Huawei Repositioning: The Evolution Of Software And Hardware Giants

In China's 100 year history of struggle, a number of world-class enterprises have been born. Huawei is undoubtedly one of the outstanding representatives.

"At the end of 2018, the board of directors adopted a decision to invest US $2 billion to upgrade software capabilities, and within a five-year cycle, software engineering capabilities will be further upgraded. Through software upgrading, we can reduce dependence on chips and create differentiation. We are also looking at software opportunities, increasing investment, and improving the revenue share of software and services. " At the Huawei analyst conference in 2021, Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, told the 21st century economic reporter that Huawei would strengthen its software capabilities.

In recent years, Huawei's culture has evolved in response to external shocks. In addition to the upgrading of the structure and system, what attracts the attention of the industry is that Huawei is transforming from a hardware giant to a software and hardware giant. Taking Hongmeng as an example, when Hongmeng announced its initial announcement, the question in the industry is: is Huawei really going to make software? Now, we focus on the construction of Hongmeng ecology, and Huawei has further demonstrated its determination to build software ecology.

"Huawei, like bdelloid rotifers, is a single gene culture, which requires multi gene conflicts and multi gene fusion to produce mutations. These mutations are conducive to the explosion of potential, "Ren Zhengfei said recently in the speech of president Ren and gold medal employee representatives in 2020, which was released by Huawei Xinsheng community." Huawei culture is a single gene chain, and there must be conflicts to promote change. Xinsheng community, cafes all over the world, the tenure of at, the tenure system of the expert committee, and so on The tenure system of the board of directors / the board of supervisors... Is to change the single gene inheritance and prevent entropy increase, precipitation and involution. "

Huawei has a long-term accumulation in engineering software, but for software platforms directly facing global developers and consumers, Huawei is still on the way to explore.

From another perspective, Huawei's innovation in the software field, the growth of Hongmeng, and the construction of ecology have introduced new genes to Huawei, which in turn has promoted the reform of Huawei's internal management and reshaped its organizational culture. In the further integration of software and hardware, Huawei is becoming more and more open, and Huawei is also repositioning itself in the global niche.

Huawei is transforming from a hardware giant to a software and hardware giant. Visual China

Hongmeng evolution

Huawei once opened the European communication market with the innovative technology of distributed base station. In the current mobile phone market, Huawei uses the full scene distributed operating system Hongmeng to cope with some external pressure.

With the system iteration, Hongmeng will be gradually applied to Huawei mobile phone, Huawei watch, Huawei smart screen, automobile field and smart home. An important node of this year is that on June 2, Huawei officially launched the harmonyos 2.0 version of Hongmeng operating system and announced the first batch of 18 models that can be upgraded. Meanwhile, Huawei is also promoting the related open source projects of Hongmeng. According to the big data of Aurora, during the period from June 2, when harmonyos 2.0 was released to June 15, the number of upgraded users has exceeded 18 million.

When the chip is blocked, Hongmeng is the breakthrough of Huawei's mobile phone business, and also Huawei's solution for the era of Internet of things. From communication business to mobile phone business, Huawei has made a big push in software business.

Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei's consumer business software division, said that Hongmeng was not trying to become another Android, but an Internet of things operating system“ We hope to use a set of operating system to solve the problem of all IOT hardware devices carrying the system. Hardware manufacturers do not need to cut down or find a new system installation when producing different hardware. " Wang Chenglu believes that more importantly, harmonyos provides distributed programming framework for all application developers, so that they can use their familiar high-level language to write business logic only once on all devices, so as to maximize the sharing of ecology on isolated devices.

According to Huawei's previously announced plan, in 2021, it is conservatively estimated that 100 million external devices will be connected to Hongmeng system. This year, the overall goal is to cover 300 million Hongmeng devices, including 200 million Huawei owned equipment. The market share of Hongmeng ecology reaches 16%, and 16% is the key "life and death line" proposed by Huawei.

Wang Chenglu said in an interview with reporters that it is not difficult to make an operating system technically, and ecology is the core. The breadth, depth and complexity of ecology are far more than those of any single technology. In addition, if ecology is not matched with the opportunity of industrial development and change, it is difficult to build an ecology. The construction of Hongmeng ecology will be a long-term battle.

In order to create a new order of operating system and build a new ecology in the era of Internet of things, the challenge is also huge, which requires huge human and capital resources. Take windows as an example. When Microsoft released Windows Vista, office system and exchange server in China in 2006, its then executives said that the total investment in these three products exceeded 20 billion US dollars. To update a version of windows, you need to adapt to a large number of software and hardware, support a large number of users, and maintain multiple historical versions, all of which need to invest a lot of money. For example, although Linux is an open source and free operating system, organizations all over the world have invested heavily in Linux development. In 2008, a study by the Linux foundation found that the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 cost about $10.8 billion.

Huawei also spared no effort to invest in R & D resources. Yu Chengdong, head of Huawei's consumer business, has said Huawei has invested hundreds of thousands of R & D personnel and more than 100 billion yuan in harmonyos. Hongmeng is still evolving, and a new story has just been opened in this long-lasting technological and ecological competition.

Software and hardware "heterogeneous"

Huawei has been preparing for a long time around various strategies of Hongmeng operating system. On the one hand, in 2016, Huawei began to study the operating system; On the other hand, under pressure, Huawei quickly assembled in 2019, "Songhu battle" to solve the problem of mobile terminal ecology.

The timeline goes back to the Huawei developer conference in August 2019. At that time, the well-known harmony OS officially appeared on the stage, showing Huawei's determination to develop software. And to build a mobile ecosystem, only operating system is far from enough. HMS, which is benchmarked with GMS of Google Mobile, has just started. In order to quickly attack HMS technology, two months later in golden October, Huawei gathered more than 2000 engineers from around the world to gather in Huawei's Dongguan Songshan Lake Park to quickly form a new team of 1000 people to jointly research and develop. Plus Hongmeng and other integrated software employees, the number is even larger. This "Songhu battle" is of great significance to Huawei.

Huawei, as we all know in the past, is a hardware box company. When we heard that Huawei was going to develop an operating system, the external question was: is Huawei's software capability OK? However, few people know that Huawei has a profound accumulation in software, but the software capability is concentrated on the system software level. It matches with Huawei's own hardware, and then sells to b-end customers (operators, etc.), not to a third party. This type of software is called engineering software in Huawei. Huawei has developed a strong ability to combine software and hardware for a long time.

But this time, Huawei is going to challenge the C-end software. This is also after the hardware. Huawei once again challenges the C-end products with the b-terminal gene. From B to C, it is a big challenge for Huawei's team management and the thinking transformation of Huawei engineers. Huawei insiders have told reporters before: "so many companies want to build an ecosystem, but they are all defeated. Whether Huawei can do ecological work well or not is in fact beating the drum."

A software practitioner analyzed to the 21st century economic reporter that there are many operating system companies in the world, such as Microsoft software companies, born out of IBM's hardware foundation; Apple is the most typical company of software and hardware integration, hardware products and operating system integration, is the king of mobile software and hardware combination; Android understands software and can be called the king of the mobile Internet era, bringing traffic to Google. All three of them have different successes. Huawei is a company with hardware gene. It will open up a new mode when it enters the field of operating system. There is no need to say much about Apple's barriers. Microsoft still dominates the PC terminal. Google has no historical burden and adopts a purely open traffic mode. How Huawei goes out of its own path has attracted much attention.

In this competition in the hardware and software market, Huawei can be called a "different type" among the giants. Facing the strong external influence, Huawei has to start a new transformation, and strive to open up a new "soft" track while playing drums. This is also the course of Huawei's self exploration and self positioning. Whether Huawei is going to learn from Google, apple, Microsoft or integrate itself into its own system is waiting for Huawei to give an answer. In contrast, Microsoft, Google and apple have all had great transformation periods in history, but few Huawei has faced such complicated and arduous internal and external situations.

With the rapid transformation, Huawei is undergoing a new round of transformation due to its hardware genes and new software capabilities.

Any outstanding world-class enterprise has to go through hardships. We believe that no matter what difficulties and hardships, there will be more Huawei emerging in China in the new great journey.