The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide.

Chapter 79
When Zhou Xin was discussing the content editing mechanism of the online encyclopedia with Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wells, the small city in the northwest of American——Redmond, where Microsoft is headquartered, Bill Gate Ci and Brian King are discussing Quora.

Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, 20 kilometers away from downtown Seattle. They also had a large number of offices and Microsoft expansion centers in Seattle at the time.

"Mr. Gates, I think we can do Quora completely. With Microsoft's connections and the number of MSN users, we have a natural advantage in doing Quora.

At the same time, Quora is a good content supplement for MSN. Users can browse news and web pages through MSN, and then answer their own doubts through knowledge communities similar to Quora, or answer doubts for others. "

Blair King was the vice president of Microsoft at this time, and he was also the head of MSN. From the last name of Jin, it can be seen that he is a Korean. Before joining Microsoft, he worked in Intel and Apple.

Bill Gates has a higher tolerance for Brian King because he has only joined Microsoft for a short time.

If other executives came to talk to him about this matter, Bill Gates would definitely ask the other party, in this case, why is the IE browser completely inferior to Netscape. MSN can't even compare with Yahoo.

Bill Gates asked directly: "You need to answer me, it is more promising for us to build a knowledge quiz community by ourselves or buy Quora.

We are now starting to invest in people to do it. Quora only looks simple, but its like mechanism, question classification mechanism, and user attention mechanism are not so simple from the underlying logic.

It involves some complicated algorithms, and it will take us a month to make the product at the fastest, and then add testing, it will take one and a half months at the fastest.

What I mean is, during this month and a half, Quora will continue to accumulate users and content. We are two months behind them. Can we really occupy a piece of cake in this market?

Based on my understanding of the Internet model of Quora, this is different from other services. The quiz community is a zero-sum game in an absolute sense, and there will only be one winner in the end.

The richer the content, the better the knowledge quiz community will automatically attract users and gather users, so that another company that is equally good, but without the best products of the best knowledge quiz community, will automatically lose users.

To put it simply, a product with a score of 100 can win in this field, and other products with a score of 99 will face elimination sooner or later.

So what is Quora's score in your opinion? "

Bill Gates has a very keen sense of smell. Although he was born as an operating system, he also has a keen insight in Internet services.

That's right, the knowledge quiz community is a pure zero-sum game, and there can only be one winner in the market.

In the original time and space, as early as 2005, Yahoo launched their knowledge question-and-answer community, Yahoo Answers, which allows users to ask questions, answer questions, vote and comment on answers, and provides a like and adoption of the best answer.

In the early 2000s, Yahoo Answers was hugely popular and was the most popular question-and-answer community on the internet at the time.Later, after Quora appeared, Yahoo Answers fell on the beach, and the number of users and activity declined year by year until it was closed in 2021.

Brian King fell silent. This question is very difficult to answer, because the boss now asks you to rate Quora. After you create a knowledge quiz community, your score can only be higher than Quora, not lower than Quora.

"Mr. Gates, I think Quora can score at least 95 points, or even 99 points." Brian King replied that giving a higher evaluation to competitors at this time is to leave a way for himself.

Bill Gates continued to ask: "You are in charge of Microsoft's knowledge quiz community, can you achieve a higher score than Quora?"

After a short pause, Brian replied loudly, "I can't rate my product any lower than Quora."

The Korean guy is a chicken thief, Quora is already ahead, he can get a product that is no worse than Quora by copying it.

Bill Gates waved his hand: "It's also meaningless. Quora has a first-mover advantage. If we want to make a product and become the final winner of this track, we must be better than Quora in order to attract their users. It doesn't make any sense if it's just a copy of a product.

And based on my understanding of Newman, he has never shy away from competition. He must have a series of means waiting for other competitors.

The reason why I ask this question is because if we choose to do Quora ourselves, then we will face waiting until our product fails to buy Quora, and its price will be much higher than it is now.

Now I go to talk to Newman, he will choose 1 million US dollars, well, he will not accept this price, and sell it to me for 5 million US dollars.

But after two months to negotiate, this price may become 50 billion US dollars. Newman has such magic power.

Therefore, the trial and error cost we give you internally is not just the two-month salary of program developers, product managers, testers, etc., but the lost opportunity cost.

Well, I'd better talk to Newman first. "

To be honest, Bill Gates is not so interested in MSN's knowledge quiz community, because he and Zhou Xin are very happy to cooperate, and Microsoft is not short of money, so it is better to buy it.

Another very important point is that most of Microsoft's energy is now focused on the Xbox project and the MSN project. Bill Gates believes that there is no need to open up another front.

That's why they didn't make electronic payment software.

But Yahoo is different. Internet services are the lifeline for Yahoo. They acquired GEOCities for $1 billion in January this year, hoping that users think Yahoo is cool enough.

As a result, the past six months have not passed. The coolest product in Silicon Valley is Quora. Since Quora appeared, the number of views of GEOCities has been declining.

Yahoo has to be a quiz community, regardless of whether Quora accepts the acquisition.

Bill Gates was very active. After chatting with Brian King, he flew to Los Angeles in his private jet Gulfstream GIV on the spot, and at the same time asked his secretary to meet Zhou Xin in the evening.

"Newman, congratulations on your success again. Quora is an amazing product. Although Melinda is my wife, she is not interested in many Internet products, but Quora, after she got started, now she has to do it every day. The first thing to do is look at Quora.

I regret that when you were still an intern at Microsoft, you were not directly appointed as the person in charge of product development, or even the vice president.

If I knew today, I would not hesitate to let you directly serve as the vice president.

What I heard the most during this time is whether we should do Quora.

It seems that everyone will only follow the trend. After a new Internet model comes out on the market, everyone is wondering if we can do this together. "

(End of this chapter)