Introduction to QQ

The background of the development of Tencent QQ

In the summer of 1996, three young Israelis, Visig, Vardy and Goldfinger, got together and decided to develop a software to make full use of The characteristics of instant communication on the Internet enable fast and direct communication between people, which gave rise to the design idea of ??ICQ. At that time, it was used for them to communicate with each other online in time. It can be said to be almost a personal "toy", and a small company called Mirabilis was established to provide ICQ services to all registered users.

The history of the development of Tencent QQ

On November 12, 1998, Ma Huateng and his college classmate Zhang Zhidong officially registered and established "Shenzhen Tencent Computer Systems Co., Ltd.". The company's main business at that time was the expansion of wireless network paging systems. When the company was founded, its main business was to build an online paging system for paging stations. This kind of software development project for enterprises or units can be said to be the best choice for almost all small and medium-sized network service companies.

In 1997, Ma Huateng came into contact with ICQ and became its user. He personally felt the charm of ICQ and also saw its limitations: first, the English interface; second, there were considerable difficulties in using it. Difficulty, which makes ICQ widely used in China, but it is not particularly popular and is mostly limited to "net bug" level experts. Ma Huateng and his partners initially wanted to develop a Chinese ICQ software and then sell it to powerful companies. Tencent did not think at the time that it would need to invest huge amounts of money to operate Chinese ICQ but could not make any money. At that time, it was because a large company intended to invest a large amount of money in the field of Chinese ICQ. Tencent also wrote a project construction document and had begun to develop and design OICQ. When the time came to bid, Tencent did not win the bid. As a result, Tencent decided to make OICQ on its own. You know, the price Tencent gave OICQ at that time was only more than 300,000 yuan. Later, when Tencent began to develop rapidly, Ma Huateng said very timely, "We need our own Chinese network software, we need our own ICQ!" But in fact, Tencent's launch of OICQ was purely accidental. If that big company If the company has no intention of investing in the field of Chinese ICQ, there will be no OICQ. If Tencent wins the bid, there will be no OICQ for Tencent. To some extent, Tencent's success is half luck and half strength.

Win among the princes

Many people have been questioning why QQ, which does not have particularly good functions, can dominate the crowd and finally come close to monopolizing the Chinese online instant messaging software market? Yes, functionally speaking, there has always been nothing special about QQ, but in comparison, there is nothing special about other online instant messaging software. Everyone is imitating ICQ.

But the reason why QQ is successful is not because of how powerful its functions are, but because its interface design is very reasonable and the user operation is simple. Compared with other online instant messaging software of the same era as QQ, , such as Sina pager, OMMO, etc., their initial functions are not weaker than QQ, especially OMMO, which launched much more powerful functions than QQ when it was first launched, such as email and network hard drive. Too many functions are actually It makes users feel that the operation is very cumbersome, which is an important reason for its failure.

In February 1999, Tencent launched the first test version of OICQ on the Internet. The functions were very simple and only included simple online instant messaging functions. However, its interface design was commendable. In fact Although Tencent has launched more than ten versions of QQ software so far, its interface has not changed at all, which shows that from the beginning, the interface design of Tencent OICQ software was very reasonable.

This brought the number of Tencent’s OICQ registered users to more than 200,000 in just two months. Although this is less than the number of new registered users Tencent adds in a day now, at the time, it was quite a large number. number.

In the following months, Tencent launched OICQ 99a, which successively added public chat rooms, file transfers, wireless paging, mobile text messages, voice chat, etc. The launch of OICQ 99a laid the foundation for Tencent's dominant position in China's online instant messaging market. By the end of 1999, OICQ's registered users had reached an unprecedented 1.3 million, with an average of more than 15,000 online users, occupying more than 80% of China's online instant messaging market at that time.

What is surprising is that after Tencent has added so many new features, the interface of OICQ still has not changed at all.

In fact, OICQ has already won at this time. The characteristics of online real-time software determine the occurrence of the Matthew Effect in this market. It is like two cities. People are willing to go to the more prosperous city, and the result is prosperity. Cities that are rich are more prosperous, while poor cities are even poorer.

QQ may be the most frequently used communication tool in China.