Since the founding of 3721 in October 1998, Zhou Hongyi, the well-known "Victory Buddha" in the Chinese Internet industry, has been on the forefront for 14 years.
To a certain extent, Zhou Hongyi’s entrepreneurial history is a history of struggle. Yang Zhiyuan personally wrote to venture capital investors asking not to invest in him. CNNIC fought with him to the death. His old enemy Lei Jun and him called each other "Yue Buqun". The troika of China's Internet, Ma Yun, Ma Huateng, and Robin Li, are all his enemies. Ma Yun and he have "blocked" each other, Ma Huateng has made "a difficult decision" for him, and Robin Li's fight with him started in 1999. It continues to this day, from Baidu VS3721 to today's 3B war, and the two parties have even fought lawsuits. Even Zhang Chaoyang, who was considered to have a good relationship with Zhou Hongyi, jumped out this time and said, "Sogou must join the war" and vowed to turn 3B into 3SB.
An Internet practitioner who had a feud with him lamented: "Old Zhou is a character. No matter what, the evaluation he receives will not be that he will be infamy forever." In the public eye, Zhou Hongyi has always been a challenger. His image emerged, with resistance to power and unafraid of competition being his hallmarks. Every leap he made in his career was achieved by challenging vested interests in a certain field. He was always barefoot and therefore not afraid of the big guys who wore shoes. But he is not a hooligan, he is a workaholic. The office of 360 is always brightly lit at midnight; he attaches great importance to user experience. During the year of making mobile phones, he always carries several mobile phones with him and takes them out to play and learn whenever he has time. He has been the president of Yahoo China and a venture capital investor. Qihoo 360, a company he devoted his efforts to, was listed in the United States in 2011. As of September 4, 2012, its market value was US$2.672 billion. As of June 2012, 360 Browser had 272 million monthly active users, 83 million unique users visited the navigation page every day, and approximately 368 million clicks per day.
He is brave and fierce, but that doesn't mean he doesn't pay attention to methods. He is hardworking enough and smart enough.
On August 16, Qihoo 360 launched “comprehensive search” and in just 5 days, it captured 10% of the Chinese search market share. Google, which had previously introduced traffic through the 360 ??Safe Browser, suffered heavy losses, and Baidu was not immune, with its stock price falling by more than 13%. Baidu's response strategy is that all users who access Baidu Zhizhi, Encyclopedia, Tieba and other content services through 360 comprehensive search will find that their pages are forcibly redirected to Baidu's homepage. 360’s response is to directly allow users to access page snapshots.
This is a war that has been planned for a long time and is difficult to end quickly. A Baidu employee said privately: "I knew that Lao Zhou would definitely fight this battle, but I didn't know it would be so early." For Zhou Hongyi, search is the starting point of everything, and it is also his heart knot. 3721 was one of the earliest search products in China and announced profits as early as 2001. However, in the end, it was sold to Yahoo and was killed by founder Zhou Hongyi in the name of "rogue software". Subsequently, Zhou Hongyi also tried community search, and in 2010 he proposed to inject capital into Sogou and split Sogou from Sohu. However, Wang Xiaochuan successfully made Alibaba invest in shares, thus rejecting Zhou Hongyi.
Now, Zhou Hongyi is back in this game. 360 Comprehensive Search is the vanguard of another war he launched, and it is also the explanation he gave himself after siege the city in 2014. The King of War returned to the trenches of the original battle, hoping to prove himself once again.