Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 837 Attending the APEC Summit
The reason why Akio Morita has become the soul of Sony is because his contribution to Sony's entry into the US market and the internationalization of the Sony brand is unparalleled.

At Akio Morita's current age, since he had a stroke, it means that he is very likely to retire, and Sony will change the dynasty accordingly.

"I have sent another old man off the stage of history." Tang Huan suppressed his "pride" about his age advantage and told Masako Wada in an extremely sincere tone, "I am too busy here in the United States to get away. , you go to visit Morita on my behalf and wish him a speedy recovery and continue to lead Sony forward."

Wada Masako obediently promised: "I will definitely send your sincere greetings [-]%."

After explaining to Masako Wada, Tang Huan asked his assistant to pay attention to Sony's high-level changes—since Akio Morita, the president, has fallen, Norio Ohga will naturally step up as usual, and the vacated president position must be indispensable. fierce competition.

After the instruction was over, he turned his mind back.

In November of this year, Mr. Richest has two main activities - attending the COMDEX Las Vegas Autumn Exhibition and the first APEC Summit.

The former is an annual industry event, the importance of which is self-evident, but he is already familiar with it; the latter, on the other hand, is a small challenge for Tang Huan, who is used to seeing big scenes.

APEC, the abbreviation of Asia-Pacific_Economic_Cooperation in English, has entered its fifth year since its establishment.

The special feature of this year's APEC summit is that the first four years were at the ministerial level, but this year it was upgraded to the leader level for the first time, and it was the first time to come to the United States, and it was held in Seattle, a Pacific port city on the west coast.

Among the many institutions of APEC, there is one called the Pacific Business Forum.Its main task is to put forward ideas and suggestions on trade and investment liberalization, economic and technological cooperation, and the creation of a favorable business environment in APEC, and to submit advisory reports to leaders and ministerial meetings.

This organization encourages people from the business community to participate in the APEC cooperation process, and each APEC member sends three representative business people as representatives, and the chairman is the host of the year—Tang Huan is currently serving concurrently took this job.

Therefore, although the richest man has a huge team of assistants and consultants to assist him, he is still very busy. There are a lot of speeches alone, and he really has no time to see Akio Morita who fell down in a blink of an eye.

COMDEX拉斯维加斯秋季展和APEC首脑峰会的举行时间，不是一般地紧凑，直接挨着——11月15日到11月19日是COMDEX；11月19日到11月20日是APEC。

According to the schedule, the richest man will only give COMDEX the day of November 11th, and then fly directly to Seattle.

Gein, although the APEC summit will not be held until November 11th, it is a leader-level level that only cares about major events, and the specific preparations will fall on the ministerial-level meeting held in advance and the forum of business leaders .

……

Facts have proved that although COMDEX was transferred to RB Softbank, the exhibition is not affected by the change and is still booming. This year, in addition to the spring exhibition held in Atlanta, it also went to Toronto, Canada, and Brazil in the southern hemisphere. St. Paul.

However, under the lively appearance, there are also endless grievances and grievances. For example, under the eyes of the richest man, Novell CEO Raymond Norda had a strange conversation with Gates.

Speaking of which, Gates is getting more and more unscrupulous.

Some time ago, Microsoft and Novell had a secret contact. Citing the increasingly fierce competition in the software industry, they proposed that the two companies simply merge. This would avoid attacks on each other and complement each other's strengths.

Raymond Norda was really moved. After all, with the Fangyuan computer standard becoming the mainstream, the market space for cross-platform software is getting smaller and smaller. Everyone has to face the direct competition of philosophers and scholars, and the "weak and weak alliance" is not a bad idea. A great way to get bigger and stronger.

Since Lang has a concubine who is interested, the two parties should sign a confidentiality agreement and sit down and have a good talk.

As a result, after Microsoft covered Novell's business secrets almost, it played Tai Chi on the grounds of price, power distribution, board of directors opinions and other factors.

After realizing that he was being tricked, Raymond Nolda's anger and embarrassment can be imagined. Looking at that look, he wished he could bite Gates a few times.

Novell is now increasing its efforts in capital operations. After acquiring a digital research company and filling in the gaps in the general operating system landscape, it has also targeted acquisitions in word processing, spreadsheet and other software, trying to create an all-round software kingdom. .

Due to the great changes in the industry's ecology, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to make a living relying solely on one software product. The once-famous word processing software WordPerfect was sold to Novell.

Naturally, these industry anecdotes cannot escape the eyes and ears of the richest man, and he scoffs at them——Raymond Norda makes frequent acquisitions, but have you ever thought about Novell's ability to digest?
In addition, Gates' methods are too dark, and no one can stand it.

In fact, only relying on technology competition, Novell's flagship product - the network suite NetWare, will not go too far.

The functions provided by NetWare are indeed remarkable, but it has a disadvantage, that is, the network protocol used is not the standard protocol TCP/IP of the Internet, but the proprietary IPX/SPX.

If the product application scenario is only for LAN, no matter whether it is IPX/SPX or TCP/IP, it is not a big problem; but the Internet becomes the mainstream is the general trend, and not using TCP/IP is equivalent to being restricted in reality like not speaking English in the United States .

But if you want to turn TCP/IP from paper specifications into actual code, the process is not that simple - first of all, TCP/IP itself is a complex and constantly improving protocol system; secondly, during the coding process, programmers It is also necessary to have a good understanding of the bottom layer of the system, and non-senior people are not competent.

So far, the most recognized TCP/IP code implementation is Zheru's TCP/IP development kit. The runtime library in it is not only stable, but also has high execution efficiency. It also provides rich and powerful tools for third-party development. function interface.

In other words, NetWare, which has used IPX/SPX for so many years, is now very difficult to switch to TCP/IP.

On the other hand, Microsoft built-in a free network suite with functions similar to NetWare directly in Windows_NT, and did not give Novell any time to make the transition.

It can be said that these schemes on the surface alone are enough to make Novell's development unsustainable, but Gates is still making small moves, which has to make Tang Huan raise his vigilance level.

The Internet has entered the fast lane of development, and the interests involved are even greater. It is difficult to guarantee that Gates, who seems to be submissive to the richest man, will not rebel.

In this way, Tang Huan suspected that the position of the second child might not satisfy Microsoft's appetite, while listening to Gates announcing his marriage to him with a smile on his face.

"I will definitely be there to congratulate you." Mr. Richest Man joked with a smile, "Do you want me to hold a bachelor party for you in San Francisco?"

"Forget it. Now my interest in playing is getting weaker and weaker." Gates shook his head - as he became more and more scheming, it seemed that, like Jobs, it was difficult to find a close friend.

……

Compared with Microsoft's current stage in the software market, which is busy grabbing operating systems, office software, and programming development tools, Tang Huan continued to warmly recommend Zheru's World Wide Web browser Polestar and website server ZIS.

In terms of marketing, the ZIS in the background follows the rules. According to different versions, the price ranges from US$6000 to US$25000, but Polestar in the front is playing a gimmick, that is, while boasting that the official version is priced at US$999, it always sells it as a beta version. The name is for users to use for free, but the version number is more than 1, but the beta version has not been upgraded to the official version for a long time, which makes those commercial companies that intend to enter the browser field have doubts and hesitate to act.

However, those research institutions with federal grants are another matter, especially after the passage of the 1991 Gore Act, they are even more well-funded, and they are not afraid of wasting resources to support research.

This is the case at the National Supercomputer Application Center of the University of Illinois. A technical team under it completed a web browser—Mosaic—that supports four platforms: Fangyuan Computer, Unix, IBM-PC, and Apple Computer.

For this reason, the University of Illinois has boasted a lot, and has even been sought after by the mainstream media.

At this COMDEX, Mosaic was brought to show off—more precisely, it was brought to the exhibition by Spyglass, which has obtained technology and trademark authorization.

The company, founded in 1990, is a branch of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to establish commercialization and technical support for the National Center for Supercomputer Applications there.

Therefore, Spyglass is authorized by Mosaic, and the meat is rotten in one pot.

The current World Wide Web browser is Zheru's Polestar. It stands out due to its mature technology and free gimmick, which scares other commercial companies from investing resources and competing in this very unfamiliar and uncertain field.

In this case, Mosaic, which can run on four hardware platforms at the same time, is quite eye-catching.

Among the visitors who shuttled back and forth, there was a young man in his early twenties, staring at the Mosaic logo from a distance, with resentment on his face from time to time.

He was the former organizer of the Mosaic development team—Mark Anderson, who had just graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and accepted an offer from a small company in California with an annual salary of $8. Get a high salary.

In fact, Mark Anderson's technology is far from the standards of outstanding programmers. His brilliance lies in his ability to speak well at a young age, and he can persuade another true technical master, who is seven years older than him. Master's graduate - Eric Biener, works for the Mosaic project.

This combination is very similar to the relationship between Steve Jobs and Wozniak when Apple was founded.

Mark Anderson's programs are always buggy, coupled with restlessness, so in the National Supercomputer Application Center of the University of Illinois, the relationship with his boss is not very harmonious.

No matter where, there are rivers and lakes-after the cross-platform Mosaic was officially released, the leaders wanted to take the credit for themselves and downplay the presence of the R&D team. The basis is naturally that all R&D resources are provided by us.

It is conceivable that Mark Anderson was marginalized, which formed a sharp contrast with the praise he won on the Internet. Coupled with the enthusiasm that was unique to Erlang at his age, he left as soon as he graduated— —I won’t serve you anymore.

Now seeing Mosaic in other people's hands, Mark Anderson, who has devoted a lot of effort to it, is not an exaggeration to say that he has mixed feelings.

At this time, an uncertain voice came from the side: "Are you Mark Anderson?"

"I'm Anderson, you are..." Mark Anderson looked for his reputation, and saw a well-dressed middle-aged man, who looked like a successful person.

"I founded Jim Clark, the Silicon Valley graphics company that makes professional graphics workstations," replied Jim Clark, personable.

In fact, this dude has already been kicked out of the company he founded because of a huge disagreement in product-market positioning.

But he didn't mention this trouble at all, but said in surprise: "So it's really you, I just sent you an email two days ago, did you receive it?"

Feeling the overwhelming hospitality, Mark Anderson scratched his head uncomfortably, "I'm too busy to visit COMDEX in Las Vegas, so I don't have time to check emails."

"It doesn't matter. Since we met, it's better to meet in person." Jim Clark invited enthusiastically: "The industry forum of COMDEX will start soon. There will provide a lot of latest industry trends, which are worthy of careful reference. How about, We walked and talked."

(End of this chapter)