Rebirth of the Tech Madman

U.S., Yvale, Silicon Valley——Dyk, the president of Sunnyvale RP Company—Terry Opdendic, annoyed, dropped the newspaper in his hand, and cursed in despair, These shameless bastards suppress us Forget it, they even joined hands.

The personal computer industry's triumphant growth in 1982 was evidenced by two iconic events—on the public side, Time magazine's selection of the personal computer as Person of the Year, and on the business side, the success of Fangyuan Computer Corporation on the New York Stock Exchange. listed.

With the increase in the number of personal computers on the market, compared with the one-off sale of hardware, the ability of the software industry to attract money has become more and more apparent.

For example, the spreadsheet software war has risen from the simple market competition of various software companies to the confrontation between Fangyuan PC and IBM-the two platforms whose products are the most powerful, which illustrates the important value of software.

It can easily reach a huge profit of 60% or 70%. One of them is rp, which helps some software companies that seize the opportunity to grow rapidly into the darling of the personal computer era with sales of more than tens of millions of dollars.

It was originally called RP, a personal software company. When it was established in 1976, its main business was to sell a board game on the personal computer platform. The business model was similar to that of a book publisher.

After marrying with the spreadsheet software, rp's operating conditions have undergone earth-shaking changes, and it has even been favored by venture capital.

For the exclusive distribution rights from Dan Bricklin's - Software Art Company, personal software companies give 36% to 50% commission terms, which is much higher than the industry's percentage A common rate of eight to twelve percent.

With Don? Estridge selected as one of the troika of ibm-platform business software and pre-installed it on ibm-. It began to bring considerable profits to personal software companies and became the mainstay of economic resources.

Therefore, the personal software company finally simply changed the company name to rp. Even the names of other products are prefixed with .

From a marketing point of view, this approach has indeed produced good results.

But don't forget. The real owner of the spreadsheet software is Dan Bricklin's Software Art Company. A large part of rp's profits go to Software Art Company.

For the sake of the glittering dollars, the two companies that were originally cooperating closely began to have troubles, but the agreement is there. RP can't see a turning point to solve the problem for the time being, so it uses the financial resources it brings to actively develop other software.

at the same time.

RP, which has been completely controlled by venture capital, has become more and more sophisticated in its management style. As a result, just like Atari back then, people were distracted and fell apart, and some important figures including Mitchell Kapoor left one after another.

When Mitchell Kapoor left rp, someone reminded Terry Opdenik that Mitchell Kapoor should sign a non-compete agreement, but Terry Opdenik wanted to save money , or simply out of disdain. I didn't take care of this stubble.

As a result, after Mitchell Kapoor officially released the spreadsheet software-2-3 with a new structure last year, he swept away other opponents on the ibm-platform and achieved dominance. He even has the qualifications to challenge Confucianism.

Terry Opdendick, who was slapped twice by the cruel reality, was ashamed as he could imagine.

Seeing the rapid decline in RP's business performance, Terry Opdendike was so anxious that he burned to death.

Just at this time, rp's investment in the field of graphical user interface has achieved obvious results.

So Terry Opdendic, like a drowning man hugging a floating log, bet all his wealth on this new product that has not yet been fully developed.

Not to mention, when a gambler named Terry Opdendike disregarded the risks and publicized his half-finished product, it really caused a huge sensation. Even the limelight overshadowed the raging spreadsheet software wars.

Many IT professional media, including Byte, praised it enthusiastically. Thinking that it is an operating system that is really suitable for ordinary users, it was instantly promoted to the number one altar in the field of graphical user interface.

Dog bites are not news. It's news when a man bites a dog.

Although these IT media strive for the rigor of professional knowledge, they do their best to attract readers when reporting on industry trends.

Nowadays, microcomputer technology is advancing with each passing day, and the personal computer industry is booming. People who are interested in this field are also willing to see such lively and extraordinary content.

Just in time to meet this need, RP was able to gain a firm foothold again. Overjoyed, Terry Opdendike immediately took advantage of the situation and launched a whole new set of product sales strategies.

However, this market-building move inevitably attracted the vigilance and rebound of Microsoft, Zheru, and Apple, which have their own plans for GUI applications.

In fact, it is not a completely independent operating system from bottom to top, it is an environment running on ms-, which provides a graphical user interface for applications, similar to the graphics on the Fangyuan personal computer operating system shell, which is the command line shell.

Or to describe it more accurately, it is very close to the 16-bit operating system running on ms- in the early 1990s in the original time and space-users need to manually start this graphical user interface by typing commands in the ms-environment.

This mode is not unique, and the operation mechanism of the graphical user interface system of another type of operating system is similar.

Of course, it is definitely not as powerful as the function.

But let alone Microsoft at this stage, there is no shadow of it yet. Seeing that it is one step ahead on the ibm-platform, my eyes were red with anxiety. (to be continued)