Jobs sat in the boss's chair in the president's office, his brow furrowed. It's been an eventful time for Apple lately, and everyone has not recovered from the joy of going public before they have been hit one after another.

The first was Wozniak, one of the company's three founders, who was killed in a plane crash. The private jet he was flying on crashed into a valley and he himself fell into a coma. After an examination by the hospital, the result was that the plane crashed and the impact caused him to suffer a violent concussion in the brain. Fortunately, he woke up soon and lost his memory only temporarily, but he was unable to recall the accident.

The blow of the plane crash was huge, and although he was physically fine after being discharged from the hospital, he had mental problems and applied directly to the company to start his leave. Wozniak's departure is a huge blow to Apple, among the three founders, Jobs and Markkula do not understand technology, only Wozniak is known as the technical soul of Apple.

Shortly after the Wozniak crash, Apple's CEO (CEO) began to lay off people again, firing 42 employees in one go, and also cutting many R&D projects. This plunged the entire Apple company into an atmosphere of panic and unease, and the stern zhòng hit morale.

One thing that most European and American technology companies have in common is that the controlling stake in the company is not in the hands of the founders. Because most companies have introduced rounds of venture capital in order to survive and grow in the early stages of development, the founders' equity has long been diluted to a relatively low percentage.

This is the case with Apple, where Steve Jobs, Makkula, and Wozniak together have less than 35% of the shares. And more equity is in the hands of venture capital. This prevents the founders from taking control of the company's development as they wish. For example, the "Lisa Machine" project that Steve Jobs was pushing forward before, wanted it to replace the existing Apple series.

But the CEO of the company was connected to the failure of the previous Apple 3 computer. It is necessary to increase the control of the company's production and research and development. So he used a trick to ask the board of directors to appoint Jobs as the new chairman. In fact, it was to transfer him out of the "Lisa Machine" project team and completely empty him.

This time, Jobs seized the opportunity of the CEO to go overboard and cause chaos within the company, and together with the other founder, Mark Kura, directly launched a motion on the board of directors to kick him out, and Mark Kura took over as CEO.

This is also a serious drawback of the dispersion of equity in European and American companies, and the founders and major shareholders often disagree. A company like Apple, which is still on the rise, should have worked together to make the company bigger and stronger, but it has spent a lot of energy in this intriguing civil unrest.

And something like Bill Gates's Microsoft empire never happened. Because the controlling stake in Microsoft is firmly in the hands of Gates himself, he is Microsoft's czar. Compared with Bill Gates, Bill Gates had at least Allen as a partner when he started his business, and Li Xuan was a sole proprietor who controlled the entire Dongfang Electronics Company.

They found a profit point in the early stage of the company's development, which was able to support the company's continued expansion, so they did not give venture capital the opportunity to intervene, and when the company went public, the controlling stake could still be in the hands of the founders. Coupled with the senior prestige built up in the course of the company's development, they are not afraid of the tail of the management. It's a matter of one sentence who you want to open.

Jobs looked at the text in his hand and couldn't help but be upset. This information is a detailed market research report made by Apple with a professional market research company. The results of the report show that Apple's Apple series of computers is rapidly losing competitiveness in the market. And all the fingers are pointed at a British company - Aikang Computer.

This emerging computer company, which has just risen for more than half a year, has a market positioning very similar to Apple. Its two models of computers, ABC-1 and ABC-2, are rapidly seizing the market share that originally belonged to Apple. Especially in the school education computer market. This field, once dominated by Apple, is now being rapidly replaced by ABC computers. Aikang company caters to campus computer teaching. The specially launched networking solution is very popular with teachers.

Jobs couldn't help but curse in his heart. He didn't have time to enjoy the joy of kicking out the annoying former CEO, and he had to face a very tough sales situation just after regaining power.

He picked up another piece of information, which was a computer research and development project that Apple was working on, called "Metakin". The project was originally led by a technician named Larkins, who planned to develop a small, inexpensive, and practical product for the mass market. Last Christmas, the R&D team selected the MC68000 processor as the core CPU and successfully developed the first "Metakin" prototype. The Mackin computer runs twice as fast as the prototype of the "Lisa Machine" project that Steve Jobs personally presided over, but it costs only $370 to build.

Jobs kept tapping his hand on the table, and he was lost in thought. After a long while, Boss Qiao's eyes became sharper and sharper, and he finally made a decision. He personally took charge of the "Metakin" project, which will serve as the company's next-generation personal computer, and gather all the strength of the entire Apple company to develop it.

Li Xuan didn't know that Jobs was defeated by Aikang's ABC computer because of the Apple computer at this time, and made a new decision to develop a new computer. The English name of "Metakin" is Macintosh, or Mac computer for short. That's right, this is the first Mac computer, and it is also the second personal computer with a graphical user interface, and the first is naturally another Apple personal computer product that was launched one step ahead of it - the "Lisa machine".

However, the graphical user interface was not so easy to develop, and the prototype of the "Metakin" computer was developed as early as the end of 1980, but it was not actually launched until 1984. The main reason for this is that the development schedule of the operating system has greatly slowed down the progress of the entire project.

In fact, as early as after the development of the East-DOS operating system, Li Xuan asked Dongfang Software Company to start developing a graphical interface operating system. Apple's graphical interface technology is derived from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PALC). In order to obtain technical support from the Palo Alto Research Center, Jobs also agreed to Xerox to buy a stake in Apple at a lower price.

But Dongfang Software Company naturally does not need to pay this price, although Li Xuan was not engaged in software development in his previous life, he also has a certain understanding of graphical interfaces. If you ask Li Xuan to develop a complete Windows system by himself, he will definitely not be able to do it. But let him develop a research and development outline for the early window system for the project research and development team, and he can still do it. As for the specific difficulties to overcome, there will be a large number of technical engineers in the software company to solve them one by one with wisdom and time.

The Metagin project can be said to be Apple's only lifesaver in the entire eighties, except for the Apple series of computers. But Li Xuan is really not worried about this, the future computer field is the era of compatible machines, and Apple's closed system can only be a niche product.

"Little Li Sheng, the American market is too terrifying!" Du Wenqiang walked into Li Xuan's office, although he said so, there was only surprise and no fright on his face, he smiled and handed Li Xuan a statistical form, "In just one month, our three game discs have sold 1.15 million copies!"

A month ago, the CP/M OS versions of the three arcade games, "Hong Kong Cubes", "Tank Wars" and "Pac-Man", were finally available on the game floppy disk. As early as when the ABC computer was launched, the Oriental Games Company randomly issued game floppy disks, but that could only run on the East-DOS operating system of the ABC computer.

This was also a small trick for Li Xuan to attract potential computer users to buy ABC computers at that time. Although more than 100,000 units have been sold since the ABC computer went on sale in August last year, it still only accounts for a small part of the total PC sales. A large number of new and previously sold computers still use the CP/M operating system.

Naturally, it is impossible for Oriental Games to give up such a large market. The ABC computer has been on the market for half a year, and the game's sales drive for the computer is almost negligible. Therefore, Dongfang Games decisively began to release CP/M operating system version of game software to enter the market and grab money.

Li Xuan took the statistical sheet and glanced at it, and said with a smile: "The total number of computers sold in the US market last year was as high as one million, and the total number of computers owned was at least several million. Only Americans can boast that they have stepped into the door of the computer age! With such a deep market foundation, it is normal for a good game to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, after all, the price of a floppy disc is only $9.9!"

Originally, the three games "Tank Wars", "Hong Kong Cubes" and "Pac-Man" had the worst watch in the arcade than "Hong Kong Cubes". But when it comes to floppy disk sales, Hong Kong Cubes leads the way with 550,000 copies, almost as much as the other two games combined.

This also has to do with the simplicity of the Hong Kong Blocks game, even the most rudimentary low-end computers with only a few kilobytes of RAM can run smoothly when you buy a floppy disk for the simple version of the game.

A gaming floppy disk costs less than $1 to manufacture, while Oriental Games ships to distributors for $4.5. In other words, the net profit of these three game discs is as high as 4 million US dollars a month.

So the software industry is the real profiteering industry, but all companies in this era are still eyeing hardware. The importance of software has not really been taken seriously, which Li Xuan has to admire Bill Gates's vision.

According to the information collected by Dongfang Electronics, Mr. Gates has indeed hugged IBM's big thick legs and is working hard in Seattle to revise the QDOS operating system he bought from others. (To be continued......)