The progress of negotiations between Egrett and The New York Times Group, the company's response to a series of recent lawsuits, the free Internet Explorer program, the buyout-to-subscribe program of the World Wide Web's basic tool software, the profile of key startups supported by the venture capital department, and much more.

Although he didn't go to San Francisco, Simon spent most of the day Saturday in his villa study.

Simon has avoided becoming a micromanager himself, but as the company has grown larger, so has the number of things that require his own involvement. As an absolutely emerging industry, the Internet has no precedent to compare, and once it goes in the wrong direction, it will be even more difficult to reverse it.

For example, the partnership with the New York Times Group.

Both Jeff Bezos and Carol Butz, who is not in charge of the web portal, said that they should firmly refuse to include the New York Times Group's content resources in the news and information field where the company can already provide content to users on its own, and the two believe that doing so could lead to the diversion of Igret's media discourse in the Internet field by the New York Times Group.

To a large extent, the two of them were right to think so.

Introducing the news content of the New York Times Group, and even directing traffic to the other party's professional news website, will inevitably lead many users to leave the Igrete portal in search of more professional news information. On the surface, this is very detrimental to the direction of the Igrete portal to control the Internet media.

It's just that if he refuses to cooperate, will Igrete really be able to hold this position for a long time?

Not to mention anything else, but compared to the size of the news and information team, the number of employees in the news and information department of the Eagle portal is about 500, which is not even a third of the 1,600 employees of the New York Times.

The key to the backwardness of traditional print media in the Internet field lies in their own vested interests.

Once the power of print media is completely liberalized and the march towards digitalization, the Igrett portal will not be able to compete with the traditional paper media in terms of news and information. Traditional print media is unlikely to fully switch to digital for a long time in the future, but even if it is only a part of the force, if the Igrete portal refuses to cooperate with content, it will inevitably push a large amount of content resources from traditional print media to competitors, and eventually even lead to competitors becoming bigger.

Most importantly, Simon has repeatedly emphasized from the very beginning of Igret's development that the portal is not the core of Igret.

In terms of network business, Igrete needs to protect at all costs, one is the search engine, the second is the social network, the third is the e-commerce, the portal is destined to be just a kind of excess. Previous executives may not have understood that with the continuous expansion of Internet users and the more proficient use of the Internet, the quiet and rapid growth of the search engine business is visible to the naked eye.

Mastering search engines and social networks is the only way to truly master the content interface of the Internet in the future.

When the time comes, through these two invisible nets, Igrat will only see what users want to see. No matter how professional and rich the news content is, if it cannot appear in search engines and social networks, or if it is deliberately hidden in the most inconspicuous corners, then everything is in vain.

This is the truly indestructible right to speak!

Portals are much easier to replicate.

If Igrete pushes a large amount of content resources into the arms of competitors, it is likely to bring the other party a transformation opportunity.

On the contrary, the liberalization and acceptance of content resources will also form a Matthew effect to a large extent.

Not only that, the digital content of traditional media seems to have gained more influence in the process, but many print media want to get more traffic from the Igrete portal, whether active or passive, and must act according to the rules of the Igrete portal.

It is very simple to understand that content that tends to the Westeros system is bound to be more likely to be recommended, and articles that attack the Westeros system must be suppressed, and this potential impact will be further transmitted to traditional print media platforms, as long as a newspaper cooperates with the Eaglet portal, even if it only wants to publish an article about the Westeros system on the print media platform, it is necessary to consider whether this will affect the relationship between the two parties.

Therefore, the introduction of the content of the New York Times Group, and even the cooperation with more print media companies, will not affect the influence of Eaglet's Internet media, but will increase this discourse.

In addition to the content partnership, The New York Times Group also offered to take a stake in Broadcast, an online radio site invested by Igret, and at the same time obtain a license for online live video technology, all of which Simon agreed.

Broadcast, the most memorable online radio site in memory of the Internet 1.0 era, was the worst example of a company that Yahoo spent billions of dollars to buy in a share swap and ended up with a mess.

Now that the project was also launched, Simon didn't want to repeat the same mistakes.

In addition to the introduction of traditional radio resources, the new Broadcast focuses more on the development of personal radio stations, audio books, online music, educational courses and other content.

Simon even considered that when iPlayer launches next year, Broadcast can be used as a content partner platform for this hardware player.

In the short term, it is not realistic to persuade major record companies to provide music resources to the Internet. However, in addition to music, Broadcast provides a wealth of audio books, educational courses and other types of film review resources, which can also play a great role in promoting the promotion of iPlayer digital music players.

Since this Broadcast is no longer another Broadcast, Simon is actually a little reluctant to share this website with the New York Times Group. Considering that the New York Times Group has a large number of print content resources that can be converted into audio resources, Simon agreed, but only gave the other party a 15% stake at most, and directly offered $30 million, and the website was valued at $200 million.

By comparison, when the project was launched last year, Igrete invested only $10 million to acquire an 80 percent stake in the broadcast site.

The other online video streaming technology is mainly due to the recent live broadcast of London girls that has made the public aware of the possibility of the Internet replacing the television industry.

Traditional print media have been looking forward to entering the TV industry, but they have been unable to do so due to the long-term restrictions of the 'ban on cross-media ownership', and the New York Times Group sees the possibility of directly crossing the TV platform to the Internet video media, so it wants to take advantage of the pit in advance.

In addition to this demonstration live broadcast, Igrete has no plans to create a special video website or live broadcast website in the short term, and at this stage, the network bandwidth and hardware equipment of most users cannot meet the process of watching online videos, and the storage and bandwidth consumption of video websites are too large, since the New York Times Group wants it, take it.

I personally decided on the cooperation with the New York Times Group, and the other Internet Explorer free plan and the World Wide Web basic tool software buyout to subscribe plan were also completely decided in today's discussion.

After completing the communication with the pre-installed hardware vendors and telecom operators, IE will officially announce the free of charge by May.

Another World Wide Web basic tools software sales model from buyout to subscription plan proposed by Carol Butz, in fact, this matter was discussed after the birth of several basic software, when Simon preferred a one-time buyout, mainly due to the software sales environment at the time, after all, Microsoft's Windows and Oracle's database software, are a one-time buyout.

A few years later, Carol Butz brought up the matter again, saying that he wanted to switch the buyout to subscriptions, so that he could get a more sustainable and stable income, and on the other hand, he was also considering the promotion of World Wide Web technology as soon as possible.

The Internet has entered an explosive period, and the speed of updating World Wide Web technology is also rapid.

Many users buy software versions that may be outdated in just one year, and there is no doubt that timely updates will require an additional expensive expense, and many new World Wide Web technologies will not be available without updating. From the perspective of Egrett as a software developer, constantly encouraging users to buy new versions is undoubtedly the best choice to maximize profits, but everyone is not stupid, and it is too easy to attract hatred.

As a result, piracy of the Ygritte series of basic tools and software has been rampant in the past two years.

After buying a set of genuine software, many start-up companies quietly turn to piracy because they don't want to pay for subsequent updates. Even if the official Igrete pursues it, it can also make up the old genuine software, which unknowingly brings a lot of losses to the Igrete company.

As a result, switching from buyouts to subscriptions ensures that users always have access to the latest software and avoids one-time costly expenses. At this stage, the Internet speed is basically enough to support the real-time update of software online. For Igret, this may lead to a short-term decline in sales in the software division, but it will lead to more sustainable long-term revenues and minimize the problem of piracy.

Until five o'clock in the afternoon, Janet came to the study, and Simon was still discussing the upcoming launch of Happy Farm with the head of the online game department of San Francisco Eaglet.

Nodding to Simon in front of the call screen, Janet sent Girl A, who was walking next to her to sort out a thick stack of materials, and picked up a copy of it herself, which was a lawsuit filed by a website called 33list against Egrett for its alleged monopoly.

Just looking at the name 33list, Janet couldn't help but pout.

It's obviously following the trend of 58list.

I casually threw it away and picked up another copy, which is an IE browser plug-in development studio that sued Igrete for blocking its development of a change homepage plug-in.

Tut.

Such an anti-human plugin, I want to go to heaven!

I threw it away again, rummaged through it a few times, and finally saw a relatively 'reliable' lawsuit, and looked at it crookedly on the sofa in the reception area with relish.

Simon continued to discuss with San Francisco for more than ten minutes, and finally turned off the call screen on his desk, and turned to the computer screen next to him to re-browse the general information of "Happy Farm", which will be officially launched next Friday.

The "Happy Farm" social game project was launched in mid-January, and the development cycle of this simple little game in memory was only two weeks, and Simon generously gave the team a month this time.

It's just that after Simon gave a rough plan, the game development team that deliberately moved to the Alabama farm was obviously a little self-indulgent.

The development team needed to be encouraged to take a strong interest in their projects and generate a lot of ideas, and Simon was so pleased with the new ideas that the team came up with that he simply gave them free rein to do so. To support the game, the game development team at a farm in Alabama was more than doubled during development.

Of course, Simon also gave a deadline to launch the game before Easter.

Two months later, the new "Happy Farm" was finally completed.

Compared with the simple web flash game that only has a planting and stealing system in memory, probably because of the relatively complex stand-alone game, the team has added a home upgrade system, a beast attack setting and a pet raising system to this mini-game in the past two months, and the interaction between different players has also increased significantly, not only can you steal vegetables and take care of each other's fields, but also can help friends drive away beasts that attack the farm, help upgrade the house and even go to a stranger's farm to explore and hunt.

Simon also deliberately provided some suggestions for the home upgrade system based on the "Journey 2" game he remembered playing, the most important point is that the higher the level of the house, the more beautiful it must be, and the development team asked him for the image authorization of the shell villa of Dumei Point Manor, which was intended to be one of the templates for the highest level 12 house.

Simon didn't agree to this request, but the team also collected a lot of beautiful patterns.

All these settings, at the same time, form a complete fan ecosystem.

When the farmland is sold, you can not only buy seeds, but also exchange it for building materials for your home, and you can upgrade your home to make it more beautiful, and you can also upgrade your home and other facilities.

Driving away beasts can be used to obtain rations for various types of pets.

Pets also add a simple attribute system, the better the pet is to protect the farm, the stronger the ability to breed and trade pets between friends.

In addition, a trap system has been added for stealing vegetables, and once the stealer is caught, he needs to pay a ransom.

The house upgrade system, if the player does not spend a penny and works hard every day without stopping, it will take 1 year to reach level 12.

On the other hand, if you use fertilizer props completely regardless of the cost, because there is a time limit for upgrading parts such as houses, kennels, fences, etc., and it is impossible to use props to shorten, it will also take at least 1 week, but if you really do this, the money you need to consume in order to buy fertilizer props will reach 2 million US dollars, which is completely the cost of a real villa in reality.

And so on.

The playability is more than ten times greater than the simple mini-game Simon remembers.

In addition, the 'Fertilizer Item' is still set as the ultimate source of income for this mini-game.

According to the theory that what you want to take must be given first, the game sets up a check-in system, and you can get a bag of fertilizer props that you can buy with money when you sign in every day, and there will be additional rewards for continuing to sign in.

Of course, the increase in replayability inevitably leads to the fact that this little game becomes more complex.

Players who want to try this game need to download an installation package of about 15M, which is already the same size as the IE software itself at this stage.

Fortunately, this process does not need to be completed overnight, the user enters the game interface, clicks on the download license, and according to the basic network speed of the AOL ADSL network 256K, it can be quietly downloaded within 10 minutes, and no special installation is required.

The user ends the simple newbie bootstrapping process in the early stage, and with a few crops, the game has been installed unconsciously.

In order to support the new Flas*** technology, the IE software team of Egrete has specially optimized the Ygritte Flash Player software for this small game, and plans to develop a more independent Flas*** support kernel once the game is accepted by users, even if it is not too successful.

The plan was sent to Simon from the head of the IE department to Simon, and everyone agreed.

Just like the Flash Player software, which focuses on video support, adding a game kernel that is more suitable for web game operation can further strengthen the technical barriers of Igrete Internet Explorer software.

Even if the browser technology has to be licensed in the future due to federal antitrust restrictions, other software vendors will not be able to achieve the same powerful functions as IE in the short term.

Simon's personal opinion on this matter is that the game kernel must not slow down the overall running speed of IE software, and the user's software experience must always be put first, otherwise he would rather veto this project, IE browser software as the core of the core of the company at this stage, this proposal has also been unanimously approved by Bezos and other core management.

After reading the Happy Farm materials, Simon emailed some of the ideas he had just generated to San Francisco, and finally turned off his computer.

Got up and stretched his body, and saw Janet leaning on the sofa not far away, turned out from behind the desk and walked over, hugged the woman's face behind the sofa and kissed it, and asked, "What are you looking at?"

Janet shook a copy of the lawsuit in her hand, but didn't say much, threw it away, and gently rubbed her head sideways on Simon's big hand holding her face.

Simon felt this intimacy, and said after a while, "Why don't you go to Australia with Jenny for a while?"

"If you don't go, you're going to stay with you here," Janet immediately refused, and added, "Or let's go together?"

Simon could only refuse: "I know, I've been a little busy lately." ”

"Well," Janet said, grabbing Simon's big hand and pulling it towards her, trying to tilt her head back to meet the man's eyes, "Little boy, are you afraid?"

Simon couldn't help but bow his head and peck on the woman's lips, and said, "Don't be afraid, I will protect you." ”

In fact, Janet has been dealing with the recent turmoil recently, and she has not been idle, and said, "I will also help." ”