You can win by waiting for the enemy: Seize the opportunity to win again?——Excerpted from "The Good Fighter"

To win in the competition, two factors are crucial: one is one's own strength, and the other is the opportunity to take action. Both are indispensable.

Strength depends on oneself, but opportunity depends on the opponent. If your opponent doesn't give you a chance, you have no chance of winning.

There is a basic principle of game theory: in a game, the success of one party's action is conditional on the action of the opponent, and there is no independent best strategic choice. Whether your course of action is the best depends on whether your opponent chooses a plan that is beneficial to you.

In the words of Sun Tzu, "The invincible lies with oneself, but the victorious lies with the enemy."

Therefore, in addition to "being invincible first", you also have to "wait for the enemy to be victorious" and wait for the opponent to give you a chance.

Liddell Hart once said: "In the process of war, it is the enemy's serious mistakes that have the most decisive impact."

In other words, those decisive victories in war Behind it is often because the opponent made a fatal mistake.

When Deng Ai of Wei State was leading his army on the 700-mile Yinping Trail, the elite of the Shu Army confronted Zhong Hui in the direction of Jianmen Pass.

When the Allied forces launched the Normandy landing, Hitler issued an order to stop reinforcements to Normandy at a critical moment.

When the multinational forces were preparing to launch a real offensive from the direction of Saudi Arabia with a "left hook", Saddam's *** and National Guard were mainly deployed in Kuwait.

The same is true for corporate competition. There is a similar phenomenon in the history of business and war, that is, the reason why competitors achieve beautiful victories is often because their opponents provide good "cooperation".

A classic example on the Internet battlefield is between 2008 and 2010, when Alibaba counterattacked Baidu and launched the "Youah" campaign.

Baidu is undoubtedly China's leading search company. In China, "Baidu" has even become synonymous with search. Baidu's greatest advantage is its search capabilities.

Alibaba has always been worried about Baidu’s shopping search. It is also a search company. The reason why Google has such a high market value is largely because Google has monopolized the traffic of product search in the United States through shopping search, thus forming a "Google + third-party e-commerce" model in the United States. ecology. It is difficult for American e-commerce companies to develop independently. An important reason is that their traffic is largely distributed by Google.

At that time, China's e-commerce business was growing rapidly. If Baidu learned from Google's model and intervened in the shopping search field with its powerful search technology, the future development space of platforms like Taobao would be greatly restricted. . Taobao’s ultimate fate may be like that of its American counterparts.

Alibaba itself admits that once Baidu forces its way into the e-commerce field through shopping search, Alibaba will not be able to stop it.

However, at the most critical moment, Baidu made a fatal mistake: instead of doing shopping search, Baidu imitated Taobao and launched its own e-commerce platform - Yes. In order to achieve success as soon as possible, Baidu also began to poach a large number of people from Taobao.

Alibaba was immediately overjoyed: Baidu did not use its strong advantage in the search field to do shopping search, but imitated others and built an e-commerce platform that it did not understand. This was a direct attack on Alibaba's advantages.

At the critical moment, Baidu made a mistake.

Alibaba decisively took advantage of Baidu’s precious opportunity to make a mistake and struck back: on the one hand, it cut off Baidu’s crawlers, making it impossible for Baidu to crawl product information on Taobao, thus blocking Baidu from doing shopping searches. It is possible that consumers can only go to Taobao for shopping search from now on; on the other hand, using the search technology of the "3721" team acquired by Yahoo, they have developed their own shopping search.

As a result, Alibaba defeated Baidu in the key battle of search, and thus established its dominant position in the e-commerce field.

Baidu’s Youah has the exact opposite fate and has become a symbol of failure. Have you heard of it? Have you ever used it?

Competition is like playing chess. If you make one mistake, you will lose everything. In particular, fatal strategic mistakes often lead to an irreversible reversal of the competitive landscape. In business history, such mistakes are not uncommon at all.

When Komatsu aimed its challenge at Caterpillar, the industry leader, Caterpillar believed that its opponents were mainly domestic companies it was familiar with, including International Harvester Company and Johns Hopkins University. Deere & Company.

While Canon was conquering the copier market, Xerox was focusing on its American rivals IBM and Kodak. Because IBM underestimated the market potential of personal computers, Apple was able to take off quickly.

Apple has made mistakes. The operating system developed by Apple was very beautiful and practical, but Jobs refused to authorize other hardware companies to use it. If Apple did this, perhaps Microsoft, which was unknown at the time, would have no chance. After all, Apple's system looks much better than Microsoft's.

For Microsoft, good luck continues. IBM's mistakes gave it another opportunity: When IBM finally entrusted Microsoft to develop the operating system, it chose a licensing method instead of a direct buyout.

Bill Gates later analyzed that IBM did this because it did not expect that the demand for the operating system would be so great later, and thought that licensing would be more cost-effective than buying out.

"That was definitely a mistake they made." Bill Gates later said proudly.

Microsoft's operating system can therefore be sold to all computer manufacturers and become the industry standard. With the explosive development of the personal computer industry, a near-monopoly industry has been established in just a few years. status.

By the early 1990s, Microsoft and IBM, which had turned from sparrow to phoenix, finally fell out. As soon as the two companies broke up, Microsoft launched the famous Windows system and has since become IBM's number one challenger.

An important factor that causes competitors and enterprises to continue to make mistakes is the weakness of human nature. People tend to overestimate their abilities, and companies tend to overestimate their control of the market, especially those companies that think they are successful.

Competitors often cannot see the real competitive landscape clearly because of this, leaving too many market opportunities for rivals or potential rivals.

We can list a long list of such errors.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Coca-Cola judged that the domestic market in the United States was mature and saturated, so it focused on developing overseas markets and reduced its investment in the domestic market.

This gives PepsiCo an excellent opportunity. By the time Coca-Cola woke up, Pepsi-Cola had become a rival.

When Japanese cars entered the US market, the three major American car brands looked down upon them. However, by the time they woke up, Japanese cars had already entered the mainland market.

In the microwave oven war that year, Galanz relied on a brutal price war to achieve its dominant position. However, after Liang Zhaoxian took over as chairman, he was very eager for Galanz to get rid of its image as a "price butcher" and announced that Galanz would achieve a strategic shift from "world factory" to "world brand" and shift from a price war to a value war.

Galanz’s decision to switch to high-end products has given its competitors a chance to breathe. In fact, under the attack of Galanz's price war for many years, home appliance brands such as Haier and Samsung withdrew from the microwave oven market in 2005. Even the toughest rival LG also decided to withdraw from the low-end market.

Midea's He Xiangjian once lamented: "If microwave ovens continue to lose money like this, Midea will stop doing it." This is undoubtedly preparing to give up huge market space to Galanz.

However, just this year, Galanz decided to partially give up the price war, and the survival pressure faced by Midea was greatly reduced. Midea, which was originally going to withdraw from the microwave oven market, got rid of the loss situation in one fell swoop and became a huge threat to Galanz. Its domestic market share is catching up with Galanz.

Alibaba has made similar mistakes. After Taobao separated from Taobao Mall and upgraded to Tmall, Alibaba focused more and more on Tmall, and the old Taobao became more and more useless.

This gave Pinduoduo a chance to emerge. Although Alibaba has woken up and begun to block Pinduoduo in all aspects, Pinduoduo is still rapidly seizing the e-commerce market.

There is a basic rule in the market: as long as large companies do not make strategic mistakes, they will not easily lose their dominant position in the market.

For a challenger, attacking blindly when the opponent is invulnerable will often only end in failure.

However, there is no company that does not make mistakes. No matter how good a company is, it will fall into a coma, which will always leave a chance for challengers to make a comeback.

In the smartphone market, compared with Apple and Samsung, Huawei is undoubtedly a latecomer. Apple and Samsung were once invincible in the Chinese market, while Huawei phones were once considered a joke.

However, Huawei’s smartphone market share in China was 40% in 2019; Samsung’s market share in China increased from 20% in 2013 to less than 1% today. Samsung It has become a niche player in the mobile phone market in China.

In the global market, Huawei mobile phones overtook Samsung in April 2020 and became the number one in the industry.

Why did Huawei succeed in counterattacking in such a short period of time? Why did Samsung fail in the Chinese market?

On the one hand, Huawei’s success comes from Huawei’s continued investment in technology and branding. On the other hand, Samsung’s fatal mistakes in the Chinese market have provided Huawei with excellent opportunities.

The opportunity Samsung gave Huawei was, of course, the explosion of Samsung flagship phones that you must be very familiar with. In a few months from 2016 to 2017, nearly a hundred explosions occurred due to spontaneous battery combustion of Samsung Galaxy Note7 mobile phones. In 2018, the battery of Samsung’s new mobile phone Galaxy Note9 exploded again. The explosion has greatly affected Samsung's brand image in China.

Unfortunately, Samsung gave Huawei another chance. This is why after the explosion, Samsung recalled problematic mobile phones around the world, but only in China, Samsung refused to recall them on the grounds that the battery suppliers were different.

This public relations mistake is really adding insult to injury for Samsung China, and it is a timely help for rivals like Huawei.

Fundamentally speaking, Samsung’s defeat still stems from its wrong strategy in the Chinese market.

When Samsung entered China, its market positioning focused on the mid-to-high-end market, and it was at the high end of the pyramid where profits are most lucrative. This brings about a problem. Samsung automatically gives up the mid-to-low-end market, which is the largest segment of the Chinese market.

Huawei took advantage of Samsung’s mistake to rise rapidly. Chinese brands such as Huawei easily entered the mid- to low-end market and quickly established a foothold in this market. Then, relying on their performance and price advantages, they began to launch a fierce attack on the high-end market where Samsung is located.

Samsung also tried to regain the situation in the mid-to-low-end market and launched the A-series mobile phones focusing on cost-effectiveness. However, the trend is over. The consumption level of Chinese consumers has greatly improved. In this market, the advantages of Chinese brands such as Huawei have become unshakable. Samsung has left the impression of "low configuration and high price" on Chinese consumers, and it no longer has any competitive advantage at all. .

Perhaps in view of Samsung’s lessons, Ren Zhengfei repeatedly emphasized that Huawei cannot give up the low-end market. He said: “While we compete for the high-end market, we must not lose the low-end market. We are now The 'top' strategy focuses on moving forward. I am worried that if the 'head' is in, the 'butt' is still exposed. If low-end products allow others to occupy the market, potential competitors may be created. , the high-end market will also be affected in the future. Huawei has gathered energy from the low-end to enter the high-end. Why can’t others follow our path?”

In a competitive environment, your competitors may Know you better than you know yourself. All your opponents are waiting for you to make a mistake.

As long as you make a mistake, your opponent will never let you go. Because when you make a mistake, it's your opponent's best chance to defeat you.

In the words of Sun Tzu, this is "win over easy victory" and "win over the already defeated."

Therefore, an important rule of competition is: first of all, you should not make major strategic mistakes, and at the same time, you should wait for opportunities for your opponents to make mistakes, and cleverly create opportunities for your opponents to make mistakes. Once such an opportunity arises, we must quickly seize it, launch a fierce offensive with absolute advantage, and go all out to open up the situation.