But Apple obviously didn't give Duke more time to find a solution, and in fact they couldn't sit idly by and watch the new Nokia phones continue to attack the market and Apple couldn't sit still.

A week after sending out the lawyer's letter, Apple's president brought the top management together to discuss countermeasures against the new Nokia Mobile.

"Well, gentlemen, last month we had a fifteen percent drop in sales and shipments compared to the same period last year, and I think you know why." President Cook said to a group of senior executives of the company, pointing to the data that had just been counted. "According to the estimates of market forecasters, we will decline further this month, if effective measures are not adopted in time."

"Mr. Peter, do we have any new developments in speech technology?" After saying his opening remarks, Cook turned to Peter, the vice president of technology, to the side and asked. "How long will it take to bridge the gap between us and the new Nokia Mobile in terms of voice technology?"

Peter, who is in charge of the company's technical planning, has been under a lot of pressure recently, and Apple's mobile phone, which was originally leading in technology, is now overwhelmed by the emerging SAL company in many aspects, which has surprised the industry and put Apple's technical department under heavy pressure.

"Mr. President, according to our current research on this technology, if the basic principles described in Duke's doctoral dissertation are adopted, we will be able to improve the speech recognition technology to a practical level in about six months to a year, but it may take us 3-5 years to catch up with the current level of the new Nokia mobile phone." Peter was already in a cold sweat at Cook's cold eyes.

There is no way, although Duke's paper explains the principle more clearly, but many things from the principle to the implementation, it still takes a lot of time to study, such as speech feature sampling, Peter does not have such a strong computing and analysis ability as Kerry, so it takes time to accumulate.

Peter said that half a year, in fact, on the basis of the recent purchase of the latest Titan III supercomputer, since the study found that the speech should be accurately sampled and analyzed by a large amount of data, Peter strongly asked to purchase a supercomputer with amazing computing power, and now this supercomputer has finally been completed by the people of Cray, and the voice feature sampling application has long been under development, and now it has been transplanted to the supercomputer to operate.

But the analysis of massive sampling data is a reality that Peter cannot avoid now.

And," Peter said, "the speech recognition technology we have now is actually based on Dr. Duke's invention, and from an intellectual property perspective, we will inevitably infringe on Dr. Duke's technology." ”

The executives here almost didn't choke to death by Peter's words, your sister, the progress has been slow for a long time, not to mention, and even technically follow other people's butts, is this technology still interesting even if it is developed?

"Isn't there another technical path to take?" Cook was also suffocated by Peter's words, "For now, we can't find any other way to achieve Dr. Duke's effect. Peter said with his head bowed.

"What are we going to do now?" Cook glanced at the executives, hoping that someone would stand up and come up with an idea to turn the tide, and honestly, he was under a lot of pressure right now, seven or eight years before that, Apple had made satisfactory progress in everything, and the mobile phone business had grown from scratch to form the company's current pillar product, with annual sales of more than $100 billion, and also had super high profit margins.

Such a good market performance is reflected in Apple's stock price, which has now exceeded $800 billion.

It hasn't been a predicament like this for years, and Cook has been with Apple for more than 30 years, and he hasn't seen a situation like this a few times.

The technological gap is by no means easy to bridge, and everyone here knows that over the years, Apple has also taken the lead by always taking a small step ahead. So these executives are also very aware of this reality, and according to Peter, there is basically no hope for voice technology to catch up with the competition.

At best, you risk infringing on your opponent's intellectual property rights.

"We can file a patent infringement lawsuit and drag the new Nokia into a quagmire." Will, the vice president in charge of intellectual property, stepped forward and said. "We have solid evidence that the new Nokia has adopted several of our 4G patents, which are standard 4G technologies that they have no way of avoiding."

"Mr. Will, I know you've sent a lawyer's letter to the new Nokia for this, but we can't go too far on this matter." Miss Michelle, Vice President for Public Relations, said. "We've used patents to file a lot of lawsuits over the last few years, even though we've prevailed in the lawsuits."

"However, the frequent use of patented weapons has had a great negative impact on our image, and the media has begun to constantly accuse us of excessive use of patented weapons, which we see as a concrete manifestation of our lack of innovation. Gentlemen, the media is now keen to mold us into an empire of unenterprising bosses. ”

"They're asking, why don't we negotiate patents with the other side and settle patent disputes by settling licensing fees?"

Seeing Miss Michelle's opposition to the lawsuit, Will shook his head. "Frankly, the new Nokia Mobile is so strong that we can't afford to let it go. They have now threatened Apple's roots. Will said.

"Therefore, the purpose of this lawsuit is to deal as much damage to the competitor as possible, to contain the opponent's time before it becomes a behemoth, so that it enters a period of risk and defeats them. Then we can buy it up when they're in a difficult time. Will spoke his wishful thinking.

"Behind the new Nokia company is an emerging technology-based company, and it is they who have developed the NOne mobile phone, which is very competitive, and I think they have an extraordinary ability in technological innovation, so it would be the best outcome for us to break them down financially and acquire them."

Everyone was attracted by Will's idea, and to be honest, this kind of thing is not the first day that Apple has done this kind of thing, but it has acquired some small companies before, and the scale of mergers and acquisitions generally does not exceed billions of dollars. But now Will is eyeing SAL, and even if the development of the new Nokia is contained, it is an extremely large company.

Relying on China's domestic market and the sales results of the other party in navigators, there is still no big problem in selling $30 to $40 billion a year. If so, then this merger will be another huge acquisition in the history of IT.

"Mr. Will's suggestion is very creative," said Cook, after considering Will's suggestion carefully, "Do you have any other suggestions?" ”

"If there is no other supplementary suggestion, then we will implement it according to Mr. Will's suggestion at present, and all units must unite sincerely to fight this life-and-death battle." Cook said the final word.

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