-Accidental-The founder of Tencent is a genius rather than a series of accidental collections. -OICQ is actually one of the instant messaging products. The earliest founders of instant messaging products were three Israeli youths, who made them in 1996 and named them ICQ. 1998 When the number of registered users of ICQ reached12 million, it was taken away by AOL and bought at a sky-high price of $287 million. At present, ICQ has more than 65438+ billion users, mainly in the United States and Europe, and has become the largest instant messaging system in the world. 1998 Tencent is just a small company with value-added service software and systems, and its boss is five or six young people full of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. All merchants have meager profits and live an embarrassing life without three meals. 1999, they made an instant messaging system, tendered it to Guangdong Telecom, and later sent it to several other places, and no one liked it. Several people looked at the ugly duckling that they had worked so hard to hatch, reluctant to throw it away. Think about it and put it on your own website as a free service to users. This is the prototype of OICQ. -When one day, several people found that this system had 100 people online at the same time, they were surprised and happy. But with the increase of users, the company needs to invest more and more money in this system, which accounts for half of the company's cost, but it can't bring any profit. Life is already tight, how can I have spare money to buy such a luxurious gadget? Some people advocated giving up, but in the end they didn't. -At that time, there were many similar products, such as PICQ, TICQ, CICQ and GICQ, which were actually followers of ICQ. Shortly after the launch of Tencent, Sina also launched Sina Paging, and Sohu, Netease and Yahoo all launched similar services in the domestic market. The biggest rival ICQ didn't have a Chinese version at that time. Surrounded by many competitors, Tencent did not expect that one day the company would survive on this product. —— Zhang Zhihao, general manager of Tencent Beijing Company, was originally in the headquarters of Zhongbei Paging Group. 1999, Ma, Chairman and CEO of Tencent, pretended to be an engineer and came to Zhongbei to debug the equipment, because Tencent could not afford an engineer at that time. In the computer room, Ma teaches how to use OICQ. Zhang Zhihao, who studied computer applications, was keenly aware that this might be a huge market opportunity. Later, he encouraged his boss in northern China to buy Tencent. It's a pity that people in North China thought he had told a funny joke. But after only a few months, Tencent began to be glad that no one was willing to buy itself at that time, because the number of OICQ users was growing at their incredible speed, and the user growth curve had almost become a steep straight line. They don't even know what happened!