The sales of Macintosh computers, the second milestone in the personal computer industry that Jobs had made a lot of vogues, fell far short of Apple's expectations. Scully finally took advantage of his position as CEO to remove Jobs' last powerful position, the head of the McIntosh program, and gave him only the title of corporate consultant.

Mr. Jobs had planned to contact a group of people to challenge Mr. Scully, but the board had already become disillusioned with him, and the rest of the company was reluctant to continue the quarrel with Mr. Jobs. Because Apple has reached a very critical moment, if it continues to fight like this internally, it may really be completely eliminated by the market in the future.

The betrayal of Jobs finally chose to leave his job, ending his first career at Apple. Of course, it is unknown whether the Apple company in this life can wait for him to come back more than ten years later to turn the tide.

Li Xuan put down the "Wall Street Journal" in his hand and couldn't help but sigh. He remembers another time and space, when Jobs struggled until 1985 before leaving Apple.

But Jobs' early departure may not be a bad thing for Apple, which is in trouble. In another time and space, it was after Scully took full control of Apple that he launched the enhanced Macintosh computer, which finally reversed the decline in sales and became the only computer company to compete with the Wintel alliance.

And now the pressure exerted on Apple by Aikang Computer Company and the Eastern Group behind it is far greater than that of IBM and PC compatible machines in another time and space.

According to the newspaper that Li Xuan had just read, Scully was on the second day of Jobs' departure. It was announced that the Lisa machine department would be abolished. The computer, named after Jobs' daughter, has a lot of overlap in positioning with the Macintosh project, and Apple is ready to focus all its efforts on the Macintosh project.

Li Xuan didn't know if Apple would be able to survive the new round of strikes that Aikang had already launched. Since the release of ABC-3 computer in July 1981. Aikang finally launched a milestone product, the ABC-5 personal computer.

Unlike Jobs's previous rhetoric, the ABC-5 has once again ushered in a major technological advancement compared to all models of personal computers on the market. Although the ERM-1 processor was a 32-bit core processor, it was castrated in actual use, and the external interface was only 16-bit, which greatly limited the performance of the processor.

The ERM-2 processor uses the latest ERM-2 architecture. Compared with the previous ERM-1 architecture, the internal instruction set has been greatly improved and optimized. And in order to solve the problem that the memory speed cannot keep up with the processor speed, the ERM-2 processor also adds 4K off-chip cache, which greatly improves the computing power of the ERM-2 processor.

The processor is the most core component of a computer. But it's not just the processor that determines the overall performance of a computer. According to the short board theory, how much water a bucket can hold depends on the board with its shortest.

And the shortest board in the previous personal computer may be the memory. When ABC-3 was launched. Memory is not like the computers of later generations. It is inserted into a special memory slot in the form of a memory module, but the memory chip is soldered directly to the computer motherboard.

In the early days of the ABC-3, two solder joints were provided for solderable memory chips. If you choose the minimum configuration of 128K memory, it is usually soldered to two 64K chips. If you choose the highest configuration of 512K memory, you usually solder two 256K chips.

However, at the end of 1982, the R&D center of the Oriental Research Institute in Silicon Valley finally developed the SIMM interface after Li Xuan invested heavily in recruiting a number of experts.

The Chinese translation of SIMM is called Single Inline Memory Module. It is the integrated circuit board (memory module) that encapsulates one or more memory chips in a unified module, and then contains these modules. Connect with the motherboard through a dedicated slot.

The biggest advantage of this is that it is easy to upgrade the memory, and after the SIMM interface technology is fully mature, the later models of ABC-3 computers will begin to use memory module slots. However, the original SIMM interface was 30-pin, which could only support up to 16-bit processors.

On the newly launched ABC-5 computer, the SIMM interface has been upgraded to 72Pin, which can support 32-bit processors. Therefore, the ABC-5 computer can be said to be the world's first real 32-bit computer, it is equipped with ERM-2 processor has not been castrated, in order to give full play to the computing performance of the processor, the memory configuration of the computer is as high as 1M.

In addition, the ABC-5 computer is equipped with a separate sound card and graphics card, and the support for multimedia functions is greatly improved. In addition to the optical drive and hard disk, the ABC-5 computer also adds a new external device, a mouse, for the first time, to cooperate with the user in the visual graphical interface mode, making it easier to control the computer.

It can be said that the launch of the ABC-5 has once again made all the computers on the market obsolete! However, the new ABC-5 computer costs as much as $5,299, and its portable model, the ABC-P5, is as high as $5,499.

Relying on the special relationship with the Oriental Research Institute, Aikang has begun to develop the ABC-5 computer as early as the beginning of the development of the ERM-2 processor. Taking advantage of the fact that other computer manufacturers have not yet had time to launch new computers based on ERM-2 processors, Aikang naturally wants to rush to plunder profits at high prices when the competition is not fierce.

The ABC-5 computer is positioned in the high-end business market, and in fact, the more high-end the customer, the less sensitive it is to price. For example, the New York flagship store of the computer park company received a large order from Wall Street on the first day of the ABC-5 computer's launch.

Lehman Brothers is planning to purchase 200 ABC-5 computers to replace an aging batch of computers they are using. For a Wall Street giant like Lehman Brothers, the back-office department is most concerned with the performance and quality of the computer. As for whether the unit price of the computer is $4,000 or $5,000, it is not a big problem at all. Because of the extra $200,000 in equipment purchases. It's a drizzle for the Wall Street investment banks that are getting into the gold bucket at all.

Therefore, although the price of Aikang's new computer is high, Li Xuan is not worried that sales will be cold. First of all, before the launch of the new computer. Large-scale marketing has been done, which has fully mobilized the appetite of potential customers.

Secondly, although the price of the ABC-5 is high, it is better than you get what you pay for. The performance of the ABC-5 is already comparable to many low-end workstation computers on the market, which cost at least $10,000 or more.

The Executive MBA (Executive Master of Business Administration) is not taught on a full-time basis, and Columbia University uses a four-day intensive program once a month. One weekend plus two working days to minimize disruption to the daily work of the participants.

According to the different learning progress of each college, the duration of study is generally 18-20 months. Since Li Xuan has applied for the EMBA program of Columbia University. Naturally, I also hope that I can really learn some knowledge. As the size of the Eastern Bloc grows, so must his leadership become more efficient and invasive.

After finishing his classes in March, Li Xuan did not fly directly back to Hong Kong from New York, but went to San Francisco on the west coast. Several important subsidiaries of Dongfang Electronics. and the Group's North American headquarters are located in Silicon Valley.

He had just gotten off the plane when he got good news. The Oriental Research Institute has reached a strategic cooperation agreement with the American company Mostek. In fact, this cooperation was requested by the Mostek company. Previously, it participated in helping China to build a deep-sea microelectronics semiconductor wafer factory under the guidance of Oriental Trading, and its relationship with Oriental Group began to become close.

As the former leader of the memory market in the United States, Mostek has been miserable in the past three or four years. Under the pressure of the desperate price war of Japanese semiconductor companies, Mostek has fallen into the red for three consecutive quarters. A number of brokerage firms have even downgraded their stock ratings from hold to sell.

In such a grim situation, Mostek must launch a self-rescue operation. The previous participation in the project of Shenhai Microelectronics Company was actually part of the self-rescue action of hunger. But that's just a one-time fast food and doesn't really solve the crisis that the Mostek company is now ordering.

The global processor market is amid the irrational price cuts of Japanese companies. has become unprofitable. The emergence of the SIMM interface has given Mostek a glimmer of light. This means that memory chips will no longer be used directly on computers. Instead, it is packaged in a guò memory module and inserted into a dedicated slot on the motherboard.

Previously, the Oriental Research Institute obtained the authorization of dozens of pre-patents through cash purchase and other methods, and then cooperated with dozens of core patents and peripheral patents on SIMM interface applied for by itself, which has erected an iron wall on the patent of SIMM interface.

If other companies want to develop memory modules, it is impossible to completely bypass the patent barriers of the Oriental Research Institute. They either obediently obtained authorization from the Oriental Research Institute, or simply abandoned the SIMM interface and developed more advanced next-generation memory technology to replace it.

When the SIMM interface was first introduced, there was a lot of controversy in the industry. The first generation of 30-pin SIMM interfaces required four lines of memory to be inserted at the same time in order to work properly. Not only does this increase consumer spending on a single component of memory, but the excessive number of memory modules also increases hardware failure rates and maintenance costs.

Therefore, with the exception of Aikang, other computer companies did not immediately follow up with the use of SIMM interfaces on their own computers. However, with the advent of the second-generation 72-pin SIMM interface technology, not only the computing speed of the memory has been greatly improved, but also only two memory sticks need to be inserted to achieve normal operation.

People of insight can already see that the trend of replacing direct soldering memory chips on computers has become irreversible. As long as Mostek can obtain the relevant patent authorization of the SIMM interface from the Oriental Research Institute, he can effectively avoid the price war of Japanese companies in memory.

Because of the addition of memory chips to the memory module, the price war in the memory field is difficult to transmit to the memory module market. Because the Oriental Research Institute, which controls SIMM-related patents, is bound to not authorize its own patents without restraint.

That will only trigger a new memory module market, and fierce competition will immediately break out. In the end, the one who suffered the most was definitely the market boss of the Oriental Research Institute. At present, only the "Oriental" brand memory modules commissioned by the Oriental Research Institute to be manufactured by the Oriental Semiconductor Company are being sold. In the case of insufficient market competition, relying only on the orders of Aikang Company, the profit of the Oriental Research Institute on memory modules is also very good.

But Li Xuan is not prepared to swallow the entire memory market alone, because this could easily lead to antitrust investigations. But as Mostek suspected, he was not prepared to license a large number of SIMM patents.

Before Mostek came to the door, in fact, a number of Japanese companies had already begun to test the position of the Oriental Research Institute. Instead, the Oriental Institute reached an agreement with the American company Mostek. Because Mostek is in the worst position right now, they are also in the best position at the negotiating table.

The Oriental Research Institute did not ask for a huge royalty to Mostek, but hoped to exchange the SIMM patents for the basic patents in the field of memory held by Mostek.

After all, five years ago, Mostek was the largest semiconductor company in the United States. It holds a series of important basic patents, which can completely open the door for Oriental Research Institute to enter the memory market.

The current fierce price war in the memory market cannot continue forever. The memory market has always been the largest market in the entire semiconductor field, and Li Xuan is not willing to give up this piece of fat completely. If it fails to obtain sufficient basic patent licensing, the Oriental Group will greatly weaken the competitiveness of its products in the memory market by simply paying various royalties to other companies.

The person in charge of negotiating with Mostek was none other than Dr. Yu Youcheng, assistant director of the Oriental Research Institute. After Li Xuan arrived at the headquarters of the Oriental Group in Silicon Valley, he immediately learned about the situation from him.

"Now that Mostek has bowed its head, our negotiations with Toshiba and Hitachi can be tougher! Especially Toshiba, whose company is said to have a technician named Fujio Makuoka, has just invented a non-volatile star memory device.

I ask Toshiba to put this kind of related patents, called flash memory, in the list of SIMM patents to be exchanged!" Li Xuan said with a smile to Yu Youcheng.

The Oriental Research Institute is not short of money, so cash is not very attractive to Li Xuan. The reason why he chose to negotiate with Toshiba and Hitachi is because both companies are among the largest semiconductor companies in Japan and have a large number of technology patents of interest to the Oriental Research Institute.

"I have already spread the news that Mostek has reached a battle cooperation with us, and Toshiba immediately sent a fax that they are ready to send another director to Hong Kong as a new plenipotentiary to continue negotiations!"

Yu Youcheng nodded and continued, "It's not us who are in a hurry now, I will grind slowly with the Japanese, and strive to bite off two pieces of meat from Toshiba and Hitachi!"

"How did you talk to Ai Kang?" Li Xuan asked again.

SIMM's patents mainly include two parts, one is related to memory modules, and the other is socket-related patents. Li Xuan Equipment transferred all the patents for the design of the socket to Aikang, which became part of Aikang's new ABC-5 computer technology standard.

In the face of competition from compatible machine manufacturers, Aikang always has some hole cards, and the new ABC-5 technical standard will not be released for free, but will charge a certain patent fee. In this way, it can not only create a stable profit for Aikang, but also push up the cost of all other competitors, which can be described as killing two birds with one stone! (To be continued......