Company lounge.

Luo Sheng and Xu Yong and others from the company sat around to exchange and chat, not necessarily to talk about any specific agenda, but to simply chat, exchange ideas, and collide with inspiration, maybe they can collide with sparks.

This culture has been inherited from the company's studio days to the present, and will continue to be inherited, and has also become a manifestation of Bluestar Technology's engineer culture, basically every day there will be about half an hour to 45 minutes of communication time.

Every company has its own unique corporate culture.

For example, one-fifth of Google's free time, Google allows its engineers to spend 20% of their time working on their favorite projects, which is equivalent to one day a week, and this practice has also allowed Google to successfully exchange 20% of free time for 120% performance.

Google's approach, in fact, is similar to the "departmental company system" formulated by Qin Weimu, so that the fertilizer and water do not flow into the fields of outsiders.

In addition to the "chat flow", the corporate culture of Bluestar Technology also has another unique corporate culture - food.

At Bluestar Technologies, it's no longer a matter of providing free food and drinks in the kitchen, in addition to a wide variety of healthy and delicious snacks for employees to enjoy for free.

In this world where everyone is a foodie, you can eat so many delicious snacks even during work, which can not only satisfy your appetite, relieve work pressure, but also worry about eating unhealthy problems.

Because the company also invited professional health care personnel to carry out matching and food security checks, the company did not skimp on this money, and everything was for employees to eat healthy food as the core starting point.

It's just that investors are a little distressed when they see it......

Bluestar Technology is more than five times more than other companies of the same magnitude in food procurement expenditure, which shows that food culture is a trick in North America, many employees, Luo Sheng failed to capture their hearts with high salaries, but accidentally caught their stomachs with Chinese food, and then grabbed their hearts, and finally caught them.

The company specially hired a top chef class from China with a high salary to go to the Menlo Park branch in California, and the eight major cuisines can be eaten without repeating the same every day just one Sichuan cuisine, and it is not an exaggeration to say that there are 365 days a year, and it can be done every day without repeating the same.

So much so that after the news spread, engineers from other technology companies in Silicon Valley came to Menlo Park to eat and drink, and even because of the company's food culture, it still attracted many excellent Silicon Valley engineers.

Rubbing over and rubbing the engineers of other technology companies automatically, it has become a favorite anecdote to "mutiny" for the sake of food.

Silicon Valley is just a general term, and it is not strictly said that Menlo Park is also part of Silicon Valley.

At this point, even Luo Sheng didn't expect that the most famous of Bluestar Technology's North American film in Silicon Valley is the company's canteen...

It can only be said that foodies have no borders.

At this moment, in the company's lounge, everyone is also chatting while eating snacks.

"The boss's trip to North America shocked countless people's eyes after the copyright cooperation agreements reached with several major record companies were transmitted back to China." Feng Yi changed his words and added: "But most of the comments seem to regard us as stupid people with too much money, and we were ridiculed by industry insiders, and we spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the copyright, but there is nowhere to spend it." ”

Indeed, after the news came back to China, it also surprised many people, in addition to lamenting that Bluestar Technology had money to spend blind Ji'er flowers, it was ridiculed.

Many people don't understand at all, what is the point of Luo Sheng spending this money?

The domestic version of the online music player is called [Blue Star Music], and when it was launched, the promotional slogan was that 2.25 million popular songs at home and abroad were genuinely authorized, free to listen to, and free to download......

It's free, okay?

Do you want to charge a fee?

This is the true portrayal of the present.

Originally, industry insiders thought that Bluestar Music would charge for it after spending a lot of money to get the copyright, but they didn't expect it to be free.

Suddenly felt that Luo Sheng was spending money stupidly, but people were not stupid, they really had to charge, Blue Star Music was absolutely certain to die in China, you must know that it is whiteness mp3 music search that dominates the list now.

"We may seem to lose in the present, but we will win in the future." Luo Sheng said with a smile, and then shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

He can't wait to be ridiculed like this, so that he can make a fortune in a muffled voice, and then a piece of copyright can easily be wiped out, and it will finally be liquidated after more than ten years, and peers in the industry will definitely pay the price for not paying attention to copyright issues.

However, it is worth mentioning that the domestic version of [Blue Star Music] is free, but the overseas version of [MusicSpace] music store is paid, after all, the market environment is different, and there is a huge difference between the two.

However, when people in the domestic Internet industry were incomprehensible about Luo Sheng's sky-high copyright fees of 1.64 billion yuan (US$199.2 million) and reaching digital copyright cooperation with the world's five major record giants, and even ridiculed by the crowd, two technology giants on the other side of the ocean took Luo Sheng's move seriously.

One is Apple, while the other is Microsoft.

In front of Bluestar Technology, are all giant-level existence, Microsoft before the bursting of the Internet bubble, the market value once rushed to 583 billion US dollars, becoming the world's first at that time, after the bubble burst, to this year in 2004, most of the technology companies have not recovered, Bluestar Technology is just a special case, and Microsoft's market value has almost been cut in half, and now there are 282 billion US dollars, ranking third in the world.

After Microsoft fell from the altar, it is now General Electric that is now the world's most valuable company with $319 billion.

And there is another unusual phenomenon that not many people care about, that is, at this point in time, the status of global financial companies is climbing wildly, and Citigroup, AIG, and Bank of America have squeezed into the world's top ten listed companies, which seems to have laid the groundwork for the financial crisis in a few years.

And another technology giant Apple that is eyeing Luo Sheng, only completed the salted fish turnaround last year, until last year 2003, Apple is still a technology company respected by "non-mainstream" users, although the public knows that Apple's products are very good, but they are willing to pay to buy them, and there are not many people who "pay" for this appreciation.

Before 2003, Apple's market value plummeted to $4 billion, and Joe Gang returned to the helm of Apple for several years without much improvement.

But all this, starting in March 2003, a month after the establishment of Bluestar Technology, Apple began to take off.

Steve Jobs launched iTunes, perhaps the most revolutionary innovation in Apple's history, and it also drove the market value skyrocketing.

The emergence of iTunes has changed everything, this is the big move that Joe has been holding back for five years, with the emergence of iTunes, Apple has been able to enter the music market, not only by selling products to make money, but also by selling music to make money, starting from the launch of iPod, in just three years, relying on the iPod+iTunes combination for Apple to generate nearly $10 billion in revenue, accounting for almost half of the company's total revenue.

iTunes has been widely supported by users and partners, because the existence of iTunes can make it more convenient for more people to download and organize music, which has also greatly promoted the sales of iPods and made this electric product quickly popular in North America.

The labels have also welcomed iTunes, which until then were powerless to do anything about the rampant piracy of music, and the Napster website alone had almost deprived them of the skin, but iTunes opened their eyes to the possibility of monetizing digital music.

Of course, the happiest is Apple, which makes money on hardware by selling iPods and music through iTunes.

In fact, Luo Sheng can talk about copyright cooperation with the five major record companies so smoothly this time, those record giants also saw that iTunes has a dominant situation in the field of digital music, and the record company itself once wanted to operate digital music, but it was found that it was impossible to play in the technology industry when it changed industries, and the products launched were scolded as dogs by users, so they gave up.

But obviously, it is not good for the record company that iTunes is dominant in the field of digital music, so Luo Sheng came to talk about copyright cooperation this time, which was quite smooth and reasonable.

Because from the point of view of record companies, as a music service manufacturer, they have the copyright, and [MusicSpace] and [iTunes] will even have more online music store platforms in the future, and these platforms will definitely cooperate at a high price in order to compete for digital rights, which is obviously beneficial to record companies.

Anyway, now they feel that they are winners, and Luo Sheng or Jobs, in a sense, they are just "middlemen" who make the difference, and they have built an online platform to connect the digital rights of the record company's songs with online consumer users, and then Luo Sheng took away 40% of the share, which is actually more ruthless than Jobs, and took 5% more share.

……