Rebirth of the Tech Madman

The reason why Akio Morita became the soul of Sony is that he contributed unparalleled contributions to Sony's entry into the US market and the internationalization of the Sony brand.

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'm sending another old man off the stage of history. Tang Huan held back his proud of his age advantage, and told Masako Wada in a very sincere tone, I'm so busy here in the United States that I can't get away from it. , you represent me to visit Morita, wish him a speedy recovery, and continue to lead Sony forward.

Wada Masako obediently promised: I will definitely send your sincere greetings 100%.

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 is the abbreviation of asia-pacific_ in English for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference. It has been in 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 the liberalization of APEC trade and investment, economic and technological cooperation, and the creation of a favorable business environment, and 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.

The comdex Las Vegas Autumn Fair and the APEC Summit are not usually held in a tight schedule, they are directly next to each other—comdex from November 15th to November 19th; APEC from November 19th to November 20th.

According to the schedule, the richest man will only give comdex the day of November 15th, and then fly directly to Seattle.

Gein, although the APEC summit will not be held until November 19th, it is a leadership level that only cares about major events, and the specific preparations will fall on the ministerial 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, apart from the spring exhibition held in Atlanta, it also went to Toronto, Canada, and Brazil in the southern hemisphere. St. Paul.

However, under the bustling surface, there are also endless grievances and grievances between businessmen and seas. For example, under the eyes of Mr. 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 increasingly fierce competition in the software industry, and suggested that the two companies simply merge, so as to avoid mutual attacks and complement each other's advantages.

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 is interested in concubines, 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 factors such as price, power distribution, and board of directors opinions.

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 stepping up its efforts in capital operations. After acquiring a digital research company and filling in the blanks in the general operating system, Novell has targeted the acquisition target at software such as word processing, spreadsheets, etc., trying to build an all-round software kingdom. .

Due to the great changes in the industry ecology, it is becoming more and more difficult for a company to make a living solely on a software product. The word processing software WordPerfect, which was once very popular, was sold to Novell.

These industry secrets naturally cannot escape the eyes and ears of Mr. Richest Man, and he scoffs at it——Raymond Norda frequently makes acquisitions, but have you ever thought about Novell's digestion ability?

In addition, Gates' methods are too dark, and no one can stand it.

In fact, only relying on technological 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 of the Internet, tcp/ip, but the proprietary ipx/spx.

If the product application scenario is only for the local area network, 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 like not speaking English in the United States in reality .

However, if you want to change tcp/ip from a paper specification to an actual code, the process is not that simple - first, tcp/ip itself is a complex and constantly improving protocol system; second, in the process of coding, 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, it is recognized that the best tcp/ip code implementation is Zheru's tcp/ip development toolkit. 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, it is very difficult to switch to tcp/ip after using ipx/spx netware for so many years.

On the other hand, Microsoft directly built a free network suite with functions similar to netware in windows_nt, and did not give Novell transition time at all.

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

The Internet, which has entered the fast lane of development, involves even greater interests, and it is hard to guarantee that Gates, who is obedient to the richest man on the surface, 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.

At that time, I will definitely be there to congratulate. The richest man laughed and joked: Do you want me to help you hold a bachelor party here 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 follow the rules. According to different versions, the price ranges from US$6,000 to US$25,000, but the polestar in the front end plays 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 world wide 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.

In this year's comdex, mosaic was brought to show off—more precisely, it was brought to the exhibition by those who have 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, with the authorization of mosaic, it can be considered that the meat is rotten in one pot.

The current World Wide Web browser is Zheru's polestar, which stands out with its mature technology and free gimmicks, scaring 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 $80,000—this is considered a good deal for a freshly graduated undergraduate student. 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 that of Jobs and Woz at the beginning of Apple's entrepreneurship.

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\u0026D team. The basis is naturally that all R\u0026D 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— —The Lord will not serve you anymore.

Now seeing the 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. Now that we have met, it's better to meet in person. Jim Clark graciously invited: The comdex industry forum is about to start. There will be a lot of latest industry news, which is worth careful reference. How about, We walked and talked.