"If you go to the laundry to do your laundry, your washing machine will always be in use. It's common sense in business operations, and it's important to keep your machine running as well as possible. If a laundry buys a new machine when 90 of its washing machines are not running at full capacity, will such a company be successful?"

Cisco, although a year ago Hu Wenhai helped the Leonards solve a patent problem with Stanford University, but a year has passed, this future "legend"

The company, however, is of little use.

In a practical sense, Cisco is still a "family workshop"

。

The company's production site is the living room of the Leonard couple's home, and all the employees are the Leonards and their two employees, and they are responsible for all the business.

The vast majority of its buyers are small groups of customers who come by word of mouth.

For almost a year, Cisco's total turnover was just over $100,000 and its profit was only $40,000.

It's really good if it's alone, but unfortunately in absolute terms, it's really not very decent.

As two university teachers, that amount of money is not even comparable to the salaries of the Leonards at Stanford.

So when Hu Wenhai, the big financier, suddenly arrived in California, the faces of the Leonards were very exciting, and they were at a loss for what to do.

"I think as the actual owners of a company, the two of you should already have some experience. In order for a company to be competitive, the first thing is to go all out and make all assets work to their full value. ”

Hu Wenhai even threw aside the income and expenditure statements handed by the Leonards, and simply pressed the two of them to the dilapidated sofa full of electronic components.

Then take out the posture of invincible beings and start your speech condescendingly.

"I must say that the work that the two of you are doing now is meaningless. The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca said that if a man does not know which port he is heading for, no direction of the wind can please him. Even worse than bad luck is the lack of goals. ”

"As the actual operator of Cisco, may I ask Mr. and Mrs. Leonard, have you ever thought about where Cisco's future path should be?"

Mr. and Mrs. Leonard looked at each other.

In the end, it was Leonard himself who said: "Hu, our goal is very clear, which is to develop the university campus market. Nowadays, many universities have a lot of computers based on different systems, but it is very troublesome to communicate without a network. There are already a lot of university computer studios to contact us and hope to ......"

"No, no, no!"

Hu Wenhai simply interrupted the Leonards rudely, and asked, "Even if all universities in the United States use your routers, how much profit can this bring?"

"We estimate that there will be at least one or two hundred million, right?"

Leonard said a little unconfidently.

In fact, this number is simply impossible to reach.

According to Leonard's observation, there are already other router products on the market, and it is impossible to wait for him to occupy all the university market.

Cisco's advantage as a first mover wears off.

"One or two hundred million?"

Hu Wenhai's tone was very hateful: "Just such a little market, you are satisfied? Believe me, your products represent hundreds of billions of value in the future! But first, let's find out where the value of this router product is." The scientific research market cannot support such a big prospect, and only by letting the router enter the living room of ordinary people is the best choice. ”

"Trillions? Oh God!"

Mr. and Mrs. Leonard regretted accepting Hu Wenhai's investment a little, they didn't look like a madman at the beginning, how could they say such outrageous things.

A router is a device that connects computers to the Internet.

The penetration rate of personal computers is now a drop in the ocean.

There is not even a market foundation, so how can I walk into the living rooms of thousands of households.

"If you want to open up the civilian market, you'd better look a little farther. ”

Hu Wenhai ignored Leonard's shouting, and continued: "Don't treat the router as a scientific research technology, but as a consumer product! Dig out its meaning in personal life! In our Chinese words, it is to open your mind!"

The current computer application system is completely irrational and is a conspiracy of computer enterprises. It's the result of hegemonism!"

Ay?

The Leonards were dumbfounded, this Chinese Hu is not light?

"Think about what I started with, is there any laundry that uses its washing machine 10 percent of its 90 rooms and stops running two-thirds of the day?"

"Of course it's impossible, but it's so common in the computer world that people take it for granted. Didn't find this huge mistake at all!"

"Mr. Hu, I don't quite understand what you mean......

Leonard was confused.

"It's very simple, may I ask how long does the computer at Stanford University run at full power, and can each computer run 24 hours a day? Both of them are directors of the computer center of Stanford University.

"This. It seems like so. ”

When Hu Wenhai said this, the Leonards really felt a little bit like that.

There is no doubt that the computer in the computer center cannot always run at full capacity, and most of the time it processes the number of jù, which is 20 or 30 percent of a computer's system resources.

"But there's no way around it. After all, most of the time, the computer waits for a human to input commands to it, and the efficiency of the human slows down the efficiency of the computer. ”

Hu Wenhai nodded and agreed: "Yes, that's the reason." But did Mr. Leonard think about it, and at this time when you type the command, your computer resources are completely available to those who are strained in computing resources. ”

"You're right, maybe ......"

Leonard seemed to have woken up, and his words were full of contradictions that opened the new century.

"Maybe we can do this in two ways, one is to have all the individual computers networked and distribute the computing tasks of a single computer to those computers that are not strained on computing resources. The other is to centralize all computing tasks on a single server. ”

"Actually, the second way would be better. ”

Hu Wenhai didn't wait for Leonard to react, and directly came to a conclusion: "I said that the current computer system is a conspiracy of computer companies, because this technology is completely feasible, but traditional computer companies will never develop it." The reason is simple: the performance of a single computer will quickly become obsolete according to Moore's Law, so individual and enterprise users like Macintosh and IBMPC will have to completely retire a batch of computers in two or three years. ”

"With this kind of continuous upgrading, computer companies will always be able to force users to consume, and this is the hegemony of electronic enterprises! Cisco's mission, I think, is to break this hegemony!"

Hu Wenhai knew that Americans in the 80s loved to listen to this kind of argument the most.

The generation of Americans, who grew up in the environment of the Vietnam War hippie culture, hedonism, anti-intellectual education, was committed to bringing down the "hegemony"

With an unusual interest.

Especially the later development history of Cisco, Hu Wenhai has already been told that the Leonards are the kind of people who can't get along with capital.

"If you use a giant computer as a server, and connect the terminal in a certain area, such as a company, an office building, or even a residential area, then no matter how advanced electronic technology is, as an ordinary user, you only need to pay for the computing resources you use, instead of spending a lot of money to buy a set of 90 idle excess resources, and then put it at home and wait for time to let it depreciate naturally!"

"With this technology, computer companies can no longer kidnap ordinary people to pay for high performance that they don't use most of the time!"

Hu Wenhai's remark was, of course, a big fool, because the speed of the development of computer computing power far exceeded the speed of the development of network transmission.

The mega-machine-to-terminal model is overwhelmingly unacceptable to future PCs.

Whether it's Apple's Macintosh or IBM's personal PC, the RAM capacity is only 128KB - that is, Macintosh actually provides an 8K memory module.

For this kind of computation, design an SoC to process the data jù and transmit it to a nearby server, and then the server will return the calculation results, which may be faster than local computing.

In fact, Hu Wenhai has always had this idea, mainly from the i7 high-end computer that he cheated on.

The 99 rooms I bought back were only used to process documents, and the performance did not exceed 20%.

The reason why I bought such a high-performance laptop is just to be able to play some hardware-demanding games with 10 rooms.

Think about it, how nice it would be if people were buying computing power based on the actual amount of computing power, rather than buying computers at the ceiling for a short period of high computing needs?

But of course, if the Americans really develop the computer system according to the method of giant machines to terminals, then Hu Wenhai will really wake up from a dream.

Even if the Americans' technology tree is not crooked, it doesn't matter, it will be Cisco who will die at that time, and it just so happens that Mr. Hu can strangle his biggest competitor in the future in advance.

Left and right are earning, tree nebee, what does it matter?

(To be continued.)

This book is from /book/html/33/33003/