"Hyde, I have invested more than $300 million in AOL! You MCI wants to buy it wholly for $200 million, which is impossible! Not to mention that this is not a matter that you can negotiate by raising the offer!"

Li Xuan saw that Hyde Walker wanted to interject, and waved his hand at him to listen to him, "My expectations for the future of AOL are far beyond the imagination of you and the other management of MCI! In my opinion, the next ten years will be a great transition period for the world to the information age.

The significance of the Internet to mankind is like a steam engine 150 years ago, just like an electric light 150 years ago, and it will once again bring earth-shaking changes to the entire human race! AOL's future will be a giant company with a market value of more than 10 billion or even 100 billion dollars! What price do you think MCI will pay now to move me to sell AOL?

Li Xuan had a faint smile on his face, but Walker, the CEO of MCI, seemed to feel the surging pressure. Although since last year, the current vice president, Mr. Bush Sr., who is also the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, has begun to advocate the "information superhighway" plan, so that Internet surfing has become a fashionable new word that has swept the United States for a while.

However, it is really enough to foresee that the Internet can develop to the point of completely changing the entire world in less than ten years, and it is estimated that in addition to Li Xuan, a reborn person, only the most optimistic prophets will whimsically think so! Walker originally thought that MCI's bid of $200 million was already very sincere for AOL.

In fact, even if it is an offer of $200 million. There has been a lot of controversy within MCI. After all, AOL has been losing money since its inception, and no one knows how much money it needs to throw into it. Walker also cited AOL as the nation's No. 1 online web service company with more than 2 million subscribers. barely suppressed the opposition.

Since MCI has invested heavily in laying fiber optic cables across the United States, it is natural to maximize profits. If the local call service is MCI's present, then Internet services are MCI's future. Because of the large-scale infrastructure investment in the past two years, MCI's financial statements are not good-looking, and at this time, Walker needs the gimmick of the Internet to increase the imagination of shareholders for the future.

"Hyde, this is Hong Kong Telecom and Hong Kong ATV Media Group. An online portal that was established not long ago!" Li Xuan was receiving Hyde Walker in his study, and after he finished speaking, he casually opened the computer on the table, and then broke the monitor. The screen is pointed at the guest sitting across from them.

Walker didn't understand what the boss meant, but he was still focused on the site in front of him. Although Walker can't read the Chinese characters on the screen, its layout is somewhat similar to AOL's homepage. And Li Xuan's subsequent explanation. It also confirmed his conjecture.

"It is a comprehensive information website that provides real-time online updates on all kinds of important news in Hong Kong and around the world. In a way, it's somewhat similar to the news service offered by AOL. The biggest difference between the two is that the 'Voice of Asia' site is completely free and generates revenue through advertising on the page!"

Li Xuan continued to explain in detail, "AOL has defined itself as a network access service provider for the past few years. In the eyes of outsiders, in order to attract users to use its own network services, AOL has specially developed a virtual community with all-encompassing content, providing users with online chat, news, games and other content!

But AOL itself is not a basic telecom operator. He needs to rent a telecommunications network like MCI. Therefore, if a basic operator like your MCI company also ends up directly, then third-party companies such as AOL will naturally be at a natural disadvantage in terms of cost!

I'm sure you're aware of that, too. From this point of view, the merger of MCI and AOL is a mutually beneficial and win-win situation.

However, I never thought of positioning AOL as a provider of Internet access services, which was a choice that had to be taken in the early days of the Internet in the United States, where users were scarce. Computer penetration in Hong Kong is far less than in the United States, and many families cannot afford such expensive appliances. However, due to its small size, Hong Kong is ahead of the United States in terms of infrastructure network construction, and the resulting Internet development speed has surpassed that of the United States!

For example, the average daily number of hits on this 'Voice of Asia' website has exceeded 5 million, which is equivalent to every Hong Kong person browsing this website once a day!

AOL is still using the model of charging users a monthly service fee, but 'Voice of Asia' has created a new business model of using free content to attract views, and then discounting these traffic through advertising fees!

With the continuous improvement of network communication facilities in the United States, the 'Voice of Hong Kong' model is the next direction of AOL's transformation, and it will strive to become a great Internet content provider! AOL's main business now -- network access services -- can be sold to MCI.

Because this is what basic communication operators should do, but you didn't look down on this bit of mosquito leg meat before! And now if MCI can increase 2 million network users at once and become the largest network service operator in the United States, it will be an excellent opportunity for the company to boost the confidence of shareholders!"

Li Xuan said a lot, which made Walker's eyes brighter and brighter. However, he also had some doubts, if AOL sold this part of the network service business, then it would basically be just an empty shelf, and what was the difference between being acquired by MCI.

However, Li Xuan's next words quickly solved his doubts: "Of course, to put it simply, what AOL sells is actually the information of its 2 million Internet users. The AOL community, which was originally used as a value-added service to attract users to the network, will be converted to a free and open state!"

in another time and space. AOL's model of providing basic Internet services with a monthly subscription fee has obvious advantages in the early stage of the development of Internet content. So the pinnacle of AOL was actually the nineties. In particular, the merger with Time Warner at the turn of the century inflated, allowing AOL to inflate its bubble to the maximum. Since then, it has collapsed, and after the dot-com bubble burst, the market value has fallen to a fraction of its peak. And AOL is no longer the star company of the American Internet industry in the early 90s.

Therefore, Li Xuan is ready to take Yahoo's traffic monetization advertising fee model in advance, and the reason why Yahoo in later generations has become a second-rate company is actually due to its own decision-making mistakes. At the very least, its traffic monetized advertising fees allowed it to successfully make a profit during the cold period when the dot-com bubble burst. Its failure stemmed from missing out on the search business it was built on. Thus allowed Google to rise successfully.

Because of the butterfly wings instigated by Li Xuan, the American Internet in 1988 was actually similar to 1992 in another time and space. Internet surfing has become a fashionable hot topic in the whole society, and the technical and political preparations for the take-off of the Internet are ready. For example, the graphic browser has appeared, and the half-foot and the next US president who has stepped into the White House are vigorously advocating.

AOL's network services business is valued at least $150 million. If AOL sells the business to MCI, the cash proceeds will be enough to last it three or four years. You must know that the reason why AOL has suffered large-scale losses in recent years. The main reason is that the cost of developing a new user is much higher than the monthly service fee charged to the user.

AOL actually relies on Li Xuan's style of local tyrants who are not bad for money and can afford to lose money. As a result, it only took four years to accumulate 2 million users and become the largest network service company in the United States.

If you only count the investment in AOL in recent years, Li Xuan sold his main business with 150 million US dollars, and this transaction will lose at least 100 million. However, Li Xuan used $100 million to accelerate the growth of the U.S. Internet industry, and also established the AOL community as the largest online access address in the United States, laying a good foundation for the next step of transformation into a web portal. These potential benefits allow Li Xuan to reap billions or even tens of billions of dollars in returns in the future. So he didn't lose at all......

What's more, Li Xuan also has a big killer weapon in his hand, and now he is on every computer that uses the Dongfang system software. will come pre-installed with a graphical browser. Next, the default homepage of the graphical browser will be set to the homepage of the AOL website. If AOL can't become a big player in the Internet era with such an advantage of time and place, then Li Xuan simply went to find a piece of tofu and killed him.

Hyde Walker came to Hong Kong on behalf of MCI, and in addition to having a heartfelt conversation with the boss behind the scenes, there were many other things to do. For example, MCI and Hong Kong Telecom are both telecom infrastructure operators, and the two companies have many things to learn from each other. In terms of scale, Hong Kong Telecom is naturally far inferior to MCI. However, its experience in emerging fields such as mobile communications and the Internet is worth learning from MCI.

Hyde Walker nominally negotiated with China Renaissance to build a pilot CDMA network in the United States. The main point of disagreement between the two sides in this matter is that Huaxing hopes to build four test sites in one go, namely Los Angeles and San Francisco on the West Coast, and New York and Washington on the East Coast.

MCI's mobile communications business layout is still mainly located in the West Coast and Southwest States, and has just begun to deploy on the East Coast. Therefore, if the experimental sites were to be built in New York and Washington, MCI would not be able to leverage the existing foundation, and everything would have to start from scratch, so the investment would be much larger.

New York, as the economic center of the United States, and Washington as the political center of the United States, both of which are battlegrounds for Huaxing to promote the CDMA network in the United States. If the CDMA network can succeed in these two places, it will undoubtedly help it to gain official recognition in the United States in the future.

After Huaxing agreed to make concessions and increase the proportion of the cost of building the CDMA network pilot, Hyde Walker signed a cooperation agreement on behalf of MCI.

During his subsequent trip to Hong Kong, he discovered an industry that was unique to Hong Kong. Of course, this industry is very familiar to Chinese netizens in the future market - Internet cafes. That's right, in 1988, there were Internet cafes on the streets of Hong Kong.

In fact, Hong Kong today has a lot in common with the mainland in the late 90s. For example, after several decades of economic take-off, although there has been great development, it has not yet achieved the point where everyone is rich. Compared with the price of ordinary families, the price of computers is still an expensive luxury.

Many families couldn't afford computers, but computers had become a fashionable thing, so the timeshare model quickly emerged. The Internet cafes that appear on the streets of Hong Kong today are actually more like the computer labs that appeared in China in the late 90s.

Because most of the computers inside are not connected to the Internet, most players use them to play games. It's just that Chinese netizens in the late nineties played games such as "Red Alert", "StarCraft", and "Warcraft". And now I play a stand-alone game that Oriental Games just launched not long ago - "The Lord of the Rings".

This single-player RPG adaptation of Tolkien's novel of the same name has finally hit the market after much waiting, instantly conquering computer game fans around the world. To say that the level of this "Lord of the Rings" RPG stand-alone game is similar to "The Legend of Sword and Fairy" released by Daewoo in 1995 in another time and space.

But for fans of the 1988 game, it's an epoch-making masterpiece. Of course, due to the elaboration of the game, the requirements for the console configuration are also quite high, and the latest ABC-6 computer is required to run.

The ABC-6 computer sells for as much as HK$30,000 or 40,000 in Hong Kong, and many gamers who can't afford it, or who already have an old computer at home and are reluctant to replace it, naturally flock to Internet cafes to see the world's best computer game.

Not long ago, Oriental Commercial Co., Ltd. made a statistic that the number of newly opened Internet cafes and computer rooms in Hong Kong has increased to 22, and the total number of ABC-6 computing units purchased has reached 2,000. It accounts for one-third of the total sales of ABC-6 in Hong Kong since its launch. In the future, new Internet cafes will continue to be opened, and when this market reaches saturation, it will bring at least 10,000 units of ABC-6 sales to Aikang.

In regions such as the United States and Europe, there are no Internet cafes similar to Hong Kong for the time being, but the increase in ABC-6 sales brought by the launch of the "Lord of the Rings" game should not be underestimated. It can be said that Li Xuan's idea of using high-end games to drive the upgrading of computer configuration has achieved remarkable results!

Of course, Walker's focus is on the computers in the Internet café that can be connected to the Internet, and these computers are also not allowed to sit idle for a moment. And these computers can do even more colorful work, or chat with friends in the city who have never met but have been friends for a long time in the virtual community. Or post some of your own comments, essays, and travelogues on your personal homepage. Or browse the global news on Voice of Asia that was updated just a few seconds ago! )