"Stephen, why are you looking for me all of a sudden? In a while, there will be a coordination meeting for the distribution of new products in various district markets to participate, which is very urgent. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo”

A white-haired man with a square head and a square face unceremoniously pushed open the door of Steve Jobs' office and walked in with a big grin.

His aura was so steady and calm that even if there were onlookers at the moment, it would be difficult to feel rude to his actions.

This person is none other than Tim Cook, the COO of Apple.

If Jobs is the soul of Apple, he is only responsible for whimsical and willful; Tim Cook is the big butler who fills the gaps, responsible for helping Jobs fill in the shortcomings left by his imagination.

Cook has been at IBM for 12 years and is from a professional background; Jobs may not be able to do Jobs's spiritual vision, but he is a rule-abiding master, when Jobs is making mobile phones and iPods, no matter what strange ideas he comes up with, no matter how strange the supplier cooperation methods are needed, Cook can help Jobs get the supply chain through the beginning to the end.

Perhaps, when any IT group has a CEO who walks the whimsical "Dugu Nine Swords" stream, it will be equipped with a COO who practices the "Tai Chi Swordsmanship" of "Circle and Wishful Flow, Continuous and Fine".

Just like Gu Mojie's side, he also needs a "big housekeeper" like Ye Weilun or Lei Jun, who is either good at integrating external traffic resources of the Internet, or good at integrating the hardware supply chain with Internet thinking.

"Market Coordination Council? That kind of thing is not in a hurry, sit. Jobs coughed lightly twice and gestured to the seat in front of him.

Cook, the number one in the universe, sat down with a wry smile.

Jobs organized his tone and said in a demeanor as light as possible: "I think we may have to make a set of alternative plans for the shipment coordination of the Chinese market." In the event of excess capacity, it is necessary to guide it to the Middle East or other target markets in a timely manner. to cope with a possible decline in sales. ”

"But how? I mean, how can there be 'bad sales' in the Chinese market? Cook couldn't sit still for a moment, lifted his glasses, spread his hands and continued:

"The Chinese market is the main sales growth point we are aiming for this year, and we have made a perfect plan - do we have to put up with more than 20 million units a year? The original intention of the Chinese is the first generation, and the total sales last year were a little higher than ours. ”

Compared with Hatsune Smart's mobile phone shipments, in absolute terms, Apple's performance last year was not superior.

However, if you count the profit margin and gold content, the annual sales of more than 20 million units of iPhone-3G are still much higher than the 30 million gold content of Chuxin 1 - first of all, the profit of a single machine is high, and secondly, the market faced by iPhone-3G is only one-third of the population size of the original market.

At that time, only the American countries and the United Kingdom introduced the iPhone-3G, and other European countries were still waiting to wait for the penetration to begin this year.

Apple has great expectations for the iPhone 4. At the end of last year, when Jobs and Cook had a meeting, they set a new sales target of "50 million and 70 million" in 2010.

You must know that "50 million" has doubled the sales volume in 2009. If a company dares to double the ticket directly, and just takes doubling as the bottom goal, you can see how confident they are in the new product.

The first generation of iPhone and iPhone-3G are to accumulate ecology for the iOS operating system, in order to attract more application software vendors into the pit and provide enough apps for the iOS ecosystem.

The iPhone 4 is the first generation of "market reaper" after the APP ecology is formed.

Just like the bacterial strains in a petri dish, they do not multiply and skyrocket immediately after being put into the culture medium, but must first secrete enough secretions, adjust the pH, and the environment, and then suddenly skyrocket.

The former is called the "adjustment period" and the latter is called the "exponential period".

iPhone 4 is the "exponential period" of the iPhone ecosystem that Apple is looking forward to.

"Don't worry, listen to me." Jobs coughed twice, threw a copy of the document he had printed out and circled several times with a red pen to Cook.

"If you take a closer look, I think that the feedback from the Chinese market on Siri's intelligence level may be much lower than that of Chumi. If our iOS ecological products cannot guarantee to crush their peers in terms of 'artificial intelligence degree', or even be surpassed, how can we have the face to make our users feel a sense of pride, belonging, and coercion as the 'world's smartest smartphone'?

You don't care how many people use Siri, we can't afford this big hat that is 'not as smart as the competition'. ”

Cook was still incredulous: "But how is this possible? After the 'Chuxin 2' came out, our technical department has rigorously tested its intelligence. Including you and me, I have also used it myself. Reports all show that the 'First Secret' is not significantly more intelligent than Siri. ”

Jobs snarled in surprise: "That's because our testing method is wrong!" ”

Cook was stunned, he hadn't seen Jobs get angry like this for a long time: "What's wrong? ”

"I'm sorry, the painkillers I just took had some side effects, and my mood was not very stable." Jobs gasped a few times loudly and drank some water pressure to suppress the shock, "Our test, the mainstream has been answering questions in English. So I can't see the power of the first secret, but what if you ask questions in Chinese? What if it's in Malay-Tagalog? What about Thai? Japanese? Korean? ”

Cook was puzzled: "Does the degree of artificial intelligence still have anything to do with language?" ”

"Cook, my old partner, you don't care too much about technology itself." Jobs shook his head, sighed, stood up and looked out the window, and let out a wry smile.

"From the moment we bought Siri, we knew that the current artificial intelligence has not really 'understood' human speech. She is just relying on 'big data' and cloud retrieval and calculation, giving 'all the people who ask the same or similar vague questions, the largest number of answers chosen', and then push it to the owner.

The basic big data we have is collected from the people who ask the questions in the language, so Siri is naturally more intelligent when dealing with the questioner in that language.

What's more, the problem of speech recognition is also a problem that requires the support of big data and cloud computing to improve its accuracy. In the United States, there are 50 accents in fifty states. In China, there are countless dialects. Many people don't speak very standard Mandarin when chatting with their mobile phones. At this time, the party with historical data and the party with deeper historical data will have stronger fault tolerance. ”

Cook gradually came to his senses and followed Jobs's train of thought and asked: "Then you mean that the first secretary has significantly surpassed the iPhone 4 in the degree of artificial intelligence in the Chinese context?" ”

"Obviously yes – the latest report I gave you makes that clear. Just looking at the feedback from the Chinese market, it may not be obvious, but in the two Southeast Asian countries of the Philippines and Indonesia, the feedback is very polarized:

The user information is the owner of the Nanyang Chinese, and he is very satisfied with the intelligence of the first secretary, and unanimously praised the mobile phone assistant for making it much more convenient for them to use the mobile phone, whether it is making a phone call or searching the web or looking for a map, they can be controlled by voice. And those Filipino and Indonesian natives complain that this thing is not very intelligent.

At first, I thought that this division was based on racism and an encouragement to the Chinese in Nanyang to become more high-tech about Chinese goods. But if you look deeper, we're all wrong, they can talk about the real benefits, it's very detailed, and it is absolutely impossible for brain-dead fans to make up so many details of 'how good this AI assistant is'. ”

was mentioned by Jobs, and Cook gradually saw a lot of details from the report that were ignored at first.

Is it possible to say something like "The first secretary can easily understand my Cantonese pronunciation and show me the way as usual" or "I said to the first secretary, 'I have been robbing a lot of business recently', but she replied to me, 'Only by robbing a lot of people does this business show that this business was profitable'"?

Obviously impossible.

If you want to be beautiful in powder, or beautiful in black, it also requires technology.

I have to say that it was the arrogance of the Americans that harmed them.

Many Americans simply know that there are two types of countries on earth: the United States, and "other countries."

During the presidential election in '08, there were a lot of jokes, such as a presidential candidate saying that "Africa" is a country; Another example is when a candidate makes shocking remarks such as "What will we do if China has nuclear weapons one day?"

Bigwigs of the caliber of Steve Jobs and Cook can't be as ignorant as politicians. But it's a pity that in the field of "artificial intelligence assistant for mobile phones", Apple's self-confidence and self-confidence are too high.

Many details hinting at the strength of the Chinese have been ignored by the arrogance of American entrepreneurs.

It wasn't until the "First Secret" came out that they were shocked.

"Then you are...... Do you think that our expansion of China's high-end mobile phone market this year is likely to be strongly blocked by 'Chuxin 2'? ”

Jobs shrugged helplessly: "I think it's very possible." So, when you go to the market/capacity coordination meeting in a while, you have to make an extra set of backup plans. If the Chinese market is not as good as we expected, we will adjust the subsequent part of the production capacity to the English version, or the French version, or the German version in time.

Hatsune Group's artificial intelligence reserves should be limited to Chinese. Last year, people from the CIA and the Security Bureau also spied on a deal between Hatsune and Google, although later I heard that the Fire Eye company involved suffered heavy losses, but after all, it got some eyebrows. The data that Google handed over to Hatsune should be based on search records in Asian languages.

Therefore, this year we may have to face a stronger push for the European market and even the Indian market. And give some of East and Southeast Asia relative to Hatsune. ”

Cook was a little unwilling: "Isn't there a way for us to quickly catch up with Siri's intelligence?" Isn't cloud intelligence just as long as the data is enriched, it will grow anytime and anywhere? Even software version upgrades are not necessarily required. Can't we achieve a traceless lift quickly and quickly? ”

"Not so fast, but it's not without opportunity. On the Chinese side, Unicom operators seem to have a stalemate with Hatsune, and this year they will push our iPhone4 as a high-end contract machine. Maybe in half a year, by the beginning of 2011, we can train Siri to the point where we can barely compete with the first secretary by relying on the data accumulated by Unicom's high-end business users.

At that time, as long as our brand grade does not decline, the advantages of other hardware and system optimization will continue to be maintained, and we are not afraid that we will not be able to grab back the Chinese market - by the way, when was the R&D progress of 4S originally scheduled to be completed? ”

Although Cook has no spirituality, he is still very familiar with the company's various business plans, and he is worthy of being a qualified butler. After listening to Jobs's question, he blurted out without even thinking about it:

"According to the original plan, the development of the 4S will not be completed until 15 months after the launch of the 4th generation. However, if the enemy presses too urgently, we can still press it to less than 12 months if we abandon some secondary needs. ”

Jobs was unhappy with this answer: "12 months is still too long. We are no longer the lone pioneer pathfinders of humanity anymore, and Hatsune is no slower than we are. We have to come up with wartime efficiency, and if we can use it directly, we will directly copy it and reverse it, and only if it can't be original. We must not tie our hands and feet, and let the enemy learn from us, and we will not learn from the enemy. ”

"And how long will it take you?"

"I ask that at least before the Spring Festival in Chinese 2011, our iPhone4s should be taken out of stock and distributed to the Chinese market."

From R&D trial flow to batch shipment, it will take at least two months. Therefore, Jobs's requirement is equivalent to pressing the R&D cycle between 4 generations and 4s to ten months.

Cook almost jumped.

"How can this kind of thing be coordinated?"

"Cook! Think about it. Jobs stood up all of a sudden, holding Cook's shoulders with both hands and shaking, trying to infect his little universe to the other party,

"Think about it, in 42 years, after the country declared war, but before the Normandy landings, how long did it take for the Army to develop a new main tank? 2 years! After the Normandy landings, when the 'Sherman' was beaten into the air by the Germans, how long did it take for us to take out the M-26 'Pershing'? Only 9 months!

Because they took back the anchored Tiger tank from the battlefield for reverse research! Because on the front line, every moment of every day, there are 'Shermans' being slaughtered into lighters by the 'Tigers'! R&D personnel have to hurry!

We are no longer lonely frontrunners. Don't leave all your research to yourself. If the enemy is better than us, use it first! ”

Of course, Cook knows this.

However, before World War II, the Germans were the world's leaders in science and technology, and the Americans were just copycat powers with large production capacity and low quality.

Since the Führer committed suicide by swallowing a gun and German scientists were divided between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States of America suddenly rose up and set up a flag. I haven't done anything like a copycat for at least 64 years.

Is this to return to the old business and sacrifice "copycat buffs" to accelerate the speed of research and development?

It's too special, isn't it?

There have always been only Chinese copycat Americans, how can I have a big American anti-copycat Chinese in the past?

Cook felt that his old heart had been greatly damaged.

"I ...... I'll think about it. You let me digest it......"

"I don't want you to think about it, I want you to execute! The market is real, and the pressure and face are not so important! 'The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes that users in the network'. In this era, the Chinese have begun to take advantage of their user numbers and slowly snowball. Cloud artificial intelligence is a very dangerous field, we must preemptively insert it before the Chinese themselves improve intelligent big data! ”

Cook eventually gave up resistance.

"Okay, I'll do it. Now, let me finish the capacity coordination meeting. I'm going to come up with a set of options after 'if the Chinese market doesn't open up as expected.'" ”

"Good luck." Jobs said no more, sent Cook out the door, and continued to take painkillers himself.

He felt a pain in his liver worse.

If you give birth to Qiao, why give birth to Gu? (To be continued.) )