Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Since 2022, we have witnessed the death of a number of well-known Internet platforms, technology products, and brick-and-mortar stores, some unable to survive, some left voluntarily, some eliminated, replaced, and some gloriously laid off. We are used to focusing on new products and new phenomena, but if we understand how an old product changes from prosperity to decline, we may find a more three-dimensional epitome of the times.

With 2022 as the time frame, we searched the search engine for keywords such as "delisting", "stopping production" and "stopping service". We took the results of the first 30 pages and verified them in trusted news media. at the same time, search for relevant keywords on Wechat official account, Weibo, Xiaohongshu and Dianping to verify public concern from customers' shop closure notice and parting atmosphere. Among them, the following products and companies that "died" in 2022 were selected. Among them, there are not only big roles that can be named for an era, but also "small potatoes" who are only famous for a while in a small circle. We want to leave some records for them.

Today, DT Finance publishes these 17 obituaries for you (2022 first half edition).

IPod2001 released on October 23, 2000

The suspension of production was announced on May 10, 2022.

Survival time: 21 years

In 2001, Jobs famously said at a press conference, "put 1000 songs in your pocket."

At that time, many people did not understand why Apple wanted to produce a "music player". For Apple, which makes the highest-end computers, making MP3 players is like Ferrari announcing the production of baby strollers-and installing programs (iTunes) on computers before using them, according to Jobs' biography.

In hindsight, however, the move was thought to have saved Apple. IPod brought a huge amount of revenue, and more importantly, the "iPod+iTunes" model inspired the later "iPhone+Apple Music". Since then, people's listening habits have changed forever-before iPod, CD accounted for more than 80 per cent of US music revenue.

Before iPod was declared dead, a total of 400m iPod were sold worldwide. It is the most popular digital music player in the world, with 35 billion songs sold at the same time.

Analyzing the elements of success, Tony Fadell, the father of iPod, concluded: "Design + hardware + software + App, followed by content. More importantly, continue to release new products at lower prices and add new features, which is why iPod is successful."

Starting with music that no one hates, Apple does make a likable impression. Some studies have pointed out that iPod is not only an "addictive drug", but also has a "halo effect", which will cause PC users to switch to other Apple products, such as the MacBook.

Soon after its popularity, however, the iPod became a bit of an embarrassing product in the Apple family. This also led to the early start of its deathbed prelude. After the release of the iPhone4, the phone can completely replace the iPod-- in function until 2014, when the iPod Classic with the iconic "click wheel" was discontinued. Three years later, iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano were eliminated, and only the seventh-generation iPod Touch--, the iPod closest to smartphones, remained until 2022.

"Today, the spirit of iPod still exists," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of global marketing, said in a statement.

For many young people, iPod is not dead. They were raised by iPod / iPhone / iPad and grew up listening to digital music. IPod seems to be more like a symbol of green age than other products. On the market, it still sells well on a small scale. In Xianyu, the unopened iPod price is often several times the official original price. The day after iPod announced the shutdown, all official Chinese stocks were quickly sold out.

In the secondary market, buying and selling around iPod has formed a culture. A paper on the second-hand practice of iPod in China records various reasons why people are still willing to buy iPod: some people buy second-hand iPod as a nostalgia for early technological life, hoping to get a little warmth in the "ruthless digital age"; some people will exchange music taste with strangers through the old playlist in iPod, which is an opportunity for them to gain emotional experience and social connection. In the Chinese context, some people's nostalgia for iPod is compensation for the lack of material life in the past. "I want to be satisfied with what I couldn't afford when I was a child."

IE browser made its debut on August 16, 1995.

June 15, 2022, support ends

Survival time: 27 years

In 1995, there were several major events: the launch of the Java language, the launch of eBay and Amazon, the opening of Internet access nodes in Beijing and Shanghai, and a large number of returnees, geeks and businessmen about to rewrite China's Internet history.

And InternetExplorer1.0 made its debut.

At the beginning of the 21st century, IE once controlled 95% of the browser market by various means. In the next few years, many people will be exposed to the Internet for the first time through the classic blue "E" logo.

Twenty-seven years later, the original overlord of the browser came to an end.

In fact, IE's funeral songs have been sung for many years. As early as after IE6.0, it has not been updated for up to 4 years. At that time, many websites could only be opened in IE, but it was full of loopholes, poor rendering and slow response, which sparked a lot of calls for "IE to die". At that time, there were a number of websites with "IE6.0 death countdown" and "IE6.0 funeral".

In China, due to the widespread use of pirated WindowsXP systems, self-contained IE6 has become a long-term Internet memory of a generation. Even in 2009, when IE was about to decline, one out of every ten computers in the world was still running the IE6 released eight years ago. As a result, developers have to set aside a lot of time to adapt to IE.

The story of IE is like a hero who attacks a dragon and ends up becoming a dragon. From now on, IE, which has been widely used for a long time but lacks careful maintenance, has hindered the development of the Internet to some extent.

According to Chris Zacharias, a former engineer at YouTube, he hit it off with his colleagues in 2009 and decided to secretly launch a plan to "kill IE6.0". They pulled banners on the YouTube page to warn that IE6.0 was about to end its service and advised all users to switch to Chrome, Firefox, IE8 and Opera. After that, the proportion of IE6 users quickly dropped from 18% to 10%, and they went unpunished, and even other Google product lines have the same advice to ask users to abandon IE6-- because there is a consensus in the industry that the browser "has always been the bane of website development work."

In this way, our protagonist really experienced a long and unrespectable social death. For example, in a 2012 marketing campaign, Microsoft, who wanted to play the self-mockery card, whipped the corpse and was called the "browser that makes you love and hate" (The Browser You Loved To Hate).

By 2019, even Microsoft's own employees had sent a message asking everyone to "stop using IE." In 2020, Microsoft finally replaced its newly released browser Edge with Google's kernel Chromium.

Today, IE has a market share of 0.29 per cent, while its successor, Edge browser, has less than 4 per cent. The ghost of IE will only exist in Edge's "IE compatibility mode". It works more like making up for past mistakes-to load sites that are in disrepair and don't work without IE, such as registration systems for various exams.

Fortunately, on the eve of the death of IE, the "curse" that hindered the development of the market because of IE monopoly standards in the past was finally taken seriously. In March 2022, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla proposed a partnership to develop a common browser standard. Developers can finally synchronize page effects without having to think about the compatibility differences between different browsers.

This may comfort the soul of IE.

Kindle2013 entered China on June 7, 2000.

Withdraw from China on June 30, 2023

Survival time: 10 years

When he saw that the CD business was quickly replaced by iPod, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos immediately decided that books must be digitized, "just as Apple controls the music business."

For the first generation of Kindle in 2007, the media did call it "the iPod of the reading world". Then, like iPod, Kindle conquered a large market and became synonymous with e-readers.

At the original press conference, Bezos introduced Kindle, "not a device, but a service." According to iSuppli, a research firm, a $79 Kindle costs $84.25 to make. In other words, Kindle's model is to sell hardware at a loss and make money from services and content.

But this model doesn't seem to work in China.

In China, people can easily find free or low-cost electronic resources. In comparison, the Kindle store has no price advantage. In addition, the state stipulates that exclusive e-books cannot be published directly, and Kindle loses its original publishing advantage.

So, unlike what Bezos expected, for many Chinese, Kindle is not a Kindle store, but a carrier for reading free e-books-comfortable to read and easy to hold.

Of course, in terms of equipment, Kindle is not unpopular in China. Kindle accounted for 65 per cent of China's e-reader market in 2021, far ahead of Xiaomi's e-book reader and iReader--, with 10 per cent of the market share, according to market research firm Counterpoint. However, another data shows that only 8.4% of Chinese adults prefer "e-reader reading", while more people prefer to "read with a paper book" (45.6%) and "read on a mobile phone" (30.5%).

In addition, perhaps because the function of Kindle is relatively simple, the iteration of the product is slow, and the demand of users for replacement has not been high. Overall sales of e-readers fell 12.5% to 2.1 million units in 2021, and are expected to decline further.

In 2020, Xianyu sold more than 400000 idle Kindle units in one year, and it is estimated that for every two Kindle sold by Amazon, one will appear in Xianyu. In 2021, Xianyu selected the top 10 useless goods of the year, and Kindle ranked third on the list as "a more expensive instant noodle perimeter".

The era of endless debate over VS paper books seems to be over, and getting information through Weibo, paying for knowledge, podcasts, audio books, reading app, short videos and all kinds of entertainment programs is more in line with today's habits.

Currently, a 2G version of Kindle Paperwhite2 (launched in 2013, is the first Kindle to be unveiled in China, priced at 899 yuan) is sold to the platform on Duoyu for a maximum of 20 yuan.

In August of Airbnb2015, Airbnb officially announced its presence in China, and in November 2016, Airbnb China was founded.

Services in China will be suspended on July 30, 2022.

Survival time: 7 years

Almost from the earliest days, Airbnb's ambition was not just to be a short-term rental platform, but to develop new ways to travel and even bring people closer to each other. And "Home in the four directions" (Belong Anywhere) is the universal value that Airbnb tries to carry forward.

Jonathan Mildenhall, then chief marketing officer from 2014 to 2017, explained that the nature of Airbnb itself already contained an uneasy element-people's suspicions about strangers, but Airbnb wanted to be a platform for goodwill-open the door to a stranger, welcome ta, and give up his bed to ta.

But Airbnb commissioned YouGov, a polling company, to conduct a survey in the United States, Britain and Australia: 2/3 of respondents said most of the people they knew were friendly, but half thought the whole society was unfriendly.

In order to promote mutual trust among strangers and convince people that the world is full of love, Airbnb has done some "silly" things, such as producing a news program with only positive news and stories such as "one rescue dog becomes the guide dog of another rescue dog." To a large extent, this is an idealistic company.

In 2016, Airbnb is ready to play a big role in China. At that time, it was predicted that "in 2020, China will become the largest source of Airbnb tourists" and "by 2030, China will overtake France to become the world's largest destination country."

But this blueprint is going to die now. In the first quarter of 2022, Airbnb's revenue reached $1.5 billion, up 70 per cent from a year earlier. But Chinese mainland accommodation and experience bookings typically account for only about 1 per cent of Airbnb's overall revenue, as the epidemic has been hit hard.

Chinese Airbnb is often criticized for not knowing the Chinese market, such as the inability to use Alipay and WeChat Pay earlier, customers who want to complain about no 24-hour customer service, can only write emails, and the platform has been slow to provide management tools for landlords.

After entering the mainland market in 2016, Airbnb has changed six heads of China operations in a row in two years, and the post of "President of China" has been vacant since the last president left office on September 30, 2021.

Yahoo China entered China in September 1999.

On February 28, 2022, Yahoo email discontinued its Chinese mainland service.

Survival time: 23 years

After Alibaba acquired Yahoo China, Jack Ma once made heroic words: "within three years, in China, search is Yahoo, Yahoo is search."

However, because of Yahoo's internal contradictions, management "faint moves" and other reasons, this great cause has not been realized. And many after 00 may not remember, Yahoo was the pioneer of Internet portals, is the world's number one search portal. At one point in the 2000s, Yahoo had more than 20% of the Chinese search market.

This time, Yahoo's departure is largely symbolic, as as early as 2013, Yahoo shut down its main services in China, including email, news and community services, and closed its research and development center in Beijing two years later.

QQ Tang started serving in 2004.

April 20, 2022, cease operation of Chinese mainland

Survival time: 18 years

A month before the shutdown of the leisure game QQ Tang, some people updated the outage countdown every day, and the QQ Tang background music collection uploaded by bilibili was also reminiscent of countless childhood days of playing QQ Tang with air conditioners on. Speaking of the last few minutes before the suspension on April 20, some players said that they had reached a tacit understanding with each other and did not hurt each other, some were in love formation, and some were saying 886 to each other until the system indicated that they could no longer log in. Share the memory of a common memory that belongs to the first generation of Internet aborigines.

QQ, which was launched at the end of 2004, relies on the more than 300 million users of QQ, and with the "social + game" model, it soon gained tens of millions of registered users. At the same time, the number of online users once exceeded 220000, and it held eight "Chinese Heroes Competition" between 2005 and 2012, which became a prelude to Tencent's future development into a game giant. To the later stage, the lack of maintenance, plug-in rampant QQ hall was gradually forgotten.

However, QQ Tang is very similar to the bubble hall developed by South Korea's Nexon company, which was sued by the latter in 2006 and became the protagonist of China's first transnational infringement case of online games. After winning the case, Tencent followed its methodology of following hot spots, optimizing products, and then using traffic advantage to occupy the market, in the words of Ma Huateng, "learn the best case, and then surpass it."

In 2022, parting is undoubtedly a key word of the year, and space is limited, so we can't sort out all the products and businesses that have left us, but just as talking about death helps to understand life, whether it's an influential product of the times, or a late-night bar that has been with us for years, we think there are some losses that need to be recorded, and we would like to bid farewell to them with this article:

NRC2010 launched in App Store in September

July 9, 2022, stop operations in China

Survival time: 12 years

NRC (Nike Running Club) is an app under Nike that tracks running records and offers running courses. Official figures show that NRC has more than 8 million registered users on Chinese mainland.

However, the suspension of NRC operations by Nike does not mean giving up the Chinese market. In the future, Nike will provide running services through NTC (Nike Training Club) WeChat Mini Programs, which is considered to be the transformation of localization in China.

Financial e-purchase was launched on January 12, 2014.

June 30, 2022, out of service

Survival time: 8 years

Financial e-purchase is an e-commerce platform launched by ICBC, with more than a dozen categories, such as digital home appliances, cars, financial products, clothing, shoes and hats, food and beverages and so on. It was the second bank to announce the closure of e-commerce after PC Mall, owned by Minsheng Bank, in 2022. In addition, the Agricultural Bank of China, Construction Bank and other e-commerce companies have also announced the change of operators in 2022.

Banking e-commerce once made great achievements. According to the Economic Information Daily, the annual transaction volume of financial e-purchases exceeded 1 trillion yuan from 2016 to 2018, second only to Taobao and JD.com in 2018. At the end of 2019, the number of users of Rong e-purchase reached 146 million.

However, banking e-commerce has always faced bottlenecks, they have not been able to carry out the same promotion as pinduoduo, JD.com and Taobao, and there is a big gap with the latter in terms of service, operation, warehousing and logistics. According to the "consumption rating list" released by the online Economic and Social Electronic Commerce Research Center in 2019, financial e-purchase ranked at the bottom with a rating of "not recommended". In addition, other banks are e-commerce, such as Bank of China Smart purchase, CCB good Business has also received a large number of complaints.

The Treasure Seafood Restaurant was officially opened on October 19, 1976.

Capsized on the night of June 18, 2022

Survival time: 46 years

Many Hong Kong people waved goodbye to one of Hong Kong's major landmarks, Zhenbao Seafood Restaurant, when it left Hong Kong. Kong Mengfeng, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, did not like it, blasted it for "providing high-priced and bad food for ignorant tourists seeking embarrassment and exoticism" (seafood restaurant dishes are indeed expensive. A seasonal vegetable costs 160 Hong Kong dollars, about 140 yuan). On the day the seafood boat was towed away, he wrote on Twitter: come on, don't come back.

The Hong Kong Economic Journal quoted shipowners as saying that the seafood boat is 28 meters high, 79 meters long and 25 meters wide, equivalent to a nearly nine-storey building that can carry up to 1746 passengers and is known as "the largest offshore restaurant in the world."

On the night of June 18, the Treasure Seafood Workshop, which had its license expired and needed to be sent to other places for overhaul, capsized in a storm, although it had not yet sunk, but the tugboat company said it was too difficult to salvage and might sink it. It is said that the seafood shop has been parked in place after the accident, and in early July was affected by Typhoon Siamba, the situation is unknown.

Seafood boat hull is a Chinese architectural style, coupled with the ship's gorgeous and complicated tea sets, strokes, furniture, is considered to be the epitome of colonial Hong Kong. Many films are filmed here, including Bruce Lee's 1973 work "the Dragon and the Tiger", Stephen Chow's 1996 "God of Food", and the James Bond film "Golden Gun Man", "Infernal Affairs 2" and "the Century of Godzilla."

However, critics believe that the treasure seafood restaurant reflects the stereotypes that Easterners have created for themselves, such as Hong Kong historian Zhao Shanxuan's comments on the restaurant, many of which are only designed to "cater to the impression of Western tourists of the East's curiosity."

In May 2004, the first store opened.

End of 2022, termination of operation

Survival time: 18 years

Yum China had hoped that Dongbai, a Chinese fast-food restaurant, would one day overtake KFC in China because they estimated that Chinese demand for Chinese food was far greater than that for western food.

Because of Yum's strong supply chain, Dongfang Bai seems to be all-inclusive. At most, it is said that there are about 200 products and sell everything, but there is not a single blockbuster product, which is lack of memory for consumers. Another problem is that almost all of its later locations are concentrated in airports, railway stations, exhibition halls and tourist attractions, which can only attract one-time consumption of tourists.

Today, the commercial dream of once a "global brand of Chinese fast food" has been dashed. At the end of 2021, there were only 5 stores left in the Chinese market.

Sober Company (99 Yandang Road, Shanghai) opened in February 2017.

June 26, 2022, close the shop

Survival time: 5 years

Affected by the epidemic, Sober Company, known as the "best bar of Chinese mainland" due to a sharp drop in income, was unable to renew its lease and hastily announced on June 23, 2022 that it would close its shop three days later. The new site is expected to be announced in the autumn.

Sober Company has been ranked among the top 50 bars in the world for three years in a row. In 2022, it was ranked 11th among the top 50 bars in Asia and the highest ranked by Chinese mainland.

Tushan Coffee entered China in 2010.

Withdraw from China in April 2022

Survival time: 12 years

In 2017, the number of Tushan Coffee stores in China reached 36. By 2022, Tushan Coffee had only three stores left.

According to the analysis of the business media winner Network, most Korean coffee mainly focuses on store scene design. However, under the epidemic, most people will no longer go to coffee shops to kill time. After losing the blessing of the scene, Tushan Coffee failed to find an advantage in the uniqueness and cost performance of the product, so it did not perform well.

Monki2015 entered China at the beginning of the year.

Withdraw from China on April 1, 2022

Survival time: 7 years

Monki is a fast fashion brand of teenage girls under Hendm Group. The price of ready-to-wear is less than 300 yuan, and you can usually buy it at a discount of dozens of yuan.

Monki's withdrawal from China is the latest example of the ebb of low-cost fast fashion. Prior to this, Forever21, Topshop, Bershka, Pull&Bear and other brands have left China one after another, and the expansion speed of Himm and ZARA is not as fast as before.

ZARA and Himm are increasing the share of high-end products. Over the past two years, COS, a high-end line owned by Hendm, has continued to expand stores in first-tier and new first-tier cities.

Slade entered the Chinese market in 2008

July 31, 2022, termination of retail business in China

Survival time: 14 years

Under the trend of offline store closures since 2020, established Danish menswear brand SELECTED has also announced that it will withdraw from China. It now has more than 1300 stores in the country, and Tmall's official flagship store has 4.06 million fans.

Ayanzhi Group, which belongs to Slade, said the shop closure was due to the high incidence of the epidemic, the weakness of the offline market and the difficulty of reducing rental costs.

Samsung LCD panel in 1992, mass production of the first LCD panel

June 2022, complete termination of LCD panel production

Survival time: 30 years

Samsung showed that it was once the world's largest supplier of LCD panels, once the market leader of LCD panels with a 25 per cent market share, but withdrew voluntarily in fierce competition with its Chinese counterparts, shrinking sharply to about 2 per cent in 2022.

Samsung showed that it had planned to formally withdraw from the LCD business in 2020, but the outbreak boosted the housing economy and the rising demand for televisions delayed the plan.

ZOZOTOWN China entered China in December 2019.

Withdraw from China on June 17, 2022

Survival time: 3 years

ZOZOTOWN is the largest fashion e-commerce platform in Japan, with nearly 300 fashion shoppers, specialty stores and 3000 fashion brands, with more than one million users. In addition to e-commerce, ZOZOTOWN also operates WEAR, Japan's largest fashion community, and ZOZOUSED, a second-hand clothing platform. Now it ends its service in China for "a variety of objective reasons".

In 2019, ZOZOTOWN announced its entry into the Chinese market, focusing on the Japanese direct mail experience. In WEAR, ordinary people and fashionistas from all over the world constantly update their clothes of the day. Through this platform, you can see the most daily appearance of a piece of clothing, and you can also see that the same dress is interpreted by different people.

During her business in China, ZOZO not only wanted to sell clothes, but also devoted herself to promoting Japanese fashion culture. Bilibili produced a series of local store visits in Japan. In addition, she also worked with Shengyou Huazawa parsley to launch her first Chinese single "magical mode", which was viewed more than 1.2 million times in bilibili.

In February 2019, the domain name is now available.

Domain name closed on June 29, 2022

Survival time: 3 years

Baoshu, a novel website with high popularity among online readers after Jinjiang Literary City, provides resources of online novel types such as fantasy, martial arts, travel, romance and metropolis. It is popular because it contains many novels and can directly download the full text of unabridged txt.

On June 29, Baoshu was found to be closed. The website said: "in response to the national call, this site will be closed forever."

As soon as the news of the permanent closure of Baoshu was posted on Weibo, the main emotions were between the supporters of "copyright protection" and the sorrowful group of "youth is gone, base is gone".

According to a report by the China copyright Association, the loss of online literature piracy in China was 6.2 billion yuan in 2021, up 2.8 percent from the same period last year. It is conservatively estimated that it has occupied 17.3 percent of the market share of the online literature industry. As of December 2021, the overall number of monthly active users of the piracy platform was 43.71 million, accounting for 14.1% of the total number of online reading users, with a per capita launch number of about 50 times per month.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: DT Finance (ID:DTcaijing), text: Zhong Wantong Editor: Wang Chaojing Design: Zheng Shuya, Qi Tongyi

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.