"If you go to the laundry and do your laundry, you can see that their washing machines are always in use. It's common sense in business operations, and it's important to make sure your machines run as well as possible. If a laundry buys a new machine when its washing machine isn't running at full capacity 90 percent of the time, will such a company be successful?"

Cisco, although Hu Wenhai helped the Leonards solve the patent problem with Stanford University a year ago, but a year later, this future "legendary" company 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.

If you look at the ratio alone, it's really good, 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 didn't even look at it, he threw aside the income and expenditure statement handed over by Leonard and his wife, and simply pressed the two of them on the dilapidated sofa full of electronic components.

Then take out the posture of invincible beings. Start your own speech condescendingly.

"I have to say. All the work they are doing now is meaningless. The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca said it. 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, and finally Leonard himself 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 if you don't have a network, it's very troublesome. There are already many university computer labs that have contacted us and want 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 at least one or two hundred million, right?" Leonard said, a little unconfident.

In fact, this number is simply impossible to reach, as far as Leonard observes, there are already other router products on the market, and it is impossible for him to occupy all the university markets, and Cisco's advantage as a pioneer will be exhausted.

"One or two hundred million?" Hu Wenhai's tone was very hateful: "Just such a little market, you are satisfied? Believe me, your products will 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 large prospect. Only by letting the router into the living room of ordinary people is the best choice. ”

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

A router is a device for computer networking, and the penetration rate of personal computers can be said to be 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 the words of us Chinese, it is to open your mind!"

"Listen to me! The current computer application system is completely irrational, a conspiracy of computer enterprises, and the result of hegemonism!"

Hey, Leonard and his wife were dumbfounded, this Chinese Hu seems to be not lightly ill?

"Think about what I started with, is there any laundry that uses only 10% of its power 90 percent of the time 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 and don't even notice this huge mistake!"

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

"It's very simple, may I ask what is the time for Stanford University's computers to run at full power, and can each machine be guaranteed to run 24 hours a day? Both of them are directors of the Stanford University Computer Center.

"Well, it seems like that's the case. ”

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 the data processed most of the time occupies 2 to 30 percent of the system resources of a computer.

"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 wake up, his words full of the contradiction of opening a 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 business users like Macintosh computers and IBMPC have to completely eliminate 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 Vietnam War, hippie culture, hedonism, and anti-intellectual education, has an unusual interest in bringing down "hegemony."

In particular, Cisco's later development history has already told Hu Wenhai 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 terminals in a certain area, such as a company, an office building, or even a residential area, through routers and switches, then no matter how electronic technology advances, 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 redundant resources that are idle 90% of the time, and then put them 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 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. 99% of the time is spent on processing documents, and the performance is no more than 20%. The reason why I bought such a high-performance laptop is just to be able to play some games with high hardware requirements 10% of the time.

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 a newbee, what does it matter? (To be continued......