Rebirth of the Tech Madman

To put it simply, the alternative minimum tax introduced in the United States in 1969 is commonly known as the rich man's tax, which is specifically aimed at those wealthy people who have many tax avoidance channels; Whether it is high or low, taxes should be collected more or less.

The doorway in tax can be described as broad and profound.

Take Oil King Mark Rich as an example. After the United States sanctioned Iran in 1979, this man still secretly did oil business with Iran, and even challenged the old order of international oil transactions.

In order to get rid of Mark Rich in one step, the United States charged him with tax evasion.

Mark Rich saw that the situation was not good, so he ran to Switzerland for refuge; at the same time, he remotely controlled his disciples and continued to do oil business with Iran; as for a large number of American assets including 20th Century Fox, they all sold off.

The reason why Mr. Richest Man's tax return five years ago was so hyped up is because the director behind the scenes judged others by himself and was convinced that Tang Huan was also unclear in terms of tax payment.

So, after the New York Post attracted people who were admiring, an analysis of tax evasion trying to destroy the public idol of the richest man appeared insidiously.

But to their surprise, Tang Huan actually dared to fight head-on.

While the New York Post clearly and clearly published the report of the richest man's tax evasion on the front page, its rival in the same city, the New York Daily News, took Tang Huan's real tax returns as evidence, gloating He launched the most ruthless ridicule and attack.

The two newspapers unanimously regarded this opportunity as the key to affecting market share, so there is no need to mention the momentum of mutual tearing. And the New York Daily News simply stood in the position of the richest man, and said all the most comforting words, regardless of image and identity.

The most embarrassing thing about the New York Post is that it has just concocted under oath that the richest man's personal income in 1993 exceeded 200 million US dollars, but he only paid 160 million US dollars in income tax. Opposite The New York Daily News used the most authoritative source to sneer: Don't be ridiculous, Tang just paid more than 200 million dollars in taxes! Do you dare to be professional?

On the other hand, Tang Huan has not been silent all the time. He wrote on his blog: My tax returns are here, what about yours?

As a result, no one dared to pick up the stubble!

It is no exaggeration to say that this turmoil has made the richest man undefeated financially.

The most ridiculous thing is that the New York Post, which has always claimed that the newspaper sales are very satisfactory, was exposed by a traffic accident.

On a New York highway, a truck flipped over, spilling copies of the New York Post.

After hearing the news, the TV reporter rushed to the scene to report and interviewed the driver who was lucky to have nothing happened but had a bad face: Why are there so many expired New York Posts in your car?

The other party replied angrily: What's so strange, it can't be sold, of course it has to be disposed of...

The New York Daily News, which has regained its position, continued to relentlessly and publicly satirize it: The New York Post is a complete liar, and it will be cheap if the newspaper cannot be sold; Consumers who trust and waste their time should sue.

See Mr. Richest Man's blog, but no one has responded. The New York Daily News sarcasm Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the New York Post, Don's tax returns are all out. Shouldn't you also be courteous?

...

Seeing that those guys who made their own tax declarations turmoil became shrinking turtles for a while, the richest man who had no time to spend on it quickly picked up the next agenda, that is, how to maximize the use and fall into serious losses. The famous database manufacturer Sybase.

In the current tide of the Internet,

The most profitable place to be down-to-earth is the product solution on the server side. These include server computer hardware, network operating systems, web server software, databases, middleware, and more.

Obviously, it is impossible for Zheru Software to make all the money. IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems also make a lot of money.

But there are exceptions. For example, Sebeth, who once challenged Oracle to the point of swearing, fell into a serious loss due to the good situation in front of him.

There is even more terrible doom. Just at the beginning of this year, Sybase was found out that there was a financial report fraud scandal of falsely reporting profits.

Listed public companies are afraid of this situation. Even though Sebeth fired the five executives involved, the big mistake has been made, and the hearts of the people are lost. The stock price has gone from the peak of 96 US dollars, like a roller coaster. slides down just as quickly.

In fact, Sybase's own products and technical solutions are still remarkable. Especially in 1994, after buying the programming development tool manufacturer Powersoft for US$904 million, the product line of PowerBuilder was added and greatly improved.

The main mistake Sybase made was that it was a bit slow to move to the Internet.

The powersc day pt programming language used by powerbuilder itself belongs to the niche, lacks scalability, and is slow to respond under the general trend of browser + middle layer + server replacing client + server, so it and competitors This narrowed the gap little by little.

Sybase's situation is in stark contrast to the incompatible Oracle. Don't look at Larry Ellison's joining the noi color alliance, and Zheru Software's fierce confrontation, but in terms of product and technology direction, No such serious strategic error was made.

A good boy who knows his mistakes and can correct them.

Sybeth has indeed repented now, and has realized his problem. Whether he can recover from it depends on the brutal external environment of competition, and whether he is willing to generously give him a breathing space.

Take PeopleSoft, a leader in the ERP field, for example, took advantage of the fire and took a fancy to Sybase, which was in a difficult time.

In the process of reporting to the richest man, Cheng Shouzong, CEO of PeopleSoft, emphasized: At this stage, database manufacturers basically complete the front-end database including program development and modeling on the basis of the original back-end database. The territory of the company, the next target of annexation is a company like PeopleSoft that provides specific application solutions such as ERP for end users.

Under this general trend, the relationship between database vendors and application software companies has changed from complementarity to competition. The most obvious example is the greedy Oracle Corporation.

PeopleSoft and Zheru Software's eba have developed in perfect harmony for so many years, and it can be said to be smooth sailing on the Fangyuan computer platform. However, we must also see that there is still a large market for Unix series platforms, and Sybase can just make up for this. short board.

The richest man listened patiently and nodded from time to time.

Over the past ten years, Tang Huan has trained many Chinese executives in Silicon Valley. At this stage, the basic and fast-rising Ah San Group is evenly matched. Cheng Shouzong from Xiangjiang is a typical representative of them.

Therefore, the richest man still values ​​each other quite a lot.

After listening to Cheng Shouzong's statement, Tang Huan objected kindly: Your thinking can't be wrong, but you didn't take into account that PeopleSoft, a company that develops products mainly around business rules, digests Cyberware that provides technical tools. Si, it’s not that easy, it’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s a burden.”

By the time PeopleSoft really integrates Sybase, the external environment may have undergone earth-shaking changes.

For example, the open source community has entered a substantive stage in commercial applications; another example is that the Internet tide that has brought all kinds of good market prices has begun to subside, and the industry has entered another cycle of depression and prosperity.

Cheng Shouzong humbly nodded repeatedly, but the disappointment was still hard to hide on his face. After all, my own creativity was shot down by the big boss in a gentle manner.

Mr. Richest, who keenly noticed the change in the expression of the other party, laughed, and said earnestly: Of course, your vision is very accurate. You have seen the value of Sebeth through the superficial crisis.

I have an idea on my side that can better utilize the value of Sebeth, and I need your great help.

Cheng Shouzong was refreshed when he heard it, and quickly said, I would like to hear the details.

...

Due to Tang Huan's sudden birth, many people had to change the rules of survival compared to the original historical trajectory.

For example, this is the case with Microsoft Corporation. Its product line supports many platforms including Fangyuan, Apple, and Unix, which is more flowery than the single-minded original time and space.

This is also normal. Humans are advanced creatures that can best adapt to the environment. Although Gates is not as wise and powerful as the richest man, he is also a man of great talent and boldness. Of course, it has its own survival wisdom.

I don't know how many Gates who belonged to him have been robbed by Tang Huan. The mood this year can only be described as ups and downs.

Microsoft's consumer-grade operating system, windows_98, can be described as a combination of great achievements, and it can be regarded as a rare perfect product of Microsoft. Once it was launched, the market responded positively, and Gates saw a promising opportunity.

Unexpectedly, a Chernobyl virus suddenly jumped out and raged everywhere, smashing windows_98, which has serious flaws in the underlying interrupt management mechanism, into a sieve.

Gates, who wanted to cry without tears, was a man. He immediately cut off the successor of windows_98, the development plan of the Windows Millennium Edition, and further cut his wrists. He gave up the windows_9x product line and turned his treasure to the windows_nt product line. Above, windows_nt5 will be the successor of windows_nt4. It is packaged as windows_2000. Fortunately, while entering the high-end market of servers/workstations, it also takes into account the home consumer market that the windows_9x product line was originally responsible for.

Fortunately for Gates, it has just been confirmed that windows_2000 has been developed smoothly and should be launched as scheduled next year.

For this reason, Gates also comforted himself in his heart: it might be a good thing to take this opportunity to integrate the scattered operating system product lines.

But just as he breathed a sigh of relief on the operating system, a crisis began to appear in the database again.

Steve Ballmer reported a heart-wrenching news: PeopleSoft, one of the world's leading enterprise management software vendors, seems to want to put Microsoft's relational database sql_color rver in the cold palace.

In the field of database, Microsoft has also divided into two product lines, one is desktop level and the other is enterprise level.

The former includes the dba-like fake foxba color of the microcomputer database that once had a great reputation on the ibm_pc compatible machine platform, but it does not natively support the relational database model that has become the mainstream, so Microsoft has created a desktop-level relational database management system and integrated Go to your own office software suite office.

However, the database products that can really bring in a lot of money are all facing the enterprise market.

Microsoft has long been envious of Zheru software, ibm, and Oracle making a fortune, so it has no background in this area, and it took a detour, that is, to jointly develop a relational enterprise-level database sql_色rver .

It's a pity that neither of the proud and arrogant parties is a good one. In the end, they parted ways due to profit distribution and other reasons. Since then, Microsoft has developed its own version of sql_rver, which is ms_sql_rver.

However, precisely because of this origin, ms_sql_rver and Sybase's sql_rver cannot be completely separated, and there are still many things in common. For example, the relational database structured query language used by both parties is t-sql.

The ms_sql_color rver, which has been diligently developed by Microsoft to the sixth edition, cannot be put on the table at all in the face of Zheru software's eba color, IBM's db2, and Oracle's oracle.

In this regard, Gates, who is experienced in catching up with his peers, formulated a business strategy for ms_sql_rver: make friends with independent software vendors of enterprise application solutions like PeopleSoft, and lobby them to adopt their own ms_sql at a price that is almost free. _color rver.

PeopleSoft also readily accepted it, because there are quite a few small, medium and micro enterprises that are sensitive to prices and their requirements are not so high, ms_sql_color rver is really enough.

Ever since, ms_sql_color rver has grown step by step under this compromise strategy formulated by Gates.

But it never occurred to me that PeopleSoft suddenly wants to abandon ms_sql_rver.

Gates collected himself, and asked in a deep voice, Do you know why?

Steve Ballmer replied helplessly: PeopleSoft is going to acquire Sybase, so they want to gain the other party's trust by taking down ms_sql_color rver.

Gates slapped the table angrily and opened his mouth, but he didn't know what to complain about.

When these two people were staring at each other, the subordinates came to report: Tang is here to visit!

The relationship between Gates and the richest man is very delicate. It is said that they have broken up, and they walk around from time to time.

In any case, Gates still got up to greet him.

Tang Huan seemed to be grinning, and said, I came to Seattle this time to visit Amazon, but I suddenly remembered that I haven't visited Microsoft for a while, so I didn't invite myself.

Gates laughed and said, Welcome Don.

After the richest man sat down, he asked earnestly, How did I hear that after the troubles of windows_98, Microsoft's relational database ms_sql_color rver was also neglected by PeopleSoft?

Don's news is really well-informed. Gates said awkwardly: I don't know, can you help and exert influence on PeopleSoft?

I still have a little understanding of PeopleSoft's thinking. Tang Huan suggested leisurely: According to me, Microsoft might as well acquire Sybes, and that's the end of it all.

After Gates and Steve Ballmer looked at each other, they fell silent.