Video Game Empire

Jobs sat in the boss chair in the president's office, frowning. [For more exciting novels, please visit] The recent period of time has been an eventful time for Apple. Everyone has not yet recovered from the joy of listing, and they have been hit one after another.

First, Wozniak, one of the three founders of the company, suffered a plane crash. His private plane crashed in a valley and he fell into a coma. After the hospital examination, the result was that the impact of the plane crashed, which caused a severe shock to his brain. Fortunately, he woke up quickly and only temporarily lost his memory, but he could not recall the process of the accident.

The air crash was a huge blow to Wozniak. After he was discharged from the hospital, although his body was fine, he had a mental problem and directly applied to the company to start a vacation. Wozniak's departure was a huge blow to Apple. Among the three founders, Jobs and Mark Kula did not understand technology, and only Wozniak was called the technical soul of Apple.

Shortly after the Wozniak crash, Apple's (CEO) began laying off people again, firing 42 employees in one go, while also cutting off many R&D projects. This caused the entire Apple company to fall into an atmosphere of panic, which severely damaged morale.

Most European and American technology companies have a common feature, that is, the controlling stake of the company is not in the hands of the founders. Because most companies have introduced round after round of venture capital in order to survive and grow in the early stage of development, the equity in the hands of the founders has long been diluted to a relatively low ratio.

This is the case with Apple, where Jobs, Markkula, and Wozniak, the three founders' shares together are less than 35%. And more equity is in the hands of venture capital. This leaves founders unable to control the company's development as they wish. For example, the "Lisa Machine" project that Steve Jobs had been pushing hard before, wanted it to replace the existing apple series.

But the company's interface failed before the apple3 computer. It is necessary to increase the control over the company's production and research and development. So he used a trick of ups and downs, and asked the board to appoint Jobs as the new chairman. In fact, it was to transfer him out of the "Lisa Machine" project team and completely empty him.

This time, Jobs seized the opportunity for the CEO to go too far and caused chaos within the company. He joined another founder, Mark Kula, to initiate a motion directly on the board of directors to kick him out, and Mark Kula would pick him up. job.

This is also a serious drawback of the decentralized equity of European and American companies, and the founders and major shareholders often disagree. A company like Apple, which is still on the rise, should have been united to make the company bigger and stronger, but it has spent a lot of energy in this kind of intrigue and civil strife.

And such a thing never happened in Bill Gates' Microsoft empire. Because Microsoft's controlling stake is firmly in the hands of Gates himself, he is the czar of Microsoft. And Li Xuan is better than Bill Gates. Bill Gates at least had Allen as a partner when he started his business, and Li Xuan is a sole proprietor and controls the entire Oriental Electronics Company.

They found a profit point in the early stage of the company's development, which can support the company's continued expansion. Therefore, they did not give the opportunity for venture capital to intervene. When the company goes public, the controlling rights can still be in the hands of the founders. Coupled with the senior prestige established in the company's development process, they are not afraid of the tail of the management. It's just a matter of saying who you want to open.

Jobs stared at the document in his hand, distracted. This information is a detailed market research report made by a professional market research company invited by Apple. The report's results show that Apple's Apple line of computers is rapidly losing its competitiveness in the market. And all the blame points to a British company - Icon Computer.

This emerging computer company has just risen for more than half a year, and its market positioning is very similar to that of Apple. Its -1 and -2 models are rapidly grabbing market share that originally belonged to Apple. Especially in the school education computer market. This field, once dominated by Apple, is now rapidly being replaced by computers. Aikang company caters to campus computer teaching. The specially launched networking solution is very popular with teachers.

! Jobs couldn't help but cursed in his heart. He didn't have time to enjoy the joy of kicking out that annoying ex, and he had to face a very tough sales situation just after regaining power.

He picked up another document, which is a computer research and development project that Apple is developing, called "Metakin". The project, initially run by a technician named Larkins, planned to develop a small, inexpensive, and practical product for a mass-market personal computer. Last Christmas, the R&D team selected the processor as the core cpu and successfully developed the first "Metakin" prototype. The Metakin computer runs twice as fast as the previous prototype of the "Lisa Machine" project that Jobs personally presided over, but costs only $370 to build.

Jobs kept tapping his hands on the table, lost in thought. After a while, Boss Qiao's eyes became sharper and sharper, and he finally made a decision. He personally took charge of the "Metakin" project as the company's next-generation personal computer, gathering all the strength of the entire Apple company for research and development.

Li Xuan didn't know that Jobs was being beaten by Aikang's computer because of the apple computer at this time, and he made a new decision to develop a new computer with all his strength. The English name of "Metakin" is called Computer for short. That's right, this was the earliest computer, and the second PC with a graphical user interface. As for the first, it was naturally another Apple PC product, the "Lisa Machine", which was listed one step earlier than it.

But graphical user interfaces are not so easy to develop. The previous "Metakin" computer developed a prototype as early as the end of 1980, but it didn't really hit the market until 1984. The main reason for this is that the development progress of the operating system has greatly slowed down the progress of the entire project.

In fact, as early as after the east-operating system was developed, Li Xuan asked Dongfang Software to start developing a graphical interface operating system. Apple's graphical interface technology is derived from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (). In order to obtain technical support from PARC, Jobs also agreed to Xerox to buy a part of Apple's stock at a lower price.

But Dongfang Software Company naturally does not need to pay such a price. Although Li Xuan did not engage in software development in his previous life, he also had a certain understanding of graphical interfaces. If you ask Li Xuan to develop a complete system by himself, he will definitely not be able to do it. But let him formulate a research and development outline for the early window system for the project research and development team, and he can still do it. As for overcoming specific difficulties, a large number of technical engineers in software companies will use their wisdom and time to solve them one by one.

The Metakin project can be said to be the only life-saving straw for Apple in the 1980s, other than the Apple series of computers. But Li Xuan is really not worried about this. The future computer field is the era of compatible machines, and Apple's closed system can only be a niche product forever.

"Little Lisheng, the American market is too terrifying!" Du Wenqiang walked into Li Xuan's office. Even though he said so, his face was full of surprises, not fright. He smiled and handed Li Xuan a statistical table, "Shortly In one month, our three game discs sold 1.15 million copies!"

A month ago, the game floppy disks of the cp/m operating system versions of the three arcade games "Hong Kong Cube", "Tank Wars" and "Pac-Man" finally hit the market. As early as when the computer was on the market, Eastern Games released a random floppy disk, but it could only run on the computer's east-operating system.

This was also a small trick that Li Xuan used to attract potential computer users to buy computers. The computer, which went on sale in August last year, has sold more than 100,000 units, but still accounts for only a small share of total PC sales. A large number of new and previously sold computers still use the cp/m operating system.

It is naturally impossible for Dongfang Games to give up such a large market. The computer has been on the market for half a year, and the sales boost of games to the computer has been almost negligible. Therefore, Dongfang Games decisively began to release game software of the cp/m operating system version to enter the market to grab money.

Li Xuan took a look at the statistics sheet and said with a smile: "The total number of computers sold in the U.S. market last year reached millions, and the total number of computers in possession is at least several million. Only Americans can boast. , they have entered the gate of the computer age! With such a solid market foundation, it is normal for a good game to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, after all, we sell a floppy disk for only $9.9!"

The original "Tank Wars", "Hong Kong Cube" and "Pac-Man" three games ~www.readwn.com~ on the arcade performance is the worst of "Hong Kong Cube". However, the sales of computer floppy disks have just been reversed, with "Hong Kong Cube" leading the way with sales of 550,000 copies, almost catching up with the sales of the other two games combined.

This is also related to the simplicity of the program of the "Hong Kong Cube" game. Even the most rudimentary low-end computers with only a few kilobytes of memory can run smoothly on the simplified game floppy disk of "Hong Kong Cube".

A game floppy disk cost less than $1 to manufacture, and Eastern Games shipped it to distributors for $4.50. In other words, the net profit of these three game discs is as high as 4 million US dollars a month.

Therefore, the software industry is the real profiteering industry, but all companies in this era are still focusing on hardware. The importance of software has not really been taken seriously. Li Xuan has to admire Bill Gates' vision.

According to the information collected by Dongfang Electronics, Mr. Gates has really embraced IBM's thick legs and is working hard to modify the operating system he bought from others in Seattle. (To be continued..)

...