Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 725 The Alliance of the Weak

……

As a matter of fact, it was only Xiaohe who took the head start of the 1MB DRAM chip at Samsung Electronics. The entire international semiconductor market structure has not undergone fundamental changes.

After all, among the top ten semiconductor companies in the world, Japanese semiconductor companies alone occupy six of them; especially NEC Semiconductor, Toshiba Semiconductor, and Hitachi Semiconductor rank among the top three, and their monopoly is still stable.

From February 1983, 2, when Samsung Group Chairman Lee Byung-chul issued the "Tokyo Declaration" and officially entered the semiconductor industry, to last year's successful breakthrough, in just a few years, Samsung Electronics has made rapid progress, but its foundation is still slightly lacking.The reason why it has attracted so much attention is largely due to the opportunities for global expansion of brand awareness brought by the 8 Seoul Olympics.

Li Jianxi is like a mirror in his heart, and there is no lack of luck in it-Samsung Electronics is willing to spend money, but the high-end technology of 1MB DRAM chip is regarded as a treasure in any company, and it is not like 64KB DRAM. As in the case of chips, as long as the bid is sincere enough, you can buy it. It is entirely because Tang Huan is worried that Japanese semiconductor companies will completely monopolize the supply chain, so he let himself pick up a leak at the right time.
Fearing that the Japanese would recollect that Samsung Electronics would lose the first-mover advantage it had so hard to get, Li Jianxi paid more and more attention to the cooperation with the United States.

You must know that the significance of Fangyuan Computer to suppliers such as Samsung Electronics is just like Apple, which owns the iPhone, to upstream companies such as TSMC and Hon Hai in the original time and space. It is even more important than that.

Tang Huan received Li Jianxi very grandly. The status of the other party is now the same, so there must be an equal standard.

Lee Byung-cheol, the old chairman of Samsung Group, passed away on November 11 last year. On December 19 of the same year, Lee Kun-hee officially took office as the new chairman of Samsung Group, announcing the beginning of a new era for this family business.

Li Jianxi is the youngest son of Li Bingzhe, and he has two older brothers - Li Mengxi and Li Changxi.According to convention, the inheritance rights of the Samsung Group should have belonged to the eldest brother Li Mengxi; even if something unexpected happened, the second eldest son Li Changxi would still be there.

However, both of them were automatically eliminated.

On May 1966, 5, Samsung Group smuggled 24 packages of saccharin, or about 2259 tons of saccharin, into a Korean fertilizer factory under construction in Ulsan, disguised as building materials. The result was discovered by Busan Customs and seized, and a fine of more than 55 million won was imposed.

And the leaders of this matter are Li Mengxi and his second brother Li Changxi,
As the opposition parties and opposition groups launched attacks on the Park Chung Hee government one after another, in order to get rid of the pressure from the political circles and the media, Lee Byung-chul, chairman of the Samsung Group, was forced to hand over the ownership of the fertilizer factory and announced his retirement.

Fortunately, Park Chung-hee's support for the Korean chaebol has always been strong, and Lee Byung-cheol was able to hide and never retreat. Eighteen months later, in February 18, he came back again.

Obviously, after Li Mengxi and Li Changxi got into such a big disaster, there was a serious problem with their integrity, they couldn't face the public, and naturally lost their qualifications to succeed. Li Jianxi, the third child, became the only choice without competition.

Especially Li Changxi, the second child who felt this subtle change afterwards, took the initiative to expose the business scandal of the Samsung Group, and even exposed his father Li Bingzhe's economic crimes such as transferring assets overseas.

In a rage, Li Bingzhe expelled Li Changxi from the house and never allowed him to enter Korea.

When Lee Chang-hee went to the United States, his brother Lee Meng-hee, who had been a partner with him in the business world for many years, inevitably entered Lee Byung-cheol's suspect list and began to be gradually deprived of his positions and rights.

In this way, after a series of dramas of grievances between wealthy families, Lee Kun-hee, the third oldest, took over from Lee Byung-cheol and successfully took over the Samsung Group.

Of course, Li Jianxi's own ability is enough to shoulder such an important task.No, after hugging the big tree of Fangyuan Computer, he refused to let go.

Tang Huan directly stated his attitude: "Open the skylight and speak clearly. Even if the major Japanese semiconductor companies react and make up for it on the 1MB DRAM chip, they will no longer be able to monopolize this field, because there are rising stars including Samsung Electronics. function, and I will guarantee to squeeze out your production capacity, the only premise is quality."

Lee Kun-hee joked: "Samsung Electronics is building a new semiconductor factory to significantly increase production capacity."

Tang Huan laughed heartily, "At the end of last year, Fangyuan Computer Company released the latest generation of personal computers - the fourth-generation Fangyuan Personal Computer-MMX, which officially incorporated multimedia functions into mainstream products, but it seems that the 1MB DRAM chip The impact on market demand is less obvious."

Seeing that Li Jianxi nodded in agreement, Tang Huan immediately made a powerful gesture, "Then I might as well reveal a piece of information now. The third generation of the Little Overlord game console is not just a smoke bomb this time, it is really ready to be launched. In addition, The basic specifications are: main memory 2MB, video memory 1MB, audio memory 512KB, and other caches, as well as read-only memory. Referring to the previous sales and market share data of the Xiaobawang game console, the memory requirements contained in this are not It’s hard to imagine!”

Speaking of this, Tang Huan deliberately paused for a moment, and then emphasized: "While ensuring the performance of the third-generation Xiaobawang game console, in order to reduce power consumption and heat dissipation, the main memory and video memory will definitely use 1MB DRAM chips. , to reduce the number of chips used.”

Li Jianxi's eyes lit up when he heard it, and he said to himself: This is a long-term business.

Tang Huan continued to add the material to make the other party die against the Japanese semiconductor company, "At the upcoming Spring Developers Conference this year, a new version of the GUI operating system-studiOS1988 will be ushered in on the Fangyuan computer platform. It provides more Advanced features will also stimulate memory requirements, increasing the mainstream memory configuration from 2MB to 4MB."

Li Jianxi nodded. He believed Tang Huan's statement.

Fangyuan Computer Company, which focuses on the hardware platform, appears to be killing all directions and is invincible; in fact, in this, the philosophers standing behind it have played a pivotal role-Fangyuan PC is superior to IBM PCs and other companies. The most obvious thing about competitors is that they have rich and powerful software product lines.

The latest graphical user interface operating system studioOS1988, as long as the hardware requirements are slightly improved, it will be like a universal baton, allowing users to unconsciously upgrade their computer hardware configuration.

In short, Tang Huan's monopoly based on the entire ecological chain is much more attractive than that of major Japanese semiconductor companies.

Of course, such a clever layout also means that it is difficult to implement and difficult to imitate.Even if Li Jianxi thinks he has tasted some of the true meaning, he cannot simply copy it like he used the Olympics to build a global brand.

……

After warmly entertaining the new chairman of the Samsung Group, who has been appointed as the new official and ready to do a big job, Tang Huan deliberately gathered his subordinates for a meeting and asked about the latest industry trends, such as IBM, which spread well and clearly, was taken over by Wall Street. Split into two plans.

"Through active running, IBM's management convinced the shareholders and won a buffer opportunity for atonement for themselves." John Chambers shrugged with a smile, "Big Blue admits that the battle for personal computer standards has been divided, and we must If you want to change the current industry structure, you need to start from other aspects.”

After years of brutal elimination, the current platform standards in the personal computer market mainly include Fangyuan, IBM-PS/2, IBM-PC compatibles, Apple MAC, and Commodore.

Relying on the price advantage, Commodore, which once played an important role in the collapse of the North American home video game console industry with Texas Instruments, and forced the latter to give up the personal computer business, its flagship product Commodore595, which is priced at US$64, is in the low-end market. The sales were quite good, even if the founder Jack Trammell was driven out in 1984, he was not affected much, and successfully launched the successor of Commodore1985 in 64, Commodore128, to continue the glory of this product line .

Apple's MAC, after getting through the initial embarrassing situation of insufficient power and flashy product design such as low memory capacity and not equipped with increasingly important hard drives, it is a targeted and improved product. , very popular in the field of education.

Especially after Jobs was kicked out, Apple's management order was on the right track, and CEO John Sculley was able to take control of the situation.He is a real person who has been trained at Pepsi-Cola, and he is quite good at marketing.

Jobs originally positioned the Apple MAC as a popular personal computer similar to Woz's AppleII, while John Sculley adjusted the price of the product to $2495 to establish a high-end image of the MAC with a graphical user interface. This marketing strategy was very successful.

Of course, with the passage of time, the number of excellent software on the MAC platform has gradually increased, especially the advent of Microsoft's new generation of spreadsheet software Excel, which has also helped MAC objectively.

The situation of the IBM-PC compatible machine is difficult to describe in one word.Manufacturers in this camp are miscellaneous and chaotic, and each takes advantage of the gaps according to their specific circumstances.

However, the "six-door" small group headed by Compaq and NEC also issued a unanimous voice on behalf of the IBM-PC compatible camp. That is, after the rapid follow-up launch of personal computers using Intel 80386 microprocessors, they finally Based on the IBM-PC/AT bus, we have successfully developed a system bus that is backward compatible and comparable to the IBM-PS/2 microsystem architecture - EISA, which fully proves that as long as you are willing, there is nothing technically impossible. Incompatibility is a lie concocted by the manufacturer for marketing purposes, which makes IBM's old face swell as it tries to force users to switch to the IBM-PS/2 microsystem architecture.

In addition, in terms of graphics card performance, which is getting more and more attention, the "Six Doors" small group also launched VESALocalBus - VESA local bus technology to supplement the EISA bus technology.

It can be said that the IBM-PC compatible computer, whose technical standards are free and open to the public, is an invincible little power. In the face of severe market pressure, it can always struggle to find a way to survive.

In contrast, Big Blue, which single-handedly built IBM-PC, is in an ironic situation.The carefully built new generation of personal computer IBM-PS/2, its various irreplaceable excellences have been proven to be lies by the IBM-PC/AT compatible computer that has been judged to have no future and should be abandoned. Deeply affected by the surge in global semiconductor memory prices, it has almost been declared a major commercial failure.

Hearing that IBM plans to break through from other aspects, Tang Huan asked with great interest, "So now, is there any concrete action by IBM?"

"Yes! IBM just completed the acquisition of a company." John Chambers nodded and asked his secretary to send the relevant information while introducing: "This new company called Sequent Computer Systems was founded in 1983. The person behind it is a group of up to 432 engineers, including some Intel employees who left because of the failure and cancellation of the InteliAPX[-] project. The main product is a high-end multi-processor workstation."

Tang Huan, who was browsing the files quickly, frowned slightly, "This SequentComputerSystems is very good in the field of Symmetricmultiprocessing—symmetrical multiprocessing technology. It can allow at least 12 microprocessors to work together, and it uses the Unix operating system and the Oracle database. , it can be said that it has already caused a substantial threat to Yuanyuan's personal workstation and Fangyuan's network server."

John Chambers agreed deeply: "If IBM can really digest Sequent Computer Systems in its entirety, maybe it can find a way to solve the problem that microcomputer products have been unable to break through in the market, and make up for the mainframe and minicomputer business. Profits are lost."

"In addition, IBM announced a new RISC processor development program, and Apple was very interested in it and joined it."

"It seems that these underdogs who have been frustrated in the competition for PC standards have a tendency to join forces."

At this point, John Chambers couldn't help but laugh, "I don't know if he felt uncomfortable seeing Apple and IBM getting closer, but Jobs also successfully recommended his own set of things to IBM."

(End of this chapter)