After Gates left, Eric and Chris discussed what had just happened on the phone before pushing the door and walking into Carmen Keys's bedroom.

The girl was lying on the bed looking through a document when she felt Eric come in, turned her head and smiled at the man, "It's noisy." ”

"That's the kind of person," Eric said as he walked over and lay down on his side next to Carmen Keys, reached out to pull away the girl's blonde hair, pulled out a headphone and stuffed it into his ear, "What are you looking at?"

The headphone cord was a little short, and Carmen moved towards Eric's side and said, "Versace's endorsement contract." ”

With the success of Dior's Golden Goddess advertisement, Carmen has become the supermodel with the fastest rising momentum in the past six months, and even got the cover of the most important September issue of the recent American version of "VOGUE".

When Eric heard Versace's name, he casually asked, "Women's clothing or other product lines?"

"Women's clothing," Carmen said as she handed the contract to Eric with an inquiring look in her eyes, "Paul said I can actually wait, maybe I can get the endorsement of the Big Six." However, the conditions offered by Versace are also very good. ”

The so-called six major brands refer to the six luxury brands of Dior, Prada, Chanel, LV, Gucci, and CK, also known as the six blue bloods. Brands such as Versace, Givenchy, and Hermes are slightly less stylish.

Eric took the contract and flipped through the two pages, saying, "Actually, it depends on what you're after." If you want to style, you will definitely make less money, and if you want to make money, you can only let go of these. The more high-end the brand, the more stingy it is in terms of endorsement fees. ”

"Then I'll take it. ”

She said in such a relaxed tone, but she looked carefully at the man next to her. In his heart, he hopes to make more money, but he doesn't want to be regarded by him as a woman who only knows how to make money.

Before she knew it, she found herself more and more concerned about what he thought of her.

Eric looked at the girl's expression, with a slightly penetrating smile on the corner of his mouth, and said: "Actually, Versace's style is still very suitable for you, ordinary girls can't support their design style with exaggerated designs and strong lines, you can pick a few more to wear for me when the time comes." ”

Realizing that Eric had seen through her thoughts, she was a little embarrassed to avoid the man's gaze, and then she hummed softly.

After a little experience of your eye game of chasing me, Eric finally reached out to hold Carmen's face and turned to himself, looked at the girl with a little accusatory expression like you didn't follow the rules, and said, "So, you must already know, I'm going to buy IMG and Elite right away." ”

With the girl's stubborn nature, Eric knew that if he didn't take the initiative to bring it up, she wouldn't ask about it anyway.

Hearing Eric say this, her eyes flashed, but she didn't speak, just waited for the man to continue.

Suddenly attracted by the girl's beautiful sapphire eyes, Eric reached over and carefully ran over the edges of her long eyelashes, feeling a row of small soft brushes sweeping quickly across his fingertips.

She pursed the corners of her lips in feigned dissatisfaction, still motionless to savor the man's sudden intimacy. When Eric withdrew his hand, she leaned forward, probed again, and finally kissed the man on the lips.

September was the time of the four major fashion weeks, New York Fashion Week was over, and Carmen flew to London the next day, and the two did not talk about IMG and Elite again.

In fact, the scale of Company M is very small after all, and even if Eric wins IMG and Elite at the same time, it will not limit the development of Company M.

In contrast, it is Ford, DNA and other modeling agencies in the same industry that feel more pressure on Eric to acquire IMG and Elite at the same time, these same first-line model agencies have been firmly suppressed by IMG and Elite, and now, with the support of the huge media resources of the Firefly system, it is even more difficult for them to get ahead.

However, although it was inevitable in the media that Eric acquired the two major brokerage companies at the same time, until the end of the equity transfer agreement between Eric and IMG and Elite shareholders, no one jumped out to publicly oppose this matter due to various considerations or fears.

Of course, in order to avoid unnecessary disputes that may arise in the future, after buying the two major agencies, Eric also quickly dealt with some agency contracts involving Hollywood.

Many models often have actor agencies in Hollywood, like Diane Kruger, whose achievements as an actor have faintly surpassed her modeling career in the past two years. For this kind of artist who develops as a model and actor, the two major agencies have also begun to draw up relevant contracts in order to straighten out the agency terms that may conflict.

Moreover, Eric is not too worried about disputes in this regard.

After all, unless someone is deliberately looking for trouble, he doesn't believe a model would jump out and make trouble regardless of his career. Whether it is in the fashion industry or Hollywood, with the current strength of the Firefly system, even if it is a supermodel, it is absolutely easy for Eric to make the other party completely disappear from the industry.

After taking over the two major agencies, Eric's affairs in New York were basically over, and he flew back to Hollywood in mid-September.

At the same time, after the collapse of the negotiation with Eric again, Microsoft also quickly launched a counterattack against the Firefly system, demanding that Yahoo stop the continued promotion of the mini music store device on the grounds that the mini music store device was suspected of infringing Microsoft's patents in terms of operating system.

However, compared with a series of core patents held by Firefly System, the evidence of Microsoft's lawsuit is only some marginal patents related to software form factor design.

The difference between the two is equivalent to the load-bearing foundation and porcelain tile decoration of a house. A house that cannot be built smoothly without a foundation and load-bearing, but decorations such as exterior porcelain tiles seem insignificant. Even if it's out of place, you can swap it out at any time.

As a result, Microsoft's lawsuit is not very offensive to the Firefly system at all.

On the contrary, without the authorization of the core patent of the Firefly system, At-Home had to shut down its search engine tools and advertising distribution system, and Microsoft's Zune player was destined to fail to be successfully launched.

Moreover, in the face of Microsoft's lawsuit, Firefly also reacted immediately.

Firefly Investment publicly announced that it will spend $500 million to increase its stake in Apple to about 30%.

In the past two years, although Apple's business has improved with the return of Steve Jobs, it is still unsatisfactory overall, and its market value has never exceeded $3 billion. With the collapse of the NASDAQ some time ago, Apple's market value once again hit the bottom of $2 billion.

As a result, Firefly Investments has easily reabsorbed about 7% of the shares from the public market when it makes a public announcement, bringing Firefly Investment's stake in Apple to 19%. Moreover, about 7% of the stocks only cost Firefly $150 million of investment.

Although Apple's stock price rose sharply after the news was announced, Jobs was like a big enemy, directly called Eric to ask about the intentions of Firefly Investment, and habitually threatened to resign, demanding that Firefly Investment not interfere in Apple's management.

At the point of not being necessary, Eric really didn't have any intention of meddling in Apple.

However, Eric did not hide his intentions from Jobs, admitting that the Firefly system needs Apple's patent support in the operating system. Despite his dissatisfaction, Jobs agreed to license a series of patents to the Indos system to Firefly Electronics at the same time.

In fact, Eric has not thought about continuing to support Apple to develop according to its original trajectory. However, after careful consideration, Eric gave up on the idea. The root cause is still with Steve Jobs.

There is no doubt that Jobs was a very talented person, but at the same time, Jobs's stubbornness will greatly affect the smooth development of Apple.

In Apple's original historical trajectory, Jobs can be said to have 'left' Apple twice, once because he was fired from the board of directors, and once because he died. And it is an obvious fact that although Jobs laid a deep foundation for Apple twice, Apple's profits exploded after Jobs 'left'.

In the case of the former iPod series of players, Apple released this product in 2001, but due to Jobs' stubborn closed-door strategy of only allowing the iPod to run on Apple's operating system, nearly four years were wasted.

It wasn't until 2005, when Steve Jobs finally defied the unanimous opinion of the board of directors and management and announced that the iPod was open to the indos system, that sales of the product finally began to explode. But at that time, with the popularity of portable electronic devices such as music mobile phones, the iPod had already missed the best opportunity to expand, and even began to decline.

As for the later iPhone, it is not difficult to imagine that if Jobs had not passed away, with his stubborn character, Apple would definitely not have made such flexible changes when the trend of large screens of smartphones became more and more obvious, and the iPhone was likely to continue to adhere to the 3.5-inch small screen strategy.

Then, in the era of rapid development of smartphones, the industry obviously will not give Apple another four years to change its concept like the iPod. Once Apple's mobile phone continues to adhere to the small-screen strategy, and the Android system comes from behind, the final result can only be that the iPhone is once again like Apple's other products, gradually reduced to high-end niche electronic products.

At the end of the day, Jobs' character doomed him to success, but it also doomed him to failure.

With Eric's return to Los Angeles, the curtain of the 1999 TV series fall season also kicked off.

The ABC network's main attraction this autumn is "American Idol," which has been carefully prepared for a year.

Speaking of which, despite the success of the British version of "Pop Idol", at first, ABC Group executives were not so confident that "American Idol" would be able to adapt to the North American market environment. Some executives have also proposed that the first season of "American Idol" be aired in the summer slot in June, so that even if the show fails in ratings, it will not be too badly damaged.

Eric also knows that the traditional four major public television stations have become more and more conservative, and this is mainly because the network's top management is worried about the loss of ratings and takes responsibility, after all, the failure of a focused program often means that the network will have sluggish ratings at a certain time in the next two quarters.

Of course, Eric naturally did not accept the conservative strategy of the network's top brass, but insisted on putting "American Idol" in the autumn file. Since the big boss personally made the decision, there were many fewer voices of opposition.

In any case, even if it fails, the responsibility is borne by Eric himself, even if he wants to pull out an executive to take the blame, but if he wants to take the blame for the boss, there are really not too few people who are willing to do so.

However, the ratings performance of this singer selection reality show ended up surprising many people's expectations, and even better than Eric imagined.

The series premiered on September 16, and due to the full publicity in advance, the number of viewers of the series exceeded 19 million. Moreover, the ratings of the first episode that followed did not show a traditional downward trend, but went all the way up.

In the end, the average viewership of the first episode of "American Idol" reached 22.3 million, and the ratings of the first episode were as high as 26 million near the end of the first episode.

Although it failed to create the ratings miracle of the two reality shows "Who Will Be a Millionaire" and "Survivor", in recent years, when the cable network has continued to expand and continue to eat away at the market share of public television networks, a reality show that can exceed 20 million viewers is definitely very successful.

At the same time, the success of "American Idol" also successfully made up for the loss of popularity caused by the ABC television network due to the end of "Friends".

While the ratings of "Survivor" and "ER" have also begun to decline in recent years, the rise of "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "American Idol" is enough to push ABC's ratings to the top of the four major television networks.

With the release of "American Idol", the popular autumn dramas of the entire Firefly system TV platform have also begun to return to the upper echelons one after another.

The three main hits of Lifetime TV, "American Supermodel Competition", "Lust City", and "Flyover Pride" have maintained very bright ratings. Series such as "Desperate Housewives," "Beverly Wives" and "Beverly Girls" on several MGM-owned TV stations have also performed well. FFM TV's "Kurodo Family" once again set a new high in ratings after the return of the new season.

In addition, the highly anticipated new drama "Shameless" on Shotime TV was finally launched on September 21.

The premiere viewership of "Shameless" ended up being 1.7 million, and as a paid cable TV series, such a rating performance reached a satisfactory level.

Moreover, "Shameless" also quickly became the focus of criticism in the world.

You must know that before "Shameless", the mainstream dramas of North American television basically reflected the life of the mainstream middle class in the United States, but the number of dramas that directly depicted the state of the people at the bottom of the American society with a very low proportion was very small.

At the same time, the kind of naked-back description of the values of the low-level little people in order to survive has almost no traditional concept of right and wrong, which also has a very strong impact on many people.

Perhaps this performance is too drastic, and although the critics have mainly positive reviews of the series itself, most critics have also taken an unabashedly critical attitude towards the values displayed in "Shameless".