Compared with Bill Gates, Ballmer and Zhou Xin have no personal relationship, and he has dealt with the Silicon Valley rookie very few times, and it is difficult for him to associate the casually dressed Chinese man with Quora, NewPay, Mphone, and other products that have changed the Internet ecology at meetings organized by some institutions.

What Ballmer admires the most is that Zhou Xin not only has an amazing record as a product manager, but also has a top vision as an investor, and can see the value behind Internet startups at a glance.

Therefore, every time he talks to Bill Gates about Zhou Xin, he will remember that when Zhou Xin first came to Silicon Valley, he interned at Microsoft. Ballmore often thinks that if Zhou Xin had stayed with Microsoft back then, Microsoft's market value would have returned to its peak long ago.

"Then I'm relieved, if Newman's preferred cash transaction model, Microsoft may need to raise some money through some financing, and I'm sure Wall Street will be very interested in Microsoft's acquisition of Weibo, but it will take time.

Since Newman is willing to accept the share swap, it is entirely possible for us to sign the agreement first and then obtain permission from the NASDAQ exchange. ”

Looking at 2004 from the perspective of the future, it was a year of strong recovery. According to an analysis report written in 2005 by the Department of Market Operation and Consumption Promotion of the Ministry of Commerce of China:

"In 2004, the world economy showed a strong recovery, with most countries and regions experiencing economic growth exceeding expectations. Despite the impact of unfavorable factors such as the sharp rise in international oil prices, the world economy is growing at the fastest rate in the past three decades. ”

The key reason is Americacan's series of expansionary fiscal policies after the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble, which led to unprecedented liquidity in the market.

In human terms, everyone has money, but there is a lack of good projects, and Weibo does not worry about no buyers who can bid a high price.

Ballmer changed his words: "Newman is worthy of being a product master, and I didn't have much feeling about WeChat's WeChat red envelopes before, but the WeChat flower delivery campaign they launched at Christmas not long ago made me feel like I could still play like this."

From the logic of the Internet, I just sent a message to my wife, but she was able to take the message to Walmart, Metro, or another chain of flowers to get a bouquet of flowers.

This kind of creativity has quickly made WeChat Pay popular among the masses, and has formed a certain scale effect.

I always feel that Newman and other Internet product managers, everyone's thinking logic is not at the same level at all, he stands in a higher dimension with infinite creativity, and fires at will. ”

WeChat flower delivery was launched two days before Christmas, and it didn't cause too many waves when it was first launched, because the time was short, and a lot of advertising was done but the users who really used it were limited.

Until Christmas, users who were moved by WeChat flower delivery began to share their WeChat flower delivery stories on various social media, such as Weibo, Moments, face chat, etc., and this product quickly exploded out of the circle and became another top case of Internet products.

Compared to Christmas, it doubled on New Year's Day, and after Valentine's Day, the number tripled again.

"It's a classic Newman style, Melinda asked me to send her a bouquet of flowers on WeChat, and then she went to the supermarket to complete a payment with WeChat Pay and successfully received the flowers.

Top marketing techniques, users pay their own money, WeChat Pay only needs to spend marketing expenses, and the initial user accumulation of millions has been completed in just one week.

I thought that my competitor was NewPay, but I didn't expect Newman to have another electronic payment platform, and this electronic payment platform became the second largest electronic payment market share as soon as it was launched. Bill Gates said.

After user A completes the payment and chooses to accept the target user B, user B will not receive a message reminder or even know about it.

The coupon code of the flower will appear in the background data of user B, and when user B only makes offline payment through WeChat payment, if the offline payment place supports WeChat flowers, the WeChat interface will jump an animation effect of a bouquet of flowers, and then the cashier will also ask you to wait, and then take a bouquet of flowers to you.

To put it simply, the user who received the flower needs to complete the payment offline to know if he has received the flower, and after seven days, the user still does not go offline, then the money will be automatically returned to the account of the user who sent the flower.

The main feature of this game is a surprise.

Compared with WeChat red envelopes, which did not cause much splash, WeChat Flower Delivery quickly became popular in Ameriken after its launch, and a large number of female users used WeChat Pay to pay offline simply to see if they were given flowers by others.

WeChat's flower delivery has caught all electronic payment software off guard, and it is still playing the annual card collection event, Alibaba's payment software is still under development, and eBaypay's offline payment is working with Starbucks to do the event.

Everyone is still engaged in traditional discounts and fancy money play, and WeChat payment has once again successfully won at the starting line.

In later generations, WeChat raided Alipay by relying on WeChat red envelopes, and now in Ameriken, which is not interested in red envelopes, WeChat Pay has relied on another trick to successfully break through again and again.

So much so that just after the New Year's Day holiday, all payment software is discussing the activity of WeChat flower delivery, and it is necessary to copy similar functions online, but only NewPay can be played.

Because this requires contacting a large number of offline stores, it needs to be linked with offline stores, which involves the accumulation of your offline resources, only NewPay has completed the accumulation of this magnitude, Tencent relies on the accumulation of enterprise-level office software and WeChat official account, and other electronic payment software has not had this awareness at all.

Bill Gates and Ballmer both think that WeChat flower delivery is Zhou Xin's handiwork, but in fact, WeChat flower delivery is an idea that Tencent team has come up with itself, especially when paying offline, it will be displayed to create a sense of surprise, which is the idea proposed by Tencent's domestic employees.

"Other electronic payment software is too slow, or they don't understand the essence of offline payment, which is not only about payment behavior, but also lags behind in product awareness compared to Newman," Ballmer said. ”

Bill Gates nodded in agreement.

"So we need to buy Weibo even more, because Weibo represents the most cutting-edge Internet product direction, and we can make up for Microsoft's shortcomings in the mobile Internet, and even in the Internet field," Ballmer said.

Bing, MSN, these are not enough. ”

After the news was released, there were many manufacturers who wanted to acquire Weibo, and a lot of preliminary communication work under the surface of the water had begun.

Zhou Xin paced around his office, looking at the abstract paintings on the wall and falling into thought.

It is now the beginning of 2004, and Zhou Xin's previous strategic plan is to return to China in 2008, and he will not go out in China in the future.

Because in the original time and space, 2008 was a critical time node.

But Bush and John Kerry came to the door, which made Zhou Xin feel a sense of crisis, he felt that he needed to return to China in advance, and he couldn't follow the time point in his memory.

Because of him, Huaguo has not changed much in other aspects, but in the two industries of the Internet and chips, there is a huge difference from the original time and space.

In the field of chips, China has been able to achieve 130nm national production, but the yield rate has not come up, Xinxin Technology and Shenhai City jointly established an investment company, in the past three years to invest in a large number of upstream and downstream enterprises in the chip industry.

Xinxin Technology is responsible for providing funds and markets, as long as your products meet the requirements, Xinxin will let your products enter the production process of some of my production lines, which is nothing more than to slowly improve the yield rate and improve the quality.

Whether it is domestic equipment or raw materials, there is indeed a gap between the quality and the products of Neon and Ameriken, but the price is low enough, the service attitude is good enough, all in Zhangjiang, and the response time of the service is timely enough.

Relying on its technical advantages, Xinxin Technology can tolerate the cost increase caused by low yield rate.

In the past two years, Xinxin Technology has almost monopolized the entire Bluetooth chip market, from mobile phones to laptops to other electronic devices, as long as it is related to Bluetooth, there is only one choice for the products launched in the past two years, that is, the Bluetooth chip launched by Xinxin.

The huge market and profits brought by monopoly make Xinxin Technology very capricious in chip production.

And because of the patent wall built by Xinxin Technology in the field of Bluetooth chips, most companies have given up this market.

Of course, there are also those who have not given up, such as the previous Bluetooth chip monopoly manufacturer Cambridge Silicon, they are already on the verge of bankruptcy, and they are trying to use non-commercial means to stop the new chip.

The European Union's Patent Investigation Committee is investigating Synchip's monopoly of the Bluetooth market, and senior officials of the committee said in an interview with local media in Brussels that they would use administrative measures to force Synchip to transfer Bluetooth patents.

The Competition and Markets Authority in England is more direct and is suing Xinxin for monopoly, demanding penalties of up to £80 million.

The one of the European Union Patent Commission is still in the process of investigation, and the penalty judgment in England has already come down, just because Xinxin Technology did not accept it, and found the law firm Hausfield to go through the appeal process.

After the verdict in England came down, netizens were quite angry after the news reached China:

"Does Xinxin have a monopoly? The monopoly is good, Intel can monopolize, but Xinxin can't monopolize? ”

"Strongly support the continued appeal of Xinxin Technology, England is purely looking for trouble."

"Before the Bluetooth function was a chicken rib, Xinxin Technology uses technological progress to make Bluetooth headsets so convenient, what's wrong with the monopoly?"

"If Xinxin is replaced by an English company, do you think England will still say half a word?"

"I work in a chip design company, and before the Bluetooth chip was almost monopolized by Cambridge Silicon, they occupied 70% of the market share, and I haven't seen England sue Cambridge Silicon!"

For Xinxin Technology, this kind of prosecution is a medal of merit, and companies that have not been fined by European countries are not considered giants.

Google and Facebook are fined hundreds of millions of euros every year, and it is not comfortable not to punish them.

Xinxin Technology also ate the domestic mobile phone integrated chip market, if it weren't for Xinxin Technology, this market would have been MediaTek to eat the majority, and other chip companies would have followed the soup.

Now it's Xinxin to eat some, and then other domestic chip manufacturers have come to get a piece of the pie, like SMIC, a large part of SMIC's business comes from helping Xinxin foundry.

Xinxin's own factory capacity is insufficient, so it will divide orders to SMIC and TSMC, and SMIC's priority is still ahead of TSMC.

In addition, the industry that has been completely changed is the Internet, Tencent's main battlefield is abroad, and Tencent's main battlefield in China is QQ and WeChat.

It is not like later generations, after starting with QQ, with the help of traffic advantages, you have to get involved in all fields, from web portals to e-shopping to anti-virus software.

Alibaba also went abroad, in other words, domestic Internet companies have formed a new path, after the company becomes bigger, it will go to sea, with limited funds to Southeast Asia, and abundant funds to Europe and North America.

This has also led to the Internet companies in China, with the support of Ameriliken Capital, going overseas and fighting with the Internet companies in Silicon Valley, and behind both sides are mainly Ameriliken Capital, and neither side loses to Wall Street.

But this kind of ecology has given small Internet companies more ways to live, and everyone couldn't roll up big factories before, but now small companies also have a way to live, and game companies are also blooming.

After Riot Games entered China ahead of schedule, there were far more console game manufacturers in the game field than in the original space.

Games are one thing, and the most important thing is that the Internet ecology is not two monopolies, everyone is rolling, relying on capital advantages to become monopoly leaders, and then using monopoly advantages to crazy all kinds of involution.

The biggest advantage of Silicon Valley compared with Zhongguancun is that companies focusing on technology also have room to survive, and a large number of open source communities and technology-focused companies can survive and live well.

For the same form of product, GitHub is much more conscientious than CSDN, which is the result of involution.

Moreover, the overseas expansion of China's Internet industry has made the domestic Internet dividend come in advance, the influx of capital hot money, the explosion of talent demand, global operation, and greater benefits, and a positive cycle has been formed, and the high Internet income has become the consensus of Chinese society in 2004.

Of course, the number of Chinese netizens is not enough now, this consensus is only in the Internet community, for the wider group to wait for the launch of cheap smartphones, and after the large-scale rollout of 999 smartphones, everyone can get similar information.

The rapid rise of Huaguo in the field of chips, as well as grabbing the cake in the Internet field and Silicon Valley, made Zhou Xin worry that Ameriken would pay attention to Huaguo's opponent in advance.

(End of chapter)