In this two months, we heard a lot of open platform news in China. Actually there are two big Internet companies we all expect them to be more open, they are Baidu and Tencent.

In an interview with journalist from 21st Century Business Herald on this Feb, Pony Ma, founder and CEO of Tencent, talked about QQ’s future development, and his experience on Facebook inspired him many ideas. He also said that “there will be many applications on QQ SNS in the future. Not all apps need to be developed by Tencent. We can open API to allow third-party apps. Users can get these apps on IM or on blogs. But it should not be too open, to avoid advertising behaviors and cheating, we will control it by some means”.

However, several months later, in a recent interview, Pony Ma changed his attitudes, and begin to downplay open platform. He said, “(Open platform) will be easily outdated, and touch the ceiling soon, just as what happened to online chat room”. He don’t think open platform really bring something valuable. He insisted that a good platform should also provides applications and services by itself, at least for main part. He said, “In fact, if they are good apps, it is inevitable that platform provider will develop it by itself, the (third-party) apps will be replaced sooner or later. For those apps which platform provider does not develop, they are definitely not good”.

By the interview, we know it is almost impossible for Tencent to launch an open platform in foreseeable future. Instead, Tencent will build everything by itself, rather than building an ecosystem around it. Tencent has hundreds of millions of users, that’s its big advantages. But I still believe the future of Internet is about openness, even in China. Tencent’s walled garden will give competitors more opportunities to win the game.