Gu Biao also let go of this question: "Okay, I hope that after these few months, you can follow Sony's technical team to learn and improve, and you can go to a higher level in terms of product excellence and train the team solidly."

Now, the improvement of PLAY-BOX is almost complete, Erickson, I need the hardware department, take most of the manpower out, and expand the team in the near future to enter the new product line -

We have reached an agreement with Sony to build our own new after-sales channels, and at the same time, we also have a certain understanding of the hardware of Sony's various cutting-edge storage media reading and writing devices, and I think the time is ripe.

In the future, we at Tiankun Entertainment will enter more personal electronic entertainment consumer goods fields, not just to make a game console. The 2C arcade business can be completely stopped or resold, and we have to concentrate on doing big things. ”

After listening to Gu Ao's decision-making, the main backbones of the R&D and product teams were all in good spirits.

President Schulhoff is also full of expectations.

Although a company has reached this scale, it should not engage in a word, let alone rely on the will of the chief to pat the thigh, but Gu Biao's consistent vision is not bad, plus he is young and understands the needs and preferences of young people, but he can provide valuable ideas.

Those veteran professional managers only need to tinker with Gu Biao and provide management plugging.

At least for a year or two, there will be no problems with this.

"Boss, what are the new projects you want to work on? The R&D department has been a bit idle lately. I thought that with the complete stabilization of PLAY-BOX, the technicians we had poached from Atari would be out of work. President Schulhoff was the first to take a stand.

He still hasn't said a word, that is, he has been secretly making a "technical department layoff plan" to cope with the trough of the R&D cycle.

This situation is difficult to imagine in the later Internet era, because at that time, the technology iteration was very fast, and the R&D model of "making a minimum product that can be used first, and then iterating quickly" has been developed, and it is impossible for technical personnel to be empty.

For example, if you are engaged in Xiaomi or Apple mobile phones, when they first went on the market, the system was not stable at all, but because the mobile phone can be connected to the Internet in real time, it is good to upgrade the system at any time, and there is no need to pursue one step.

In this way, programmers will always have a job to do, and they don't have to overhire a large number of programmers at once and put the product on the market thoroughly.

However, in the 1980s, when there was no network, all Silicon Valley technology companies faced the cyclical problem of the size of the technical team and the demand for workload.

Whether it's a game console or a computer, you don't have a chance to sell it and then upgrade the software system.

At this time, large companies need to open more R&D lines, so that the R&D department also has work to do in the off-season of the middle one or two years of the iteration cycle of the main products.

That's why Sony, as well as other companies, will come up with so many bizarre and niche product models - those are all programmers and electronic engineers who are idle and idle.

But if there is a large company that can make a clear idea and make achievements in the off-season, then it is equivalent to saving at least twice the R&D labor cost compared with other technology companies in the same period in the 80s.

Therefore, Gu Biao wants to start a project, and Schulhoff supports it from the bottom of his heart, even if he is foolish, he has no loss, and he is idle.

Eriksen, Yang Hao, and Lu Yunda are glad that there will be no layoffs, and their brothers will not have nothing to do.

The internal thinking is very well aligned.

Gu Biao was sure that his prestige was as good as ever, so he went straight to the point:

"I would like you to change your career a little bit and develop a CD player - of course, the CD format I am talking about is the CDDA data format jointly promoted by Sony and Philips the year before last. Recently, thanks to the cooperation with Sony, you should have done a good job of pre-studying. ”

"No wonder two months ago, when the people who followed Sony were improving the floppy drive, the boss asked us to study Sony's other potential data storage formats and reading and writing devices. Lu Yunda's heart was bright, and he secretly figured it out.

It turned out that Gu Biao had already foreshadowed. Since December, Tiankun has invested most of the energy of the R&D team on the pretext of optimizing the design and integration of the floppy drive machine.

At that time, in addition to researching Sony's floppy drive, he also used this as an excuse to study "all the reading and writing devices that Sony has taken out so far and may be used to store game data in the future".

Gu Biao also drew a cake for Akio Morita: how big is the storage capacity potential of CDs, and in the future, maybe he can build a game console with an optical drive and replace the game cartridge with a CD.

In 1983, CDs were also relatively advanced and rare, and piracy was difficult and difficult to get to the point, because Sony itself had just launched it in 1982.

Philips, another giant that jointly formulated the international standard, is even slower than Sony, and has always felt that the cost cannot be lowered, and the road to CD players is temporarily difficult.

(Note: In September '82, when music in CDDA data format was defined, there were three founding companies, the other being PolyGram.) But PolyGram is only a record company, not a hardware company. Therefore, the only hardware factories supported are Sony and Philips. ）

Of course, Akio Morita would not have thought that these things that are expensive today will be cheapened into small plastic plates for 5 yuan a piece in the future.

Of course, the fact is that this future is still far away. Even if the copyright protection is as bad as China's, it really began to crack and pirate the CD/VCD business, it was around the time of the emergence of the WIN95 system, that is, 95 years.

Before 94 years, the commercial value of these industries was safe - you must know that when the great man went south to inspect in 92, he also saw the "Xianke Laser" in the Special Economic Zone, and at that time I thought it was still a very remarkable high-tech industry. And Xianke Laser is the company that later came up with the "Xianke VCD" product.

The CD business, at least, can make money for 10 years without the copyright being infringed, so it is still worth investing.

10 years later,Don't say WIN95 appeared,Even the Internet is coming,It's really unstoppable.,Even if the CD is not pirated.,With the Internet, others will find a way to place pirated resources by themselves.,Even the disk is not needed.。 Now that there is Gu Biao in this time and space, maybe the Internet will be born in advance, and there is no need to wait until 94, maybe as soon as the Soviet Union collapses, the Internet will be born.

With Gu Biao's strength, it has been developed for so many years by then, if it doesn't have a butterfly effect that affects the general trend of the world, it will be too mixed, so that the Internet will be born a year and a half to two years in advance, with Gu Ao's energy at that time, it is completely reasonable.

The scale of the CD-walkman's business is definitely not as large as that of the tape Walkman, and the total profit in the future will not be too high.

But Gu Biao's entry into the market is already at this point in time, and it is impossible to re-follow the old road that Sony has taken, so he can only cut in a corner and enrich the product line.

I hope that the young Americans born in the 60s and 70s will leave an impression that "produced by Tiankun must be a trendy and cool black technology" in the future, and Gu Biao's goal will be achieved.

……

After a cursory analysis of the research engine and the prospect of the project, the thinking is temporarily unified, and the next step is to discuss the feasibility.

Professor Erickson is a veteran of the consumer electronics industry, with a wide range of research on the products of his friends.

When Gu Biao said that the general trend was up, he asked people to bring a music CD player that Sony is currently selling as a display.

"Boss, do you want to make a product that is close to the Sony CDP-101 model in terms of performance? I have also bought this thing, but I only bought it from the perspective of an enthusiast in the industry, with all due respect, I intuitively feel that this thing is too expensive, and it does not seem to last long in the United States, and other people who are not too enthusiastic would rather continue to use the video recorder that plays video tapes. ”

The CDP-101 he showed was the first CD player in human history to play music CDs, and Sony officially released it on October 1, 82.

The appearance of that thing is similar to the previous video recorder, and even the VCD player familiar to Chinese in later generations, with a black plastic case box on the long rectangle, and a CD tray shaped like a later optical drive can pop up with a press on the front.

AND TO BE EXACT, THIS THING IS THICKER THAN THE VCDS OF LATER GENERATIONS, BASICALLY THE SIZE OF TWO PS4PRO GAME CONSOLES STACKED TOGETHER.

President Schulhoff listened to Erikson's introduction, and nodded slightly: "I think what Erikson said about the market, there is a certain truth, this machine is too expensive - when Sony went on sale in October last year, the announced initial price was 168,000 yen, which was converted into US dollars at the exchange rate of 240 at that time, which was exactly 700 US dollars."

President Morita did not go on sale in the United States in '82, but it was sold in the book first. When it was officially released in the United States on January 1, '83, it cost $640 even if the price was lowered for Americans.

But the video recorder of ordinary American families has been too popular, and the earliest video recorder also appeared in 76 years, and most American families have only bought video recorders for three or four years, and they have not reached the iterative cycle when the video recorder is broken.

It's impossible to buy another machine with a slight increase in performance but no growth in functionality as GE's. Not everybody is willing to 'just throw away the old music listening gear that hasn't broken just to improve the quality of the music'. ”

After Schulhoff finished speaking, everyone waited for Gu Fu's verdict.

Gu Biao didn't dampen everyone's enthusiasm for discussion, but just asked kindly: "So, think about it from the standpoint of ordinary people, if a CD player is reduced, how much can the price be reduced to make American families abandon videotapes." Or, let them not feel like 'this is a big deal', and the thresholds can be more arbitrary when making purchasing decisions. ”

Erikson is a tech nerd and obviously not easy to assess.

Schulhoff thought for a moment and said in a discursive tone: "I think that even our home game consoles only sell for more than $150 a piece, and the $640 CD player is really too dark, even if you have good sound quality, it can only be used to play music."

I think up to $300, which is up to twice as much as a home console. If it exceeds, there will be no large-scale home users, and you can only do the business of enthusiasts. The current video recorder is generally more than 200 US dollars. ”