United States, Office of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Too & Co.

"Curran, what's going on in the Chinese market, what kind of fame is that Huaxia CAD doing!"

President Kvic threw a material in his hand on the table, glared at the marketing director Curran and asked.

The matter of Huaxia CAD open source, Tuo did not pay too much attention to it at first. Compared with Tuo, the strength of the new Jingwei company is not worth mentioning at all. Huaxia CAD has a place in the Chinese market, but it has little presence in the international market, and Tuo does not see it as a competitor in the slightest.

Nowadays, there are several open source CAD software in the Western market, but none of them are successful, and only a very small number of developers will use these open source CAD for design, and the motivation is mainly for curiosity. The features of this type of open source CAD are so thin that they are completely incomparable to commercial versions of CAD.

When Huaxia CAD announced the open source, the marketing department of Tuo Company conducted an evaluation and came to the conclusion that the new Jingwei Company may not have felt that it could compete with Tuao Company, so it chose such a method of exiting the market. The marketing department also believes that the new Jingwei company has a certain motive to vent its anger, and wants to use this method to hit Tuo's sales. Well, in fact, it won't hit much, at best it's just disgusting to Tuo.

But what happened next made the company have to be vigilant. According to the report of Tuo China, after Huaxia CAD was turned into open source, China's Ministry of Education, Ministry of Technology and other major ministries and commissions jointly issued a notice requiring developers from universities, research institutes and industrial enterprises to write applications for Huaxia CAD, and promised various preferential conditions to participants.

Driven by the policy, China's universities and research institutes have set off a boom in writing applications for Huaxia CAD, and in just over a month, tens of thousands of open source application modules have been uploaded to the official website of Huaxia CAD. The staff of New Jingwei Company tested these modules day and night, and the garbage modules picked out accounted for more than eighty percent of the total. But even so, there are thousands of useful modules left, which is dizzying to look at.

A few days ago, one of Toau's long-time customers approached them and asked them to develop a special module for calculating the cutting edge geometry of the cutterhead for gear hobbing machines. The company quoted the price according to the general standard, and the other party claimed that it needed to be considered, but there was no news of it.

The marketing department of Too called the other party to ask if they were still interested in purchasing, only to get the shocking news that the other party had abandoned the plan to order the module from Tuo and had switched to Huaxia CAD.

The marketing staff inquired in detail and learned that the other party had inadvertently discovered that there was a module that could meet their needs in the open source resources of Huaxia CAD. With the mentality of trying it out, they downloaded Huaxia CAD and that special module, and the effect was good after running? Successfully calculated the cutting edge geometry? And the cost is almost zero.

Actually, the model for the calculation of the cutting edge geometry is public? Isn't it too difficult to convert into a program? There are some companies that can develop such programs themselves. The price quoted by Tuo to that customer is also to maintain the needs of the entire product price system? The actual investment is not much.

When there is no open source software, if the machinery company wants to order this kind of module from the software company? Do you have to pay a high fee? Otherwise, you'll have to write your own code. Now with the open source platform of Huaxia CAD, some companies directly upload the code they have written in the past for their peers who lack development capabilities.

These companies that upload code don't have any financial appeal, they just feel that they have written the code out? It doesn't hurt to share it with your peers. It's like some students in college take a lot of notes in class? Before the exam, it was directly sent to the class group and shared with classmates, which was just a matter of effort.

But this one gesture ruined Tuo's good business. In the past, Too made money for this kind of development, but now people can find it for free directly on the Internet, and who else wants to pay Tuo?

Is there another advantage of open source software that commercial software does not have? That is, after downloading the open source software, users can modify the software according to their own needs. For example, the customer above? After downloading the open-source cutting edge geometry calculation software, combined with the needs of your own company? Adjusted some of these parameters to achieve some unexpected results? This is a convenience that is difficult to obtain with commercial software.

After that customer got this bargain? I passed on my experience in my own circle. Subsequently? Several companies that were planning to order software from Tuo withdrew their orders, claiming to have received other solutions. The marketing department of Tuao inquired and found that these so-called solutions are actually open source resources on the official website of Huaxia CAD.

"If this continues, at least half of our business will be lost!"

Kwek shouted at Curran. I thought that Huaxia CAD's turn to open source was just a farce of children's anger, but who would have thought that it would really affect the core business of Tuo. The customer didn't look at the Zhongxia CAD itself, but took a fancy to the open source resources provided by the peripheral developers, which is really a terrible thing.

"We've also received feedback from some customers who think that we used to charge too much for custom projects, and that we have to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for development when they can provide modules for free, which is difficult for customers to accept. Curran timidly reported.

Reporting something like this when Kerwick is losing his temper is definitely adding fuel to the fire. But Curran can't help but report, because Kerwick will know about this sooner or later, and it will inevitably be held accountable for not reporting it when the time comes.

"Nonsense, if we don't charge such a high development fee, how can we have the funds to keep the software updated? Why don't they say it's too cheap when they buy CAD!" Kweik was really annoyed, and smashed the things on the table.

As early as 10 years ago, Tang Zifeng and Li Kejia discussed this issue, and the company connived at piracy in the Chinese market, which seemed to lose the sales revenue of genuine copies, but in fact it was cultivating users' habits in order to collect high returns from customized services in the future.

The price of Tuo CAD is very expensive from the perspective of Chinese users, but considering the salary level of software engineers in Western countries, such a price is not enough to make a huge profit for Too, and the software sales revenue can at best maintain the company's daily operations.

Too's main profit comes from customizing the functional modules for its customers. Some functional modules are actually very simple, but customers do not know the source code of Toao CAD, so they cannot develop it themselves, or they can only use other systems to develop a program, calculate the results, and then import them into Toao CAD, which is undoubtedly very troublesome.

In order to improve design efficiency, some companies can only ask Tuo to help develop some special modules. Depending on the difficulty of module development, Tuo charges tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions, which is affordable for large enterprises.

By the way, these machinery companies themselves do the same business, and the equipment they sell to customers is not expensive, but they can charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for any spare part. It is impossible for the customer to manufacture these parts by himself, so he can only accept the blackmail of the manufacturer.

Further downstream, those companies that have purchased machinery and equipment produce consumer goods that are not this kind of routine. A mobile phone costs 3,000 yuan, and it costs 1,500 yuan to change a screen, don't you have to pinch your nose and admit it?

But now, there is a spoiler in the market, claiming that there are a large number of free mobile phone screens available, and if the screen they provide is not the same as your phone model, just take the scissors and click to trim it, and install it can also be used. With such benefits, who would go to the store to change the screen for 1500 yuan?

"This new Jingwei company seems to be the so-called strategic partner of Tuo in the Chinese market, right?

Kwek stared at Curran and remembered something from the past.

There are many strategic partners of Too, which are claimed externally and differentiated within the company. Some of the strategic partners are genuine and have a close relationship with Tuo, which to a certain extent can be said to be a loss and a win. Other strategic partners are basically just lip service, and the reason why the two sides recognize each other is just for some kind of public relations needs, and the actual business has little to do with it.

The signing of a strategic cooperation agreement between Too and New Jingwei was indeed handled by Curren, but it was the Chinese branch of Too that proposed this plan. The reason why Too China proposed to cooperate with New Jingwei was that Huaxia CAD was attacking the Chinese market at that time, squeezing Too's market share.

Too China believes that it is advisable to move forward by retiring and recognizing the interface style and file format with Huaxia CAD, so that Huaxia CAD users will not find it difficult to turn to Tuao CAD, which will reserve the groundwork for Tuao CAD to make a comeback one day.

The idea proposed by Tuo China was not seriously evaluated by the U.S. headquarters. At that time, the scale of the Chinese market was still very inconspicuous, and such a small business scale was not worth the company's bosses to bother. The Chinese company submitted a report that looked like a flower, and Curran took a few casual glances, felt that it made sense, and reported it to the board. The Board also took the matter seriously and went through a process to approve the matter.

What they never expected was that this incident actually buried a mine for the Tuo company itself, and it was a big mine.