At two o'clock in the afternoon, Eric and Caroline arrived at the café on time, where Roger Wilson was already waiting. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

Roger Wilson was about forty years old, tall, dressed in a light gray suit, rimless glasses, and meticulously combed with his hair, without the raunchy appearance of a technical engineer.

After politely introducing each other, find a place to sit down.

After ordering coffee and waiting for the waiter to leave, Roger Wilson looked at Eric without a trace and said, "Mr. Williams, is the filming of 007 going well, everyone is looking forward to it?"

Eric nodded and said, "Of course, everything is going well, and, Roger, you can call me Eric." ”

"Well, Eric," Roger Wilson nodded with a smile, "actually, we were very surprised to learn that you were interested in Arm. ”

Eric smiled, after all, the other party was still an engineer who focused on technology, and he began to take the initiative to enter the topic so quickly.

The waiter brought the coffee, and Eric paused slightly, waiting for the other party to leave again, and then said: "I have always been very interested in the IT field, and in my opinion, Arm technology has a very wide range of application prospects, so I asked Caroline to collect technical information about Arm." ”

Roger Wilson thought for a moment and said, "Eric, can I know what you expect from Arm?"

"Of course," Eric nodded, looking at Caroline.

The girl took a Newton tablet out of her bag and placed it on the table.

Eric opened the tablet and said, "I want to be able to buy Arm and continue to focus on the development of application software chips." ”

If you want to buy Arm, you need a reasonable reason after all, otherwise Arm's technical team will not be able to follow a purposeless boss.

Eric's purpose in buying ARM is very simple, in order to prevent the widespread spread of ARM technology, and even cut off the licensing of technology from possible competitors.

But the reason for this monopoly is certainly not humane.

As for the research and development of mobile phone chips, Eric already has Nokia and Qualcomm in its hands, as long as these two companies are fully authorized by ARM technology, their R&D strength in mobile phone chips is definitely far greater than that of ARM itself.

After careful consideration, Eric set his sights on the tablet.

Roger Wilson took the Newton tablet from Eric's hand, briefly operated it a few times, but his expression was a little gloomy, and said: "Eric, I had a phone call with Mr. John Scully, Apple's CEO, last time, and they may stop the production of Newton tablets next year, so this product should be regarded as a failure." ”

Roger Wilson's subtext is clearly that Eric's choice to develop a tablet PDA was not a wise move.

But Eric disagreed with Roger Wilson, saying, "Roger, Newton is a very good product in its own right, and the reason why it failed was that it didn't find its right price and market positioning. According to the information I have gathered, the overall shipment of the handheld computer market has reached 3 million units last year, and in the first half of this year, this number has reached 2.6 million, so it can be said that this is a very fast-growing market. ”

Roger Wilson quickly calculated that, if Eric was right, at an average $500 price, the tablet market would be around $2.5 billion this year. While this figure is insignificant compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars in the PC market, it is enough to prove the value of the existence of tablets.

Arm was founded to develop processors for Apple's Newton tablets, and Roger Wilson and most of Arm's engineers still have a lot of feelings for tablets.

After thinking about it, Roger Wilson said, "So, Eric, what kind of tablet do you want to build?"

"I'm planning to make this tablet a hardware peripheral for Yahoo Network," Eric said. If we can work together, Arm will be responsible for the development of the chip, and Yahoo will develop a dedicated operating system for the tablet, integrating Yahoo's browser, instant messaging, email and other services into the tablet. I wanted this product to be more entertaining and practical, not only to connect to the internet, but also to read books, listen to music, and so on. ”

"According to you, this is actually a mini handheld PC terminal," said Roger Wilson, "But, Eric, have you ever thought about how to connect to the Internet, the biggest advantage of a tablet is mobility, you can use it anywhere, but if you have to drag a long network cable around in order to use the network, I think most people will think that this is not as convenient as a laptop." ”

"This is very easy to solve," Eric said with a smile: "At the beginning of this year, I happened to let Firefly Electronics buy a complete patent for wireless LAN technology, called wifi, this technology can realize the connection between terminal equipment and the Internet in a short distance, although the transmission distance is only a few tens of meters, but it is enough to meet the requirements of a person to use the Internet at will in their own home or company area." ”

"It seems very similar to Ericsson's Bluetooth technology," says Roger Wilson, "but, Eric, we might be able to integrate WiFi technology into a tablet, but where does the signal come from?"

Wireless routing with integrated WiFi technology will not begin to rise until ten years later, although Firefly controls a large amount of equity in Cisco, but Cisco's main business area is the enterprise-level router market, and does not involve a wide range of personal consumption terminals, and Eric will not deliberately interfere with Cisco's business ideas.

Since Cisco can't help with this, it's hard for Eric to use the power of Fireflies to push other router companies to develop wireless routers.

However, this problem is not difficult to solve.

"As long as a person has access to the Internet in their home, it's very easy to create a source of transmission, or call it a 'hotspot,'" Eric said. We only need to equip this tablet with a peripheral with a WiFi technology chip and a signal transmitter, compared to the price of a tablet that can easily cost hundreds of dollars, this mini WiFi signal transmitter may only cost ten dollars to make, so just like a tablet charger, it will not cause too much burden on its overall cost and selling price, and it is very feasible. (To be continued.) )