Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Yao Tingting
"This price can be said to have fallen below Alibaba Cloud's base price. It is very high in the entire market and is a bit abnormal." Luo Yonghao, who has sold satellites and "air taxis" , started selling cloud in Taobao live broadcast room. On the evening of March 31, Luo Yonghao brought goods for Alibaba Cloud in Taobao's live broadcast room. More than 2.3 million people flocked to Lao Luo's live broadcast room to watch the live broadcast, and thousands of companies placed orders to purchase Alibaba Cloud products on the spot.
Luo Yonghao’s live broadcast room has launched a total of 8 Alibaba Cloud products, and 4 highly recommended popular cloud servers and storage products are even more cost-effective. The u1 instance of the enterprise’s preferred cloud server with an annual package of 168 yuan was snapped up, and Alibaba Cloud had to re-list it to satisfy everyone. enthusiasm.
Alibaba Cloud stated that the cooperation with Luo Yonghao aims to popularize the value of cloud computing to a wider range of people and allow more enterprises to use advanced public cloud services. Industry insiders have observed that Luo Yonghao’s live broadcast of cloud sales may lead more ordinary users to directly experience enterprise-level cloud services for the first time.
Lao Luo Maiyun, what’s so special about it?
In this live broadcast, Luo Yonghao’s product selection covers popular Alibaba Cloud products such as cloud servers, cloud storage, and enterprise network disks. His target customers are entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Take cloud server ecs as an example. Cloud server ecs is a cloud computing service on which users can deploy and run various applications such as websites, mini program servers, and mobile app servers. The two cloud server ecs launched by Luo Yonghao in the live broadcast room are economical e instances and general computing u1 instances. The
economical e instance is suitable for developers and entrepreneurs, and the general computing u1 instance is suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises. It is also a small program to be built. The former can support about 100 people accessing it online at the same time, while the latter can support 300 people. In terms of storage products,
’s live broadcast room also launched the 1-year 1TB Alibaba Cloud object storage OSS product suitable for personal use and the 1-year 2TB Alibaba Cloud Disk Enterprise Edition. The
cloud server ecs economical e instance is sold for 99 yuan/year. The live broadcast room also has "Lao Luo's exclusive price". The general computing u1 instance is only sold for 168 yuan/year. Alibaba Cloud Object Storage OSS and Alibaba Cloud Disk Enterprise Edition are 2TB. The price is 199 yuan/year.
"These products have huge discounts and very affordable prices. I don't make money but just make friends with you." Luo Yonghao said with a smile that many netizens called the price "fragmentary price", and thousands of companies placed orders on the spot to purchase Alibaba Cloud products. .
"Selling clouds through live streaming" sounds like a new thing, but this is not Luo Yonghao's first time selling high-tech products in a live streaming room.
As a serial entrepreneur, Luo Yonghao has been "tossing around". From founding Niubo.com in 2006, Smartisan Technology in 2012, joining live streaming to sell goods to pay off debts in 2020, and now founding ar company Thin Red Line Technology... These entrepreneurial experiences have not only made him one of the leading anchors with his own "technology" "Attributes are also more attractive to entrepreneurs and business owners.
As early as the evening of March 31 last year, Luo Yonghao brought satellite goods in the "Make a Friend" live broadcast room, setting a record of 6 minutes of transaction. On the evening of March 20 this year, Luo Yonghao delivered the EHang eh216-s "air taxi" live again.
However, the price of the technology products Luo Yonghao hawked before was in the "millions" level. For example, Luo Yonghao shouted "The price has been reduced". The satellite was sold in the live broadcast room for 1 million yuan, which can shuttle at low altitudes in the city. The price tag of the "Flying Taxi" in the live broadcast room is as high as 2.39 million yuan.
The Alibaba Cloud product that appeared in Lao Luo's live broadcast room this time can be said to be the lowest-priced and most "people-friendly" technology product that Luo Yonghao has ever sold. Those placing orders are no longer mysterious buyers who spend a lot of money, but many small and medium-sized business owners and entrepreneurs.
is lower than low. How did Alibaba Cloud do it? Before
was put on the shelves of Lao Luo's live broadcast room, Alibaba Cloud had already carried out the largest price reduction in history.
html On February 29, Alibaba Cloud announced that the official website prices of more than 100 products and more than 500 product specifications would be reduced by an average of 20%, with a maximum reduction of 55%. The new prices are effective immediately. After the price reduction, the price of Alibaba Cloud's core products has reached the lowest price on the entire network.This price reduction has the largest range of participating products and the widest number of beneficiaries in history.Taking the cloud server u1 product, which is most popular among small and medium-sized enterprises, as an example, purchasing the five-year version with 2c4g configuration costs 768 yuan/year. After the price reduction, it only costs 485 yuan/year, a price reduction of 36%. Object storage oss standard storage-local redundancy dropped from 0.12/gb/month to 0.09/gb/month, a decrease of 25%. In terms of databases, taking the RDS MySQL basic series as an example, purchasing the five-year version of the 2c4g universal configuration costs 936 yuan/year. After the price reduction, it only costs 562 yuan/year, a 40% price reduction.
In the middle of last year, Alibaba Cloud announced that it would adjust the prices of some ecs products, with the highest reduction reaching 32.5%. Earlier, Alibaba Cloud had announced price reduction decisions many times.
In 2013, the "Alibaba Cloud 1218 Event" kicked off Alibaba Cloud's first price reduction; in 2014, Alibaba Cloud reduced prices 6 times in a row; from October 2015 to October 2016, Alibaba Cloud set a record of 17 product price reductions in a year Price reduction record.
Almost every year since then, Alibaba Cloud has lowered and adjusted the prices of some of its product categories. Alibaba Cloud has cut prices almost countless times. The price reduction of
is no longer a big deal for Alibaba Cloud, but a norm with technological advancement.
Liu Weiguang, senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group and president of the Public Cloud Division, once mentioned: "Alibaba Cloud hopes to allow more enterprises to use advanced public cloud services through large-scale price reductions and accelerate the popularity of cloud computing in all walks of life in China. and development.”
In fact, cloud computing is a business model with network effects and scale effects. From the perspective of technological development, it is a general trend for cloud computing to become low-priced under Moore's Law.
Moore's Law is an empirical rule about the doubling rate of the number of transistors in integrated circuits every two years, that is, computing power will continue to increase, and costs will decrease accordingly. Although Moore's Law was originally used to describe the development of the semiconductor industry, its influence has spread to all areas of computer science, including cloud computing.
technological innovation brings about improved hardware efficiency, improved energy utilization efficiency, and reduced operating costs. Alibaba Cloud itself can also further improve the efficiency of cloud computing and reduce costs through integrated software and hardware collaborative optimization in terms of underlying chip hardware and Feitian Cloud operating system.
For example, Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Pangu storage system has greatly improved storage resource utilization through EC, compression and other technologies. The continuous optimization of self-developed chips such as Etian 710 can improve the cost-effectiveness of databases, big data, AI, high-performance computing, video encoding and decoding and other scenarios by more than 80%.
In the past ten years, Alibaba Cloud has reduced computing costs by 80% and storage costs by nearly 90%.
In addition, economies of scale mean that cloud service providers can spread costs by purchasing hardware equipment on a large scale, further reducing the price per unit of computing. Therefore, cloud vendors' price reduction is not only an inevitable trend of Moore's Law, but also a natural result of market competition.
's cheaper cloud products can attract a wider range of customers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs. The reduction in cloud computing costs may significantly reduce their overall expenses. A survey of more than 500 IT professionals released by IDG in 2020 revealed that cloud computing accounts for one-third of IT spending, as most organizations plan to use cloud services for more than half of their infrastructure and applications.
72% of those who have not moved to the cloud
In the past year, when large models are prevalent, cloud computing has become the soil for AI innovation and development, and the cloud market is still a huge cake.
But where to find growth? The answer may lie in the needs of a wide range of small and medium-sized enterprises that have not moved to the cloud.
In fact, China’s public cloud penetration rate still has room for significant improvement. Currently, there are 20 million servers in the Chinese market, and about 21 million in the United States. However, the computing power provided in the form of public cloud services in the United States accounts for 60%, while that in China is only 28%. The increase in public cloud penetration will help improve China’s overall computing power utilization. For cloud vendors, this is a huge business opportunity.
Therefore, Liu Weiguang mentioned, “Alibaba Cloud’s price reduction is not a short-term market competition behavior, but a long-term strategic choice."
According to a recent report released by market research agency canalys, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Alibaba Cloud held a leading position in China's cloud computing market with a share of 39%. This also means that Alibaba Cloud's price cuts can better leverage its scale advantages.
In the news released by Alibaba Cloud on April 1, there was this sentence: Many enterprise-level customers also contacted Alibaba Cloud through the live broadcast room to inquire about the overall cloud solution.
Perhaps, only more technology tycoons like Lao Luo will join. Join the ranks of popular science cloud computing and let more entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized business owners try to go to the cloud. Only 72% of them can access inclusive cloud computing and achieve an improvement in overall computing power efficiency
.