Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 319 Dare to be richer than me
In fact, in terms of qualifications in Silicon Valley, William Millard, who is nearly 50 years old this year, is definitely a veteran figure in the field of personal computers. Seymour Rubinstein, who made his fortune by relying on word processing software WordStar, was his One of his managers.

William Millard was born as a salesman, originally worked for IBM, and later served as the head of the data processing business in the San Francisco area, so he had the opportunity to deal with various mainframe and minicomputer companies, and accumulated the necessary industries for self-establishment experience.

After the bankruptcy of his first company, Systems Dynamics, William Millard founded IMS Associates in 1973 to provide consulting services.

As a result, he caught up with a wave of good market prices. Edward Roberts' MITS company launched the Altair, a microcomputer with an acceptable market price, which opened the real prelude to the development of personal computers.

William Millard seized this opportunity and imitated Altair to develop the famous personal computer IMSAI 8080.

In order to create a set of loyal team members, William Millard encouraged his subordinates to participate in Erhard Seminars Training——Erhard Seminars Training, the essence of which is to teach students to "self-help" and strengthen their hearts. Learn from success.

At that time, many Hollywood stars and celebrities in the business world were brainwashed by this Erhard seminar, so its reputation was quite loud.

Many IMSAI employees, including the rebellious Seymour Rubinstein, naturally threw themselves into it without any psychological burden.

And these graduates basically have a characteristic, that is, they are unwilling to easily admit that something cannot be accomplished or that a certain goal cannot be achieved. In other words, they advocate surpassing themselves and creating miracles.

Ever since, with William Millard as the center, an extraordinary operation team was formed, and the entire IMSAI has only one will from top to bottom.Even if William Millard is not in the company, it will not be affected.

Edward Roberts' MITS company is product-oriented, and engineers are concerned about what exciting new functions personal computers can provide; while William Millard's IMSAI company is market-oriented, and marketing personnel care about it. is the big number on the sales report.

Obviously, these IMSAI salesmen in suits and ties were more professional, and they soon caught up with the counterfeit IMSAI, overshadowing the genuine Altair.

No matter how much the personal computer is worshiped as a god by enthusiasts, its hardware production, like other products, follows the traditional parts procurement, factory manufacturing, and so on.

This is very different from Tang Huan's first pot of gold writing the spreadsheet software CGrid. He found a personal computer, slept less to fight for progress, and drank more water to pad his stomach, so that he could inhumanely reduce costs to the limit and survive difficulties. period, and the initial operation of IMSAI is inseparable from the actual support of real money.

Seeing that the cash flow was tight and the market prospect was so promising, William Millard borrowed a sum of money from Marina Company, but the other party added a condition that the bond could be converted into IMSAI Company or William Millard. 20.00% of the shares in Millard's holding company and any company William Millard might start.

IMSAI took advantage of the situation, and MITS became the duo in the first stage of personal computer development.

However, IMSAI put too much emphasis on marketing and neglected hardware, which gradually ruined its reputation and was spurned by users and sellers; although MITS paid attention to technology investment, the technical threshold of personal computers was too low at this time, and it was quickly overwhelmed by imitators successively. up.

In the end, both IMSAI and MITS became short-lived. The former went bankrupt and the latter was sold off. The development of personal computers entered the second stage led by Apple, Tangdi and Commodore.

Compared with Edward Roberts, the founder of MITS, who took the $200 million from the sale of the company to become a carefree farmer, William Millard transferred his energy to 1976 long before the situation at IMSAI was bad. Computer Park, a personal computer sales chain store, was established and ushered in the second peak of his personal career.

The RadioShack bought by Tang Huan has a larger network, but its business scope is not limited to personal computers, and its style is relatively stable.

Computer Park continues to adhere to William Millard's aggressive marketing strategy, and expands extremely rapidly through franchise stores.

The second-generation Fangyuan computer launched by Tang Huan brought the development of personal computers to the third stage of using 16-bit CPUs.

IBM-PC, which quickly followed, has a total of three franchised dealers, and Computerland is one of them.

According to historical development, Computer Park's sales will reach 1982 million US dollars in 4, that is, next year, and will reach 1984 billion US dollars in 10.

But it was such a well-known veteran of the personal computer industry, but when the good times came, he was targeted by people who wanted to get involved in the shares of the computer field.

It is said that the grievances in Silicon Valley this time were provoked by a former employee of the computer field named Martin Musumeh after he was fired by the company.

This ruthless man got acquainted with a wealthy businessman in California named Andrigetto. He not only sold [-]% of his shares in the computer park to the other party, but also told the story of the relationship between William Millard and Marina Company in the early years. The secret of inter-debt.

It has to be said that these two speculators are really strong. They formed a special partnership and formed a company named Micro-West, and quietly bought it from Marina Company for 30 US dollars. William Millard's IOU.

The ripping off company calculated the debt time, and seeing that the time was ripe, it recently notified William Millard of its intention to exchange the IOU for 20.00% of the shares of Computerland Company.

Now the computer field has obtained the franchise rights of several PCs, and the number of stores has expanded to hundreds. It can be said that the business is booming and the development is booming. No one would be willing to let the $25 bond back then be exchanged for the current 20.00% family business.

William Millard, who refused to agree, believed that the IOU could not be transferred from Marina Company, and argued that the 20.00% ownership of IMSAI back then did not constitute the corresponding proportion of shares in Computer Park.

In Tang Huan's view, the IOU signed by William Millard back then was a veritable convertible bond. The Micro-West Company was established specifically for this purpose. Ruthlessly made a windfall.

This kind of opponent is the most difficult to deal with. After all, Computerland is a company with regular business, and business operation is its own business.

The ending in the original time and space was also the same. This lawsuit lasted for 4 years. In the end, Micro-Vest Company won a great victory and the extortion was successful, while William Millard failed completely. Computer Park not only spent 300 million Court fees, surrendered 20.00% of the company's shares, and was ordered to pay more than $1.41 million in damages.

Since then, the computer field has suffered heavy losses, and William Millard's business reputation has plummeted.

In the end, he had to withdraw from the computer field, sold the remaining shares for [-] million US dollars, and completely avoided public view. Similar to the retreat pastoral of MITS founder Edward Roberts, he went to Saipan Island in the Pacific Ocean far away from the United States.

For William Millard's current resistance, Tang Huan felt a little futile. After all, all the details of this loan were traceable. Perhaps it was the most appropriate way to deal with it, but William Millard's reaction was also reasonable. Excuse me, it's an unsolvable situation

Like the attitude of most bystanders, in Tang Huan's eyes, this ripped-off show was nothing more than a commotion, and at most it was used as a negative example to alert himself.

But what he didn't expect was that his old rival, Atari, actually made up an excuse like this, disgusting himself, and ruining the layout of wooing Jay Miner.

Now that the interest rate in the United States is so high, the cost of loans continues to increase, and many small and medium-sized enterprises cannot survive bankruptcy. Some small-scale companies in Silicon Valley are naturally facing a similar dilemma.

Tang Huan is using convertible bonds to hunt down some selected targets.

Because the daunting high interest rate is replaced by the future convertible share rights, the attractiveness of convertible bonds has repeatedly won Tang Huan's hands.

Jay Miner was mainly responsible for the design and development of video display function modules for game consoles at Atari. The result was the Television Interface Adapter—TIA. The Atari 128 only had a measly 2600 bytes. Excellent game performance relied on TIA. .

After Bushnell left Atari and Ray Casa took over as CEO, he shifted his focus to how to market existing products more effectively.

And Jay Miner wanted to develop a game platform based on the more powerful microprocessor MC68000, but the high-level executives of Atari, who had undergone a major change, preferred the cheap MOS6502.

When this conflict was unresolved, like other employees who left, Jay Miner also chose to leave Atari, with a group of followers around him.

Among the talents lost by Atari, David Crane-David Crane, Larry Kaplan-Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller-Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead-Bob Whitehead, Co-founded the first third-party game publisher, Activision. .

This year, game designer and programmer Larry Kaplan developed "Kaboom!", fully proving the strength of these technical elites in the game industry, and the works were well received and well received.

To be fair, this game is derived from a published game by Atari. After all, it was developed by a group of people, but now the authors are flying solo.

As a result, Atari and Activision's companies fought more fiercely. In Atari's view, Activision was simply cutting its own flesh.

In the current American video game industry, hot money is pouring in, chaos is everywhere, and even the minds of the practitioners themselves are extremely impetuous.

For example, a group of investors took a fancy to Larry Kaplan's ability, found him, and encouraged him to start anew.

Larry Kaplan, who knew everything about Atari, immediately contacted Jay Miner, who was also flying solo, and planned to cooperate to develop a new game platform. The money invested by investors started working.

Tang Huan, who has been paying attention to collecting news in Silicon Valley, heard the news not long after, which immediately aroused his vigilance.

The second-generation Xiaobawang game console that is being revised is based on the MC68000 hardware platform. Jay Miner, who has worked in this field for many years and has profound experience, also plans to use MC68000 to develop a new game console. competitors.

Tang Huan is well aware of Jay Miner's background. In the original time and space, his project called Amiga came up with a prototype in 1983, but unfortunately, it caught up with the collapse of the North American video game industry and had to be rejected. Set aside.

However, the excellent performance of Amiga has caused several companies to compete for it. In the end, Commodore spent more than 2000 million US dollars to win it and found a new generation successor for its Commodore 64.

Amiga uses technologies such as coprocessors on the hardware, and the operating system AmigaOS supports preemptive multitasking features, so it performs very well in terms of video and audio.

Commodore did not realize that the Amiga was actually a multimedia computer and launched it as a commercial computer, but it still achieved market success and sold millions of machines in total.

It can be said that Jay Miner's current work on the Amiga is similar to some projects in Zheru R&D Center, and Tang Huan naturally wants to control this team.

However, there are some taboos Tang Huan has to take into account.

EA is now a worldwide listed company. It must pay attention to its public image and be particular about its work. If it directly recruits important employees like Jay Miner who left Atari, it will inevitably lead to a crazy counterattack from the other party. The lawsuit between him and Activision is A proof.

Therefore, Tang Huan could only take a roundabout route.

The pursuit of hot money is short, smooth and fast profits. The orderly progress of the Amiga project is torturing one's patience in the eyes of laymen. The enthusiasm gradually faded, and Jay Miner's project team fell into financial difficulties.

Tang Wenmao immediately seized the opportunity and sent a convertible bond of 50 US dollars.

But Jay Miner and his group were born in Atari after all, so they couldn't help being cut off from their old club.

So, after receiving the news, Atari jumped out and shouted, "Convertible bonds are very insidious. Do you want to become William Millard's second? Now the old club is funding you with US$50, on the condition that the new platform One-year priority right to use it.”

Tang Huan was very annoyed by this, because Atari was nothing but a shit-stirring stick.

"Dare to be richer than me." After Tang Huan snorted coldly, he immediately told Tang Wenmao, "The same conditions as Atari, I will offer 75 US dollars, you can adapt accordingly. Remember, the ultimate goal is to make Jie ?The Miner team is isolated and cannot fall into the hands of competitors like Atari."

(End of this chapter)