Baidu has tens of thousands of product technology talents, but in the past two years, it has rarely made convincing achievements, and even repeatedly made some behaviors that make the industry despise. Is it because it has gathered a group of people with ordinary business ability or low moral standards? Obviously not. But this is really a question that makes people want to ask "why".

This question is so grand that it is difficult to have an exact answer. This article tries to look at it from one side.

A strategic adjustment

In June 2013, Baidu made an important organizational change, transforming its nine business divisions: mobile games, PC games, post bars, music, videos, library reading, literature hao123、 Nine business divisions of lottery are integrated into CBG (user consumption business group). According to internal and external interpretation, the purpose of this action is two points: first, to turn traffic into users; 2、 Let users generate consumption. There are two core assessment indicators for products and businesses in this business group: product activity (daily activity) and income.

Knowing this, it is easy to understand what Baidu CBG's products have done in the past two years, whether it is "Baidu Family Bucket" or "Sell Post Bar": you see, users are really charged, and the activity has really increased.

Until the industry has begun to denounce Baidu's "post bar selling" behavior, Baidu's first external statement also believed that it was no problem to "cooperate" with some third-party medical and health care institutions with direct interests in the operation of the post bar, and talked about it with relish with "professional institutions" After the cooperation, "after a period of trial operation, the operational efficiency of the post bar jointly managed by professional institutions has improved significantly, and the average number of active users and posts per month has more than doubled".

One noteworthy detail is that a person in charge of CBG likes to emphasize two words internally: "First, you can do business only when you have money; second, the Internet is 3G: Game、Girl、Gamble， Games, pornography and gambling. " There are some "bed calling bars" and "gambling bars" in the post bar, including some violent and pornographic things in Baidu AV, which are reflected internally and externally, but the management does not think there is any problem.

Who can decide the form of a product?

Many front-line Internet insiders are divided into T, P and M lines, corresponding to technology, product and management respectively. Baidu's products are divided into P1-P12, 12 levels in total. Generally, fresh graduates are 3-5, equivalent to front-line small leaders; 6 is more advanced talent. It is great to be above 7. 8, 9 and 10 are basically out of gear. The highest P of the company is 12. There is only one, ranking among the top decision-making level of Baidu with only a few people.

P7, a former Baidu mobile product, told Lei Feng.com that in his project team, M holds the financial rights, human rights and all the rights to report upward, and holds the promotion of the project team members.

This does not seem to be an isolated phenomenon. The reporter heard a former employee describe Baidu's incentive mechanism like this: "3-5 promotions are relatively easy, and generally, M2 is enough to manage oneself, while M3 is needed to promote 5-6 promotions", "the voice and status of different sequences from high to low are: M (management)>T (R&D)>P (product)>P (operation)=U (design)>B (business market, etc.), only M has the authority to manage ".

Most of these M's are college students recruited from the campus. After several years of growth and promotion to management positions, they may have some management experience, but they have no industry background. They are specific to a specific product, such as lottery (as required, they are vague about the identity of the interviewees, here is a random example), They do not understand the demands of each participant in this ecosystem as industry experts do. Considering its own KPI, M's desired product form and promotion speed are not in line with P's in charge of the project. Therefore, the final product is not under P's control - for example, someone adds some pornographic pictures on the product's startup page for the sake of DAILY, which can stimulate DAILY and quickly obtain users, but these garbage flows do not help the development of the product itself, and the target audience is lost.

The two people agreed that only considering the input-output ratio, it is more flattering to take the M channel inside Baidu than to study business and polish specialty. In this way, Baidu's talent reserve and training mechanism in the P sequence are not powerful, and can neither train nor retain product maniacs like Zhang Xiaolong. Think about that year, why did Yu Jun leave Baidu?

If there is a basic logic for what a product looks like, when Baidu promotes a project internally, it will be interfered by many factors other than product design, which does not conform to the basic logic. For example, Baidu concert suddenly inserts a voice advertisement between songs, which obviously cannot be attributed to the low level of product managers.

The PM director of a quasi first-line Internet company reported to the reporter that if two offers with the same salary are in front of us - one is Baidu's P7 and the other is Meituan's P7, then we should choose Meituan without hesitation. "Baidu's PM is fragmented. It is also P7. Meituan's P7 can be responsible for one business line, while Baidu's P7 can only manage one module in the product."

Another person who left Baidu commented on this statement: "I think Baidu's management is not a 'fragmentation' problem, but a rigid problem. Like the assembly line, everyone shares a share of the business line, with poor coordination, not teamwork, and cross departmental coordination relying on private friends."

For comparison, he cites Ali's "virtual organization": whenever a new project is organized, the leader of the project can pull his own team, and the people he pulls in must be responsible for his assignment, that is, fight together. No matter how high the level, the communication channels will write and revise their own drafts, so Ali's people can play their own advantages and complement each other, which is amazing. Baidu can't form this atmosphere. "

The former project leader of Baidu Wenku wrote a passage in Why I Left Baidu Wenku:

"If I don't go to Baidu Library, I will never know how Baidu's products and technicians work, how to write weekly reports, how to deal with HRBP, how to raise wages and promote, how to complete KPI, how to report to the next manager, how to report to the higher level, how to block the gun for leaders, how to stand on the team, how to overcome difficult difficulties To live in the world is not to collude with others, but to do your duty and leave without regret. "

Everyone is responsible means everyone is not responsible

There is a saying in Russia: seven nannies looking after a child means no one looks after it. As a company that has accumulated tens of thousands of excellent technical talents, Baidu has not made pioneering products or developed new business growth points in the past two years (this judgment can be proved by the fact that the annual online marketing revenue accounts for more than 95% of the total revenue in the financial report), and even has become increasingly vicious in extracting the residual value of original search and traffic, If the reason is only attributed to "values", it is equivalent to saying that "no specific person is wrong, it is all the fault of the mechanism", which is a correct and useless sentence.

The so-called "values" are actually people. Baidu is highly centralized in its organizational structure. From a broad perspective, there are almost no people who dare to say "no" to Robin Li and can correct him. It can be said that Robin Li's will is Baidu's will.

However, Baidu's development to today's scale is hardly the result of Robin Li's outstanding business intelligence or organizational management ability - a few years ago, some commentators even wrote an article that "Robin Li should read MBA", believing that Robin Li must have great defects in enterprise management. Within 5 years of Baidu's listing, most of the entire senior management team left. In 2005, Baidu published an enterprise biography called "Believe in China" after its listing. By the end of 2007, Li Yanhong was the only person left on the cover of the five company executives who stayed in the company; In 2008, Ye Peng and Li Yinan joined Baidu, and Baidu's senior management team reshaped, but they also left a year later. In 2009, Yu Jun, the father of the post bar, also left Baidu.

Where Baidu will go in the future depends on such a Robin Li.

Returning to the question asked at the beginning of the article: Can Baidu return to the path of product technology innovation?

For example, the problem of Baidu summarized by Yu Jun, the father of the post bar: first, the problem of values, and then the problem of incentive mechanism. The crux of the problem lies in Robin Li. Is he willing to have a self revolution? Is he willing to make a drastic reform in Baidu? If we don't have a self reform, announce to stop "selling stickers", correct the library infringement, and don't solve the source problem, Baidu will continue to mend its ways, and continue to play this game of fighting the gopher.

From Li Yanhong's summary of the post bar event a few days ago, "our values are the best" and "public relations are not well done" - this self glorified overbearing president seems not to feel the need for change at all.

P.S： At the Forum for the Future held on the 17th, Li Yanhong said publicly that he would "reflect very deeply". A company can't be drowned by drooling. We hope that this company that once made epoch-making contributions can return to the path of product technology innovation.

Editor in charge: Cen Feng

Reward

Scan WeChat and reward the author