The new Jingwei company was first founded by Zhao Yuntao and Liu Xiaohan, two technicians who went to the sea from the state-owned research institute, and the only product was a very crude set of "Huaxia CAD", which could not be sold a few sets a year, so that Zhao and Liu had to help people install machines in Yibin Building to earn their own living expenses.

Later, Li Kejia took a fancy to the potential of this product, resigned from Tuo China Company, joined the new Jingwei company, and brought Tang Zifeng to inject capital into the new Jingwei company, and jointly found a new business direction for the company, so that the company quickly improved.

At that time, the most popular CAD in the domestic market was the CAD of the American company Tuo, but due to its high price, few users in China could afford it. In order to monopolize the Chinese market, Tuo acquiesced in the proliferation of pirated software, leaving no place for domestic software such as Huaxia CAD.

Tang Zifeng and Li Kejia saw this and persuaded the relevant state departments to crack down on pirated CAD software, forcing domestic research institutions and industrial enterprises to buy genuine ones. Due to the general shortage of funds in domestic enterprises, they cannot afford to purchase expensive Tuo CAD, which gives cheap Huaxia CAD an opportunity to develop.

Over the years, Huaxia CAD has undergone several rounds of upgrades, and the software performance has been greatly improved, and it also has a high reputation in the domestic market. However, including Li Kejia, he also has to admit that compared with Tuao CAD, Huaxia CAD still has many shortcomings, that is, it has an advantage in price, so it can tie with Tuao CAD.

"In the past, we mainly relied on price to win. In recent years, domestic research institutions and enterprises have money, and they can afford a set of software for 10,000 yuan or 20,000 yuan. Especially in colleges and universities, the education funds given by the state are required to be earmarked, and a large part of them is to purchase IT-related products. The financial expenses of these colleges and universities are not enough, and it is not a big deal to buy a few high-priced software. On the contrary, it is our Huaxia CAD, because the price is too cheap, people still disdain to buy it. Li Kejia said depressedly.

"Isn't it, the money can't be spent, and it's painful, you have to understand them. Tang Zifeng teased with a smile.

If the funds of public institutions cannot be spent, they will have to be recovered by the end of the year. Moreover, if you have a surplus of funds for the first year, the finance department will think that you do not need so much money and will reduce the amount of money given to you when preparing the budget for the next year.

The evaluation of public institutions is related to the amount of funds. If you can get 1 billion yuan a year, it means that your unit has a high level and strong ability. On the contrary, if you only have tens of millions of funds a year, and you have to reduce it every year, everyone will wonder if you can't do it, and why you can't spend the money you can't spend.

It is precisely for this reason that various public institutions will desperately pile up projects when preparing budgets in order to obtain more funds. After these funds are in place, all units must find ways to spend these funds, and absolutely not leave a single penny.

There is a point in how the money given by the state is spent. If you make a budget and say that you want to spend 10 million yuan on software, then the money can only be used to buy software, and not elsewhere. At the same time, the software you buy must also be relevant to your actual needs, and you can't buy a bunch of software that you don't need.

As a result, the high price of foreign software has become the first choice of these institutions, buy 10 sets of Tuo CAD, you can spend three or four hundred thousand yuan, and if you change to Huaxia CAD, you can only spend seventy or eighty thousand, you have to find a way to use the rest of the money, isn't this looking for trouble?

Of course, there are some differences between Tuo CAD and Huaxia CAD in terms of performance and user experience. If you use your own money, you will not spend a few more expenses for such a small difference. But now it's the financial money, and it belongs to the kind of people who can't do it if they don't spend it, so why don't you buy better things, as for the cost performance or something, Who_care?

"It's really not good, you should also raise the price. Tang Zifeng suggested, "The pricing of Huaxia CAD is too cheap. Now that everyone has money, you can also sell it if you raise the price, and in terms of cost performance, it's still much higher than Tu'o, isn't it?"

"It's a bit difficult. Li Kejia said, "Our products are okay in terms of functionality, but in terms of user experience, they are much worse than those of Tuo." There is no way, Tuo's R&D investment is more than 10 times more than ours, although the labor cost of foreign programmers is higher, but people have so much investment, we still can't fight with them.

"Now some users choose Huaxia CAD because they like it to be cheap, and a set is only seven or eight thousand yuan. If we raise the price to 15,600, the price gap between the price and Tu'o will not be obvious. Units that are willing to spend more than 10,000 yuan will not care about spending more. ”

"It's a dead knot. Tang Zifeng patted his head and said.

Touau CAD started early and has a monopoly position in the Western market. With high per capita incomes in Western countries, a few thousand dollars for a set of software is nothing for the average company, and it is not a problem for Too to continue to generate high profits from the market and support a huge R&D system.

Huaxia CAD has always been sold in the Chinese market, the price is only five or six times that of Tuao CAD, and the sales volume is not as good as Tuao CAD, and the profit level can only be equivalent to a fraction of Tuao. If the profit is not enough, the R&D investment cannot be guaranteed. It is not easy for the new Jingwei company to persist to this day without being pulled out too far by Tuo.

The problems encountered by the new Jingwei company also exist in Linji Group. Linji Group's machine tool products are mainly concentrated in the middle and low end, and the profit level is only a fraction of that compared with foreign peers such as PATEO, Dawes and McClung PATEO and other foreign machine tool companies can invest hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in technology research and development a year, and can only invest more than one billion yuan in the machine, which is already very high in the domestic counterparts.

Fortunately for Linji Group than Xinjingwei Company, machine tool users are all industrial enterprises and value cost performance. Compared with foreign machine tools, the user experience is also poor, and the appearance is not as dazzling as others, but how can industrial enterprises care about this, buying machine tools is not buying Simmons, who cares if it is comfortable or not, cool or not?

It is precisely because users pay more attention to practicality, the machine tool of the machine tool in the domestic sales situation is very good, in the low-end machine tool market, the basic has been the expensive Japanese and German machine tools squeezed out, and now is entering the high-end market, and has also been gained.

In addition, some users in developing countries are also very fond of cheap machine tools from China, the per capita income of these countries is lower than China, more sensitive to price, Chinese machine tools have a price advantage, it is enough to make up for the defects in user experience.

The software market is not the same as the machine tool market. Those who use the software have a little say in the unit, and they are not as easy to bully as the workers in the workshop. These people are very concerned about the user experience of the product, and they will put forward opinions if they don't use it well, as for whether the unit has to spend several times more money in order to make them feel comfortable, they don't care.

"What did you want to say when you called me?"

After thinking about the various joints, Tang Zifeng asked Li Kejia. At least so far, he can't think of any way to break the situation, I'm afraid he will disappoint Li Kejia.

Li Kejia said: "These days, I have discussed many times with Zhao Yuntao and Liu Xiaohan, and everyone feels that there is no way. Tuo CAD's market share in the country is steadily rising, and if we don't have a good way to stop it, in a few years, it will monopolize the domestic market and we will be squeezed out.

"If we want to stop Tuo's expansion, we can't fight a price war, we can only improve our products significantly. But to do that, it takes a lot of money, and that's something we can't afford. ”

"Is there no way at all?" Tang Zifeng asked. He knew that Li Kejia called him over, definitely not simply to complain to him, but to have some ideas and ask him to evaluate.

Sure enough, Li Kejia changed his words and said: "There is a way, but it is very risky. ”

"Wealth is in danger. Sometimes, it's also necessary to take risks. Tang Zifeng said.

Li Kejia said: "This method was actually inadvertently proposed by a senior executive. At that time, we all said that there was no point in fighting a price war with Tuo, and the executive said angrily, saying that we would simply give it away for nothing, and we didn't want a penny, so we didn't believe that the customer would not accept it. ”

"Free delivery?" Tang Zifeng was stunned for a moment, then thought of a word, and couldn't help blurting out: "You mean, open source?"

As soon as these words came out, Li Kejia was taken aback, she looked at Tang Zifeng and said, "Why, you also know open source software?"

"You don't really want to make open source software, do you?"

"If you really can't do it, I'm afraid you can only give it a try. ”

"Cow! you guys are so good!" Tang Zifeng cocked a thumbs up and said sincerely.

The so-called open source refers to open source, that is, all the code of the software is made public, allowing users to freely use and transform the original code to generate software that is more suitable for themselves.

The term open source software, which dates back to the mid-80s of the last century, was intended to challenge the hegemony of large software companies. The most well-known open source software is Linux, which challenges windows, which has a monopoly on all PC operating systems, and provides a possible alternative for those who can't stand windows.

Although the model of open source software was proposed earlier, it has really become popular since the new century. At the moment, there is a lot of open source software in the Western market, but China is lagging behind, and many people are not even aware of such a concept.

As for Tang Zifeng, it was entirely thanks to the golden finger of the traverser that he knew the concept of open source and the vitality of this model. When he heard that the new Jingwei company actually wanted to make Huaxia CAD into open source software, he was indeed shocked and admired.