WeChat Pay are applied widely in China, ranging from vendors to big firms, it has covered most aspects of people’s daily life. After reading Michael’s blog, Tencent and WeChat – Reasons for Success, I have a deeper understanding on the reasons why it would be so influential and powerful to change the modes of payments of people in China.

Michael demonstrates a incredible growth of Tencent in the period of 12 years with the reasons that it has followed a correct value proposition. It is undeniable that WeChat now has a huge amount of users, and according to thedrum, as Tencent’s mobile messaging app, WeChat, which is reports a global monthly active user base of 938 million users. So what makes WeChat become special among so many social medias? The reason that differentiate WeChat from the others is that it not only provides its customers a reliable platform to communicate with families and friends, but also brings people the convenience of ordering the variable food and drinks, ordering the movie tickets, transfer money to others by scanning QR code, and more. All of them could be done by WeChat Pay.

I can remember the days when I still in China, the high temperature outside made me lazy to get out and have meals. Then I could just compare and choose the food I like, and pay thought WeChat, and after waiting for 30 minutes, the food I ordered will be delivered to my house. The convenience of WeChat pay is that, you do not need to switch several apps to find the goods and transfer money to the sellers (within this process, you perhaps also need the name of the receiver, email address and set a secure question and answer, and that usually would take a little bit long time to process). All you need to do is click the “pay”, and use your finger print to finish it. Even for some vendors, you even do not need to use the finger print. The whole process happens really quickly without handling charge during the payment.

WeChat Pay has a big influence in China, but not restricted in China. Nowadays, the impact has expanded to the global range. In UBC, more and more people, including students and professors, are getting to know WeChat and its convenient payment, and even the function “official account”. In our Business Plan Part II, we contained a recommendation that advertising the company to Asia potential customers by creating a official account on WeChat. Based on the facts, I believe that WeChat would become the main stream of payment in the short future.

“Disruptive innovation”, raised by Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen, was an innovation that transform the existing business or industries which are complicated and have a relative high cost into a simple, convenient, accessible, and affordable approach to acquire certain products or service. At the beginning, the companies who hold a disruptive innovation might has a few resources with a small scale, but it will eventually become a powerful contender alongthe successful companies by focusing on breaking and redefining the inherent modes. Currently, so many disruptive innovation appear and develop in our daily life, including 3D-printing, Uber and Airbnb.

Airbed and breakfast (Airbnb) started by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who lived in San Fransisco and they were bothered by the heavy rent. Then they decided to rent their garret out to earn extra money. However, the traditional website, like monotonous, was monotonous, and thus a brand new website to rent the idle rooms with airbeds to those who cannot order a room in the near hotels.  They succeed, and after paying the rent, they began to expand the business from a rough website to a competitive company.

At the earlier days, Airbnb only offered the airbed in some people’s houses, and the rooms available for the customers could be the living room, basement, and garret with a really low price, which satisfied some visitors expectations: convenient and cheap. The business model behind it is that the customers with less budget could easily get what they want while Airbnb does not really own its property. “A low-cost solution to a low-value customer”. Time goes by, the quality of Airbnb is going to better.The innovation contained in Airbnb is that, it broke the original mode of a hotel – people now do not need to spend relative more money in getting accommodation, and they could choose the residence that can bring them different and unexpected and local experience with a lower cost. And its success proved it in reality.

Although disruptive innovation has only exist before a few decades, the theories hidden behind it has appeared for a longer time than that. The innovation would work in so many places, and the key to entering an existing and mature market is to find out what people really want, and what they really willing to pay and meet their requirements.

Currently, Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more popular. It can work and react as human, changing our world in variable ways ranging from housework to aircraft industry. One example is the autonomous car. 18 companies including Volkswagen, BMW and Tesla have already invested on this program, attempting to occupy the market as much as possible.

Will people buy it?

Christopher states that the autonomous car can bring people benefits (such as avoiding the accidents and drunk-driving) but it would be hard to achieve in a short term since there are still many problem that need be solved. “one day autonomous vehicle will take over the road, but not in my lifetime”. I agree with his points based on facts and conditions of the society.

It seems like the autonomous vehicles have so many advantages, however, problems that cannot be neglected still occur. Firstly, some traditional people think that they driving is not just for commuting from place to place, it it more likely the way to release stress and refresh themselves, and thus, autonomous cars cannot fit the bill. And, if the auto cars replace the position of manual cars, millions of driver would face unemployment, and that would be definitely a heavy hit on both the families and our society. What’s more, once the accident takes place and who will be responsible for it? The Car Company or the owner? It is ambiguous to determine the person in charge. In addition, the moral issue should also be considered. Just like the situation shown blow, facing the choice between the people on the pedestrian crossing and damage itself, what should the vehicle do and which one has the priority? More over, there is not a effective regulation department for the auto car, and there is not the mature rules and relative laws made for autonomous vehicles.

The Automation of vehicles is a certain trend of development of cars since its convenience and effectiveness. However, it might take a very long term to deal with the non-negligible issues, and it is related to a huge change of the vehicle system, including parking, traffic rules, etc.. Therefore, it would take a long time to construct on it and lead people to adapt the new patterns.

On September 12, Apple Special Event was held at Apple park, California. Whether you are an apple user or not, you must pay attention to it more or less. One of the bright spots of iPhone X is that the disappear of home button. Actually this is not the first time that Apple did such big change on iPhone, and if we look back, it is clear that Apple is keeping altering their products: iPhone 7 dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack; iPhone X abandoned the home button, which is one of the significant symbols of iPhone; for MacBook 2016, it replaced the top keys (F1-F10) by Touch-bar, and the lightening ports took the place of USB interfaces. So why did Apple make

those changes?

First of all, Apple concentrates on changing their users’ habits for a long time. For example, the disappearance of 3.5mm headphone jack will push the sales volume of AirPod — to be able to listen to the music while the phone is charging. To be precise, Apple is trying to lead a revolution covering the whole smart phone market. What the company did was forcing people to accept them. When users start to get used to new technology or new products, then the company then reach its goal. Apple wants to make itself different or specialize itself with other phone companies, and they are trying to be unique, and they are trying to be “Apple”.

On the other hand, changes will bring profits. Substituting the USB interfaces by lightening ports is a good example. Apple owns the patent of lightening ports, thus only the companies authorized can produce this device by paying for the license, which would make more profits for the company.

Apple is devoting it self to create a “Wireless Future” that connect all the devices without any cables. In the future, Apple may remove all the buttons on iPhone, including side button, mute button and volume button, etc., to make the products look like a whole when the technology grow mature. If we imagine the future more boldly, we can even say that the current changes Apple made are just a beginning of the revolution. Can Apple achieve “wireless future”? Time will give the answer.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/31/16233998/apple-iphone-8-event-september-12th-invitation

https://www.apple.com/ca/apple-events/september-2017/

http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/iphone-7-headphone-jack-the-story-so-far-1324866

https://me.me/i/iphone-7-no-headphones-iphone-8-no-home-button-iphone-18728048

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/technology/iphone-7-apple-headphone-jack.html?mcubz=1

http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/iPhone-8-Full-Vision-Display-iFanr-mockup-001.jpg

Talking about social responsibility of business, it actually should be called “the social responsibility of businessman”—since only people can take responsibilities. So what are the social responsibilities of businessman? To eliminate discrimination? To avoid pollution? I would like to say that these “responsibilities” are just floating on the surface; what businessmen really do is that take social responsibilities as “a cloak for actions that are justified on other grounds rather than a reason for those actions(Milton, 2007)”.

In September 2015, Volkswagen claimed that there were 11 million diesel cars carried the  software which were able to cheat while testing the emissions, and it influenced both American and European markets and led to billions-of-dollar loss of the company. The profit of that year was impacted terribly, and it’s shares dropped by 35 percent at the end of Friday, with a shrink of value of stock market of 25 billion pounds within just 2 days(Ewing, 2015).

Just as Milton says: “one man’s good is another’s evil(Milton, 2007)”, what Volkswagen did was to pursue the maximum profit for their own good—by cheating on the emission test to reduce the cost of the cars, which would result in the pollution of air(Milton, 2007). Here, I want to talk about the social responsibilities that Volkswagen (or its corporate executives) should take. As for an automaker, the primary responsibilities are to produce cars with safe devices, avoid pollution, etc.. However, the cheating behavior of Volkswagen shows that it does not have “social consciences” as a part of this society, or “social responsibilities” for the public.

In my opinion, all of the companies, not only for Volkswagen, need to find a balance between the pursuit of profit and social responsibility, and compete with each other in a fair and righteous way, otherwise it may bring unexpected consequences.

References:

Ewing, Jack. (2015 Sept 23). Volkswagen Says 11 Million Cars Worldwide Are Affected in Diesel Deception. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/international/volkswagen-diesel-car-scandal.html

Milton, Friedman. (2007). The Social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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