📰 Weekly Digest#
Vision Pro goes on sale with various eye-catching bags! Driving, exercising, and crossing the road are all amazing, AI expert Karpathy shares his thousand-word personal experience#
After watching some usage videos, it feels like it's still a high-end toy, maybe it has some use in the office.
Ant provides train station weather information#
South Korean man sentenced to prison for refusing military service due to playing PUBG#
According to the Korean Pioneer on February 4th, the Supreme Court of Korea sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for refusing military service on the grounds of opposing war and violence. And the reason he lost the case was because he was enthusiastic about playing PUBG.
Bubu lives here.
📚 Articles#
The myth of management in internet companies#
Excerpt 1#
Values, OKR, nicknames, flexible working hours, etc...
In the past 20 years, the internet industry has contributed many innovative management methods to the business management field. Some of them are original to the Chinese internet industry, while many others are learned from Silicon Valley and belong to the global internet industry.
When the internet industry was in its golden period of growth, almost every successful internet company had to some extent promote their own corporate management methodology, some through founder speeches, some through books, and companies like Tencent and Alibaba directly influenced the startups they invested in through entrepreneur clubs.
However, with the end of the golden growth period of the internet and the disappearance of the global internet popularity dividend (for China, it's the demographic dividend), we were surprised to find that many management concepts that were highly regarded in the internet industry are now failing... or perhaps they have never been effective.
Looking back at the management methodologies that internet companies have accumulated at this point in time, whether it's Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Google, Amazon, or Netflix, their corporate management methodologies may have made attribution errors - underestimating the era they were riding on and overestimating their own efforts (management behavior).
Because in the field of business management, there are some obvious wrong answers, and everything else is the "right answer".
This is my impression after reading the book "Big Company Talent" recently, which was produced by Samantha, a partner at Mu Sheng Consulting. The book provides a detailed horizontal evaluation of the management systems of various big companies such as ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, and Huawei, and occasionally compares these different models with traditional corporate management systems.
The author of the original book summarized it more tactfully, but based on my own experience working in a big company and my reading of this book, I can say directly: all the management innovations of internet giants may be unnecessary additions.
Excerpt 2#
However, the world itself is made up of backwardness.
I first realized this when I was sharing my manuscript (the one with tens of thousands of words) on Feishu during a conference attended by older members. I was halfway through my presentation when an audience member asked me, "What page are you on?"
I was stunned. What page was I on? Feishu doesn't have page numbers, because Feishu never expected anyone to print out and read electronic documents.
The questioner was in his 50s, which can be considered "old" from my perspective as well as that of most internet employees. But in fact, he has been using computers since the 1990s and can't you say he lacks "digital literacy"? Similar situations exist for almost all online document platforms that do not support "footnotes," which are very important in academic writing (and also "revision mode"). Even Kingsoft Docs, which still has a market share that Tencent Docs and Feishu Docs cannot obtain, cannot support these features.
Is it because the dazzling array of online document platforms is not "advanced" enough? No, it's because they are too advanced and do not match the backward real world.
Unless you assume a society where everyone retires at the age of 35, compatibility with backwardness is the most important foundation for advanced management tools and productivity tools.
This has been repeatedly verified in the SaaS market. Everyone says that the SaaS market in China is difficult, and they have come up with many reasons. But by 2024, there are only a few companies that dare not buy Microsoft Office. Even the free WPS Office can only grab a market share because it looks "exactly the same" as Microsoft Office. That's why when I was talking to @汐笺 about SaaS, I said:
If you create an office suite and think you're innovative and don't look like Office, then you must have done something wrong, because each button in Microsoft Office represents a product and R&D effort that is as large as your entire team, and corresponds to a market share of 0.x% to x%.
You can use Feishu, Notion, Obsidian in your daily life, and even in small teams, you can use these new tools for collaboration. However, once you enter a larger scale of social collaboration, you cannot do without Microsoft Office. Does ByteDance's government relations team send Feishu links? Do Alibaba and Tencent use DingTalk documents for preliminary mutual review when signing contracts? Impossible.
This is not only the case at the tool level, but also at the management tool level. OKR is a so-called "innovation-oriented" management tool. But even in the past half-century of intensive human innovation, innovation has not been the norm for companies. Innovation brings about new growth points, but once these points are created, subsequent growth work is invariably driven by a massive number of people and funds in mundane daily work.
Source
I agree with excerpt 1, which is the conclusion of the book "Big Company Talent". We have been using OKR for a long time in our company, but I don't feel it's as brilliant as it's made out to be, even Google doesn't use it anymore~
However, excerpt 2 is a bit biased. Good tools make our work more efficient and advanced, rather than aligning with so-called industry standards and outdated practices. When dealing with external parties, we can easily adapt and even have the power to change the industry.
Nowadays, both government and enterprises use Tencent Meeting for communication, isn't this an innovation that changes the industry?
🎞️ Life#
Returned to Hefei from Shanghai for the Lunar New Year on February 7th.
💭 Excerpt#
There are many things that are more fulfilling than the rewards of work, such as gardening. However, besides the tangible returns such as salary, work also requires certain evaluations from the social system, which may seem worthless but are difficult to let go of.