When the plane landed in Los Angeles, Mike had been waiting at the airport for a long time.

Zhou Fangyuan and Sun Jing walked out of the airport and went directly to the convoy that came to pick up the plane. The convoy drove straight out of the airport and headed for Irvine, where Blizzard's headquarters are located. Irvine is only an 80-kilometer drive from Los Angeles and can be reached in a maximum of 40 minutes. On the way, Zhou Fangyuan began to ask about the task he had given Mike.

"BOSS, the company you mentioned called Danger has been found, it's in California, and I've been in contact with the CEO of that company, and I told him that you want to invest, and he's already coming with the company's materials, and you'll see him in a moment. ”

"Good. ”

Zhou Fangyuan nodded with satisfaction, "By the way, how is the recruitment website doing?

"Mr. Li has already contacted me with the CEO he is looking for for the recruitment website, and he has taken away all the materials we need here, and he has also borrowed five engineers, saying that he wants to develop the website. BOSS, you have to talk to Mr. Li, now the company's engineers are in short supply, and the research and development of Warcraft III has reached the most critical time, but he borrowed our core engineers, in fact, a recruitment website is just a recruitment website, ordinary programmers are enough, there is no need to borrow core engineers. ”

Mike said helplessly.

"Eh, if he lends you something, won't you refuse?"

Zhou Fangyuan looked at Mike curiously, he didn't think Mike was the kind of good old man who didn't know how to refuse.

"I would like to, but BOSS, you also know that he is Mr. Li's person, and Mr. Li is still the majority shareholder of the company, and I can't refuse his request......"

Mike looked helpless.

He is not wrong when he says so, Zhou Fangyuan and Brother Xiao Li bought 80% of Blizzard's shares together, of which Zhou Fangyuan has 20%, which is as much as the shares of Blizzard's three founders, and Brother Xiao Li is unique and owns 60%. After the two bet, Zhou Fangyuan obtained 15% of Blizzard's shares, his shares became 35%, and Xiao Li's became 45%.

But even so, Brother Li's shares are still the first, and his shares alone are more than double the sum of the three founders of Blizzard. Of course, Mike couldn't refuse his request directly. It's not completely impossible, it's just not necessary. If it is a major matter related to the survival or development direction of the company, Mike will certainly stand firm. Even if the majority shareholder is not satisfied, as long as he feels it is right, he will not back down.

But it's just to borrow a few engineers, and if he wants to refuse such a small matter, it will be too bad for Brother Li to save face.

So although he was very unhappy, he could only accept Brother Li's request and lend out the five engineers who could be said to be the most core.

"Okay, okay, let's slow down the game development progress, the job site is also very important, and once the website is built, are you worried that we will not have enough manpower, when the engineers all over the United States are at your disposal, I just hope you don't pick and choose when the time comes." ”

Zhou Fangyuan said with a smile, reaching out and patting the back of Mike's hand.

Brother Xiao Li was very arrogant, but he had to wipe his buttocks, this matter can't just pass like this, he will have to find Brother Xiao Li to settle this account sooner or later.

chatting all the way, mainly Zhou Fangyuan and Mike were talking, and Sun Jing was sitting next to her, completely in the role of a secretary.

The car quickly arrived in Irvine and finally stopped in front of the Blizzard building.

Blizzard's other two founders, Frank Pierce and Aaron Adhan, were already waiting at the door, and as soon as the car stopped, they came over to help open the door, like hotel waitresses. But it's no wonder that the company's second largest shareholder is here, and it is the person who has inspired them a lot, and it is too late for them to respect, and it is completely irrelevant to take the initiative to open the car door or something.

Zhou Fangyuan got out of the car, shook hands with the two of them, had a brief conversation with them, and everyone walked towards the building together.

All the way to the second floor, in the conference room, Zhou Fangyuan finally met the main target of his trip, Andy Rubin, the man known as the father of Android.

In fact, from the time Zhou Fangyuan decided to take over the glass factory, he began to plan this matter.

In this era, no one may be very clear about the future development trend of mobile phones, even those pioneers are now feeling the stones to cross the river, the future can be said to be dim, and it is impossible to see where the road is. But Zhou Fangyuan is different, he knows very well that the future is the world of smartphones.

With the upgrading of generations of smartphones and the continuous improvement of mobile phone performance, even the big brother PC industry has been strongly impacted, not to mention those mobile phone companies that are still well-known today, Motorola, Nokia, BlackBerry ...... Basically, they either disappeared into the tide of history, or they were left with only a difficult respite. But now, who would have thought that these big companies would be so embarrassed in the future?

And the initiator of all this is the smartphone.

In smartphones, the two major systems can be said to have carved up the whole world. One is the Android system, and the other is Apple's ISO system. Apple Zhou Fangyuan is not ready to start, now Apple is already very powerful, it is not easy to buy this company, compared to it, Android is very simple.

In other words, today's Android has not yet appeared, and there is no such thing as buying Android.

But it's still okay to buy the father of Android, and Zhou Fangyuan is not only interested in the fact that he developed the Android system, in fact, this Andy Rubin is a pretty powerful.

How awesome is he? Why is he so awesome?

It starts with the same year he was born in New York State in 1963, where his father studied psychology and ran a direct sales company for electronic toys. After the sales sample is photographed and put into the sales catalog, it belongs to little Andy. As a child, his room was filled with all kinds of the latest electronic toys, and repeatedly disassembling them was one of his favorite things to do, and his geek genes were planted during this period.

After graduating from university, he joined Carl Zeiss GmbH, a company known for its optical instruments, as a robotics engineer, mainly working on digital communication networks. Later, he also worked for a robotics company in Switzerland and had a great time.

It wasn't until 1989 that Andy traveled to the Cayman Islands, and while strolling alone on the beach early in the morning, he met a poor man sleeping on a deck chair. Andy paid for the poor man's own money. In return, the man agreed to introduce Andy to his company. It was only then that Andy realized that the person he was helping was actually an engineer at Apple.

Andy's extraordinary Silicon Valley experience as a young man made Andy a fish in water at Apple, an engineer-led company, with the desktop system Quadra and the first software modem in history.

He also did not forget to show his geek nature, and in his spare time, he also reprogrammed the company's internal telephone system, pretending to be the CEO to call personnel and instruct him to give stock awards to his engineering colleagues in the group, and as a result, the information department came to trouble because of this.

It wasn't until 1990 that Apple's handheld device division spun off and General Magic was formed. Two years later, Andy decided that there was a lot to be done in this field and chose to join it. Here, he is fully immersed in the company's dedicated engineering culture. He and his colleagues set up a bed above their cubicle and ate and lived in the office almost 24 hours a day.

Their product was Magic Cap, a groundbreaking Internet-based mobile operating system and interface, which was a short-lived success in the market, leading to a listing in 1995 and a doubling of its stock on day one. But the good times didn't last long, this product was too advanced, and the support of the operator couldn't keep up at all, and it was quickly sentenced to death by the market.

After that, Andy joined Artemis Research, which was founded by Apple employees, and continued to live and eat in the office, chasing his dream of Internet devices. This time, he participated in the development of the product is the interactive Internet TV ebTV, and has created a number of communication patents. The product has gained hundreds of thousands of users and has successfully achieved profitability, with annual revenue of more than $100 million.

In 1997, the company was acquired by Microsoft, and Robin joined Microsoft with great ambitions to start his super robotics project. The internet bots he developed roamed around Microsoft, recording what he saw and heard. Unexpectedly, one day, the computer that controls the robot is hacked, angering Microsoft's security officials. Soon after, Andy left Microsoft to rent a store in Palo Alto, where he and his engineering friends continued to play with robots and new devices, and come up with new product ideas.

This was the predecessor of Danger.

As for the Danger company's awesome inventions, the most famous of them is a mobile phone called Sidekick. This is the first true smartphone that has been surfing the web, sending and receiving emails, chatting with AOL's Instant Messenger, playing online games, reading emails and more while others are still using their phones to send and receive text calls.

And this phone was developed by Danger.

In addition to this, there are many other inventions of Danger, such as Peanut, which should be translated as peanuts in direct translation.

This is really the clearest portrayal of this invention, because its size, it is actually a key pendant with its own LCD display, which can receive information associated with the user's account, such as event lists, calendars, emails, etc.

There are two ways to transfer data to Peanut: one is through a dock connected to a computer's serial interface, and then you log on to a special web page. Customized browser plug-ins can be used to transfer data to Peanut. At that time, Andy they had an idea that while the data was being transferred, an ad would be displayed on the plugin and peanut. Another method is to transmit data via the FM radio subcarrier.

The idea was to lease bandwidth to radio stations in every major city. This technique is one-way and can only send very little data, therefore, only a limited amount of information can be sent per day. However, this approach opens up new possibilities, such as retailers being able to purchase FM transmitters that connect to the Danger network and push messages to users.

For example, when a user passes by Starbucks, Peanut will make a "ding-" sound to tell the user that they have received a group discount. Of course, this feature was not completed in the previous life, but the concept survived, and Apple's iBeacon is something similar.

There's also a user-targeting app called "here My Dogs At?", which shows you where the user is. At this time, the mobile phone does not have GPS positioning, and the positioning of Danger is based on the mobile phone base station. One engineer also made a cool app, a notepad about a location. When you are in the right position, you are able to see the note, otherwise it is hidden.

In the last 02 years, Danger employees used their devices to write microblogs, record their lives, and automatically upload them to the web page. In '03, they turned this practice into a service. When users post text and images to hiplogs@, the resulting posts are added to the blog, like Instagram and Tumblr combined.

However, this is not the coolest thing, the coolest thing is that in the last life 04, there was a special project within Danger that combined Gameboy and Hiptop. The project was called G1 at the time.

Andy combined the GBA's chipset with the hiptop motherboard, and then built a chip to mix the video signals of the two. They do something like this: while playing a Gameboy game, a phone call comes in, and the Gameboy game pauses and a warning window appears on the screen asking if you want to answer the call. When the call ends, the game will restart. Through their app store, users can purchase Gameboy games without having to carry any cartridges.

At the time, Nintendo's executives liked the idea so much that they were ready to invest in the project, but Nintendo's game licensing did not include rights in electronic sales, and there was still a lot of work to be done to sell games in stores. So in the end, it was a pity that the project did not move forward.

But in any case, Andy's ability is obvious, coupled with his identity as the father of Android, if Zhou Fangyuan lets go of such a person, then he is really blind. He didn't think of this person before, but when he decided to buy the glass factory, he thought of Gorilla Glass, he thought of Gorilla and thought of Apple, he thought of Apple, he thought of Android, and when he thought of Android, he thought of the father of Android.

Thinking back to the other party's experience, this person is definitely a milestone, as long as you can win him, you can win Android.

Just imagine, if in the future of this life, Zhou Fangyuan's Android system can once again be separated from Apple's ISO, what a magnificent scenery it will be? Because of the late development of Huaxia, there is indeed a certain gap between China and European and American countries in many places, and the same is true for mobile phones. Although China has caught up in the later period, the development speed of European and American countries is not slow, and they are restricting the rise of China through various methods.

Zhou Fang is far from qualified to meddle in national affairs, nor is he capable of interfering, but in the economic field, he wants to use his foresight to give his country a hard blow.

This Android system is actually the best project, if Huaxia can have one of the world's two largest mobile phone operating systems, then the situation of European and American countries will completely cease to exist, at least in the field of mobile phones, Huaxia is also a country that can have the final say.

This idea could no longer be suppressed since it appeared, so when the meeting in Shenzhen was over and Mike was ready to go back to the hungry country, Zhou Fangyuan gave him this task.

Mike did a good job and found Andy, and Andy was obviously willing to accept Zhou Fangyuan's investment, otherwise he would not have appeared in the conference room.

At the same time that Zhou Fangyuan saw Andy, Andy also saw him, the two glanced at each other, and then Andy took the initiative to get up and shake hands with Zhou Fangyuan.

"You're Mr. Zhou, Mike told me about you, but I didn't expect you to be so young. ”

Andy said with a smile, he is now a middle-aged man in his thirties and almost forty years old, and he has a hair crisis, but he is very energetic, or for an entrepreneur, the age of forty is when he is most energetic.

"I told you before that you still didn't believe it, but now you believe me? I just said that Zhou is always the best young man I have ever met, better than anyone else. ”

Mike also spared no effort to praise people, and Zhou Fangyuan was a little embarrassed.

He waved his hand, "But don't say that, there are many powerful people in the world, what am I, I'm just on the lucky side, not as powerful as you say." ”

"But luck itself is a strength. ”

Andy said, "Plants vs. Zombies is a fun game, and I've been playing it for a long time, and I think the success of this game is not just luck, it's the quality of the game itself." And after I learned that you wanted to buy my company, I investigated you and forgave me for my presumptuousness, but I wanted to know what kind of person wanted to buy my company. As a result, I found that you already have a sizable industry on the other side of the ocean, and these industries seem to have nothing to do with each other, but I think there must be a certain connection between them. And I think the most interesting thing is that your company linkage model, some seemingly unrelated companies, effectively united together, to form an ecosystem-like environment, you have me, I have you, fight each other, but uniformly, this model is very efficient, but also very powerful, for the current Internet, this is a very mature model.

I saw the wisdom you had hidden in this pattern, and I felt that this was exactly what I needed. I need a smart investor, preferably one who can speak the same language as me, like one who is completely on the same frequency as me, which in theory I am completely unacceptable because I don't have time to explain to someone who doesn't understand anything. But you don't look like that kind of person, in fact, I don't fully understand a lot of your movements, and you're smarter than I thought, so I'm really looking forward to working with you. ”

Andy said with a smile.

His words were even more powerful than Mike's praise, if Zhou Fangyuan hadn't been a lot deeper now, he was afraid that he really couldn't help but grin the corners of his mouth behind the roots of his ears. Fortunately, he endured it, so he didn't really lose his ugliness.

"Thank you for the compliment, Andy, you are also very good, and I also want to talk to you because I see your unique side. In fact, I have a program that needs talent like you, which is why I asked Mike to contact you. ”

Zhou Fangyuan said with a smile.

"Can I know what this program is?"

Andy immediately asked.

"It's okay, I came to see you today, I just want to tell you the content of the plan, and I want to get your support, but should we sit down first? ”

Zhou Fangyuan said with a smile.

Andy noticed that he had been busy talking to Zhou Fangyuan before, but Zhou Fangyuan had been standing there since he entered the house, and he himself was standing, and the three founders of Blizzard were also standing. It was indeed a bit inappropriate for everyone to stand on the ground and speak.

"It's all my fault, Mr. Zhou, please take a seat. ”

"Haha, don't apologize, I like your serious attitude very much, Mike, you also sit, by the way, I haven't got any good tea recently, bring me a pot." ”

Because Zhou Fangyuan likes to drink tea, the employees of his companies also began to like tea.

Huaxia's local companies are good to say, after all, Huaxia people have the habit of drinking tea since ancient times. And for Mike, the tea is a little less tasty, they prefer and coffee. However, because Zhou Fangyuan's hobbies have to be taken into account, the three of them have tea in their offices all year round, which is still quite good.

And coffee, not every day, after all, the tea leaves are there, and over time, they will occasionally try the taste of tea.

At first, it really didn't taste interesting, there was no taste, only a faint fragrance. But as the number of tea drinks is increasing, the three of them gradually like the feeling of drinking tea, especially the feeling of watching the tea gradually stretch, the whole person seems to be quiet, and then gently sip the tea, leaving a fragrant mouth, feeling much more forced than coffee.

Coffee has now become the second most popular drink within Blizzard, and the first most popular is undoubtedly tea.

Now that Zhou Fangyuan asked, Mike immediately smiled.

"I did buy some, but it's not bad, and I'm starting to feel the artistic conception of drinking tea now, and the quality is secondary. ”

"Haha, Mike, Mike, you guy is becoming more and more like a Chinese. ”

Zhou Fangyuan said with a smile.

The secretary went to make tea, and after a while, he brought the tea into the conference room and poured it into the teacup, and the conference room was immediately filled with a faint fragrance of tea.

Andy doesn't usually drink tea, but today he asked for a cup of tea for the first time, took a sip, and couldn't help nodding.

"It's kind of interesting, I've never drunk tea like this before, I used to drink that kind of English black tea. ”

"In fact, green tea is the essence, and you will gradually like it. ”

Zhou Fangyuan said, drinking tea while chatting with others.

After chatting for a while, after the fatigue of the journey was washed away by the tea, Zhou Fangyuan finally decided to get to the point.

He put down the teacup, changed into a position that he felt comfortable, leaned back in the chair, looked at Andy who was sitting next to him, he gently curled the corners of his mouth, "Andy, what do you think the future of mobile phones will look like?"