While Zhou Xin was discussing the mechanism of editing content for online encyclopedias with Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wells, Bill Gates and Brian King were discussing Quora in Redmond, a small city northwest of Ameriken, where Microsoft is headquartered.

Microsoft was headquartered in Raymond, 20 kilometers from downtown Seattle, and they also had a large number of offices and Microsoft Expansion Centers in Seattle at the time.

"Mr. Gates, I think we can do Quora, and with Microsoft's connections and MSN users, we have a natural advantage in doing Quora.

At the same time, Quora is a good content supplement for MSN, users can browse news and websites through MSN, and then answer their own questions through a knowledge community like Quora, or answer the doubts of others. ”

Blair King was a vice president at Microsoft at the time and the head of MSN, and as the surname suggests, Kim was a Korean-American who worked at Intel and Apple before joining Microsoft.

Since Brian King hasn't been with Microsoft for long, Bill Gates has a higher tolerance for him.

If other executives come to talk to him about this, Bill Gates will definitely ask the other party, in this case, why Internet Explorer is completely inferior to Netscape. MSN can't compare to Yahoo.

Bill Gates asked directly: "You need to answer me, is it more promising for us to do our own quiz community or to acquire Quora."

We're starting to put people into doing it, Quora just looks concise, but its like mechanism, problem classification mechanism, and user attention mechanism are not so simple for us to do from the underlying logic.

It involves some complex algorithms, and it takes us one month at the earliest to make the product, and then add testing, the fastest is one and a half months.

I mean, in this month and a half, Quora will always have user accumulation, content accumulation, we are two months behind them, can we really occupy a piece of the cake in this market?

In my understanding of Quora's Internet model, unlike other services, the quiz community is a zero-sum game in the absolute sense, and there will only be one winner in the end.

The richer the content, the better the knowledge quiz community will automatically attract users and gather users, so that another one that is equally excellent, but does not have the best knowledge quiz community excellent products, will automatically lose users.

To put it simply, a product with a score of 100 in this field can win, and other products will face elimination sooner or later even if they score 99 points.

So in your opinion, what is the score of Quora? ”

Bill Gates has a very keen sense of smell, although he is an operating system, he also has a keen insight into Internet services.

That's right, the quiz community is a pure zero-sum game, and there can only be one winner in the market.

Back in 2005, Yahoo launched their quiz community, Yahoo Answers, which allows users to ask questions, answer questions, vote and comment on answers, and provide a thumbs up and take the best answers.

In the early 2000s, Yahoo Answers was very popular and was the most popular Q&A community on the internet at the time. Later, after Quora appeared, Yahoo Answers collapsed on the beach, and the number of users and activity declined year by year until it was shut down in 2021.

Brian King fell silent, this question is very difficult to answer, because the boss now asks you to rate Quora, and after you do the quiz community in the future, your score can only be higher than Quora, not lower than Quora.

"Mr. Gates, I think Quora can score at least 95, or even 99." Brian King replied that to give a higher rating to a competitor at such a time is to leave a way back for himself.

Bill Gates went on to ask, "Are you in charge of Microsoft's quiz community, can you achieve a higher score than Quora?" ”

After a pause, Brian replied loudly, "I can't score my product lower than Quora." ”

The Goryeo is the chicken thief, Quora is already in front, and he can get a product that is no worse than Quora by copying it.

Bill Gates waved his hand: "This is also meaningless, Quora has a first-mover advantage, if we want to make a product to become the final winner of this track, it must be better than Quora in order to attract their users, if it is just a copy of a product, it makes no sense."

And from what I know about Newman, he has never shied away from competition, and he must have a series of means waiting for other competitors.

The reason I'm asking this question is because if we choose to do Quora ourselves, we will be faced with waiting until our product fails to buy Quora, which will cost a lot more than it does now.

Now I'm going to talk to Newman, he's going to pick $100 million, okay he's not going to accept the price, $500 million to sell me.

But two months later, the price could become $5 billion, and Newman has that magic.

Therefore, the cost of trial and error is not just two months' salary for programmers, product managers, testers, etc., but also the opportunity cost lost.

Okay, I'd better talk to Newman first. ”

To be honest, Bill Gates is not so interested in MSN to do the quiz community, because he and Zhou Xin have a very happy cooperation, and Microsoft is not short of money, so it is better to buy it.

It's also important to note that most of Microsoft's energy is now focused on the Xbox project and the MSN project, and Bill Gates doesn't see the need to open another front.

That's why they didn't make electronic payment software.

But unlike Yahoo, internet services are a lifeline for Yahoo, and they bought GEOCities for $3.57 billion in January, hoping that users will think Yahoo is cool enough.

As a result, half a year has passed, and the coolest product in the entire Silicon Valley is Quora, and since Quora came along, GEOCities' views have been declining.

Yahoo has to do quiz communities, regardless of whether Quora accepts the acquisition or not.

Bill Gates was very active, and after chatting with Brian King, he flew to San Francisco on his private jet, Gulfstream GIV, and asked his secretary to meet Zhou Xin in the evening.

"Newman, congratulations on your success again, Quora is an amazing product. Although Melinda is my wife, she is not interested in many Internet products, but Quora, the first thing she has to do every day after she gets started is to watch Quora.

I regret that when you were still an intern at Microsoft, you didn't have you directly as the head of product development, or even vice president.

If I had known that there was a day, I would not hesitate to let you go straight to the position of vice president.

The thing I've heard the most during this time is, should we do Quora?

It seems that everyone will just follow the trend, and after a new Internet model comes out on the market, everyone is wondering if we can do it together. ”