intelligence Research Center.
For a long time, Lenovo was seen as a company that merely sold hardware, but it now aims to become a provider of one-stop solutions for devices, applications, and services. Previously, Lenovo would sell its products to customers, and their interaction would end there. In the future, Lenovo envisions itself as the "next-generation smart device." Once users buy Lenovo's devices, the relationship with them is just beginning.
But will artificial intelligence truly save Lenovo during this crisis? During the waves of the Internet and mobile Internet, Lenovo poured significant resources into trying to make a splash, yet every attempt ended without much success. Now, Lenovo is placing another big bet on smart technology. Will it meet the same fate?
Missing the Internet and Mobile Internet Waves
As we all know, the BAT companies and portal websites on the Internet were established between 1998 and 2000. Surprisingly, Lenovo didn't miss this wave of the Internet.
In October 1999, Lenovo invested hundreds of millions of dollars to create the FM365 portal. It featured news, email, search, games, software, and other channels. At the same time, it engaged Nicholas Tse and Zhou Xun as brand endorsers. At its peak, FM365 was considered one of the "four major portals," alongside Sina, Sohu, and Netease.
However, while Sina, Sohu, and Netease all went public in the U.S., FM365 never did. When the Internet bubble burst, FM365 struggled with the challenges of running a portal. It tried various transformations, including e-commerce, youth services, and online product services, but eventually became something of a "fourä¸åƒ" (a term meaning something that doesn't fit neatly into any category). It transformed into an ordinary company website.
As the Internet winter deepened, FM365 eventually collapsed. Many people didn't even have time to understand what FM365's "FM" stood for before it quickly met its demise. In October 2003, the website ceased operations.
It is said that FM365 was forced to shut down because the FM365 domain name expired due to human error and wasn't renewed. It was snatched up by the U.S. company SnapNames on behalf of a client. Although the domain name was recovered in the following April, the rich content was lost. During the Internet bubble period, Lenovo simply abandoned FM365 and redirected the domain name to Lenovo's official website. In an era where history could have been made, Lenovo watched as BAT and other major portals rose to prominence, leaving it out of the action.
When Apple's iPhones gained popularity and Xiaomi emerged, the prelude to China's mobile (microblogging) Internet officially began. Lenovo also hoped to seize this opportunity. In the first half of 2012, Lenovo launched efforts in both the operator market and the open market. One highlight was the continuous release of three series of smartphones in the open market: women's phones, large-screen phones, and long-lasting battery phones, which achieved good results. This year, Lenovo's performance exceeded expectations and it was profitable for nearly a year.
At the time, Liu Jun, the head of Lenovo Mobile, announced at an internal meeting that Lenovo had already surpassed Samsung in China in the first quarter. He was even considering whether to "hide the lead" to avoid becoming a target.
However, the most concerning aspect of the Chinese market in 2012 was not Lenovo's mobile phones, but the Xiaomi phones released by Lei Jun (microblogging) in October 2011. But Lenovo never took Xiaomi seriously from the start.
At an internal executive meeting in the fall of 2012, Liu Jun handed out packs of Pu'er tea to each manager and, while sipping tea, boldly declared that even if Xiaomi was making a lot of noise, it would amount to only a fraction of Lenovo's losses.
Liu Jun's comments directly influenced his subordinates' perception of Xiaomi and the Internet model. At the end of 2012, Xiaomi announced that mobile phone sales had exceeded 7 million units that year and set a shipment target of 10 million units for 2013. Zeng Guozhang, head of Lenovo Mobile Open Market, said at a meeting that even if Xiaomi reached this goal, it would only be a small fraction of Lenovo's achievements.
Until the end of 2014, when Lenovo Mobile China's business had already hit rock bottom, Lenovo decided to invest in establishing the Internet model for the mobile phone company Magic Workshop, but it was too late. The initial transformation of the smart machine had already been divided. In March 2015, the FM365 domain name was redirected to the ZUK website of the Magic Factory, but within less than two years, the ZUK brand was also abandoned by Lenovo.
Innovation for Innovation's Sake?
This year's Lenovo Global Technology Innovation Conference, full of bets on artificial intelligence, shows how optimistic they are about this direction. As Tong Fu, senior vice president of Lenovo Group, mentioned earlier: By 2020, the global AI market will reach 119 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.7%. In China, the artificial intelligence market will reach 9.1 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate as high as 50%.
However, it must be noted that while the market size is large, there is a fundamental difference between whether a company can perform well in this market. The Internet market is vast, the mobile Internet market is even larger, and the smartphone market is also substantial. Yet, Lenovo has not been able to transform successfully almost every time. It remains primarily a manufacturing company with PCs accounting for the majority of its revenue.
In fact, Lenovo's previous two technology innovation conferences showcased countless new products, but most of these products disappeared after the press conference and are hard to find in the market among real consumers.
In 2015, Lenovo's first Science and Technology Innovation Conference in Beijing presented innovative products like the "smart projection mobile phone" and the "magic screen smartwatch." In 2016, Lenovo's second Technology Innovation Conference in San Francisco continued to focus on "Hyper Technology": foldable phones, smart running shoes, VR (Think Mirror)/AR (AR Glass), and mobile phone products like the PHAB2 Pro and Moto Z, showcasing Lenovo's equipment innovation and the innovative results of the "equipment + cloud" integration model.
However, after the two sessions of the Science and Technology Innovation Conference, apart from the company's massive advertising campaigns, Moto Z barely achieved sales of two million in the market, and almost all other products vanished without a trace. Around us, it's hard to find a real user. And the worst part? Users still aren't buying. This is Lenovo's most embarrassing issue with innovation. Is Lenovo's style of innovation focused on users or just innovation for its own sake?
If artificial intelligence is merely used to "hyper," rather than genuinely fulfilling user needs, such artificial intelligence will struggle to endure.
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