Today we’re talking about a man who was once regarded by everyone as a fraud, who was abandoned by team members, who lost a lot of money on a project, who was controversially promoted and maligned. But up to now, China’s cloud computing industry should be most grateful to him — Dr. Wang Jian.
PhD in psychology with programming skills
Wang Jian graduated from the original Hangzhou University, majoring in applied psychology. After graduation, he has been a doctoral supervisor in Zhejiang University for a long time, researching and teaching psychology. Such experience is hard to connect with cloud computing and the Internet, but Wang Jian is the person closest to the Internet in life. He teaches students how to code, and was one of the first to use E-mail when it first appeared in China.
At that time, Wang Jian had a chance to have a conversation with Simon, the winner of the Turing Award (the highest award in the field of computing) and an artificial intelligence expert. The conversation at that time was described by Wang Jian as “like going through a time and space tunnel”. Simon’s explanation and outlook on artificial intelligence brought Wang Jian into contact with a new field. Perhaps at that time, he really “through” and ten years later to see their own side.
Misguided technicians
It was an accident to get to know Jack Ma. At that time, Dr. Wang Jian, who had turned to work in Microsoft Research Asia, had technical experience and sharp judgment on the future. This conversation made Jack Ma think that The key Mr. Wang Jian was needed for Alibaba’s transformation. Out of his intuition and belief in core technology, Wang jian accepted Ma Yun’s invitation to join Alibaba to start the layout of cloud computing.
A liar who fooled Jack Ma
Despite Ma’s strong support, reality has not been kind to Wang jian. Cloud computing, a project that almost no one in China looked at at that time, was extremely expensive. The investment of one billion yuan a year was not just ma Yun’s promise, but really needed such a budget to support at that time.
However, with so much money invested, the programmers who initially trusted Dr. Wang gradually lost confidence, suspecting that what they were doing was meaningless. At the hardest time, 80% of the programmers left the Aliyun project team.
The failure of the “cloud phone” project also made Wang Jian a flood of criticism inside Ali, but he never gave up, his idea with romantic idealistic color — “just because there is no way to prove that it will not work, so there is hope!” Because of this sentence, Wang Jian was called a “liar”.
“Billion” and “450 billion.”
The so-called Yellow sky pays off to those who wait for it. Dr. Wang Jian, who has idealistic temperament, finally got a little return after five years of persistence. In 2013, ali Cloud acquired Wanwang and began to sell cloud services to various enterprises. In 2015, 12306 put the ticket query business on Aliyun, which greatly improved the previous paralysis problem. In October 2016, the “City Brain” project proposed by Dr. Wang Jian began to be implemented in Hangzhou.
Now Ali Cloud, the valuation reached 450 billion yuan, and the original Ma Yun promised to Dr. Wang Jian “one billion a year, ten years of investment” compared with the promise, has far exceeded, Dr. Wang Jian finally right now.
conclusion
From The experience of Dr. Wang Jian, the idealist always seems to have a blind optimism, but this is due to his adherence to the core technology and insight into the future development. Cloud computing is not understood by most people, Dr. Wang Jian believes that such core technology will provide the biggest power for an enterprise; While cloud computing is considered old wine in a new bottle, Dr. Wang Jian sees it closely related to artificial intelligence and urban brain.
It is such persistence and vision that a “cheater” has opened up the way for Cloud computing in China. It can be said that all cloud computing practitioners should thank Dr. Wang Jian.