There is nothing wrong with monopoly in itself. Patent protection is a kind of monopoly protection.
Antitrust laws in various countries around the world are mostly aimed at preventing monopolistic companies from using their own advantages in the technology market to suppress competitors. In other words, monopoly is not wrong, but using monopoly advantages to suppress competitors is wrong.
However, in actual implementation, the standard of monopoly has always been difficult to determine.
Vague definition standards have led to antitrust often becoming a tool for political and economic games between enterprises, capital and even countries.
The Igrit Company, or the entire Westeros system, has created a new Internet era in advance through the layout of the entire industrial chain of World Wide Web technology.
To this end, companies such as Cisco, AOL and Igret have invested billions of dollars in total over the past few years. It stands to reason that with such a huge initial investment, the Westeros system can enjoy the benefits brought by the Internet industry with peace of mind.
The problem now is that the interests involved in the Internet industry are too huge. It is so huge that not only the Westeros system cannot eat it alone, but many people will not allow the Westeros system to enjoy this huge cake alone.
The three core executives of Ygritte, even Tim Berners-Lee, who focused on technology research and development and was not very understanding of the world, also realized the problems after seeing the company's 1992 annual financial report.
With many memories from two lifetimes, Simon has a clearer understanding of the situation that Ygritte Company will face.
Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft was tortured to death by the U.S. antitrust department. To a large extent, it was not the monopoly of Microsoft's operating system, but the monopoly of several Microsoft shareholders such as Damen classmates. Too many stocks.
When Bill Gates, Paul Allen and others continued to reduce their holdings, Microsoft gradually became a publicly held company integrated with the U.S. economy, and the operating system giant never encountered a large-scale antitrust investigation.
After the financial report meeting in the morning, Simon discussed with Tim Berners-Lee, Jeff Bezos, and Carol Bartz the three senior executives in the afternoon about the situation that Eagleett would face if it were resolved.
Microsoft's competitors include Apple, Intel's competitors include AMD, and IBM's competitors include SUN. For Yigret, the problem now is that this new technology company that has created a new Internet era in advance cannot even There are no decent opponents.
After completing the authorization of e-mail technology, Microsoft and AOL, which have obtained commercial operation licenses, are preparing for their own portal businesses.
However, even if Microsoft and AOL's network businesses are online and able to compete with Eagle, in the eyes of outsiders, the three companies still belong to the same camp to a large extent.
The "Sherman Antitrust Act" of the United States has a clear definition. Related enterprises collude to control the market, which is also a monopoly.
Igret has already released a large number of World Wide Web patented technologies for free, and it is unlikely that it will further release the core patents held by the company in the short term.
If there is no competitor, it is also impossible to create a competitor out of thin air.
In fact, even the powerful Microsoft and America Online are unlikely to pose much of a threat to Igret in the short term in terms of network business, let alone building a competitor from scratch.
So, there are only two ways to avoid the antitrust pressure that Yigrit may be subject to. One is to take the initiative to split it up. According to Simon’s original idea, the major businesses of Yigrit will be split into several different companies. company, the second is to carry out external financing as soon as possible, or conduct an IPO, and give up sufficient equity shares to capital from all parties.
The first method, after all, treats the symptoms rather than the root cause.
The second is to sell equity and integrate Ygritte into the entire American economy. This is the most thorough solution.
In fact, Simon has made such plans a long time ago. For companies such as Cisco, AOL, and Eagle, he only hopes to eventually retain about 30% of the equity after continuing to reduce his holdings.
Considering the terrifying market value of these companies in the future, a 30% shareholding is still a very huge wealth.
When the small meeting of several core management personnel ended, the preliminary plan had been finalized.
Igret will conduct its first external financing, and is expected to sell 10% of its shares and plans to raise US$1.5 billion.
Based on Igret's revenue of nearly US$2 billion in 1992 and its high growth rate of nearly 400%, if it goes public, the company's market value will definitely be comparable to that of Cisco and America Online.
Therefore, the valuation of US$15 billion is still very conservative for Yigret.
As long as you have a little understanding of Igret's position in the emerging Internet field and its financial data in 1992, you should know that the price of US$1.5 billion for 10% of the shares is very cost-effective.
If some people think that Yigrit Company is opening its mouth to the lion, then the other party is obviously not a partner worth cooperating with.
Although the quotation is as high as 1.5 billion U.S. dollars, the 10% of the shares cannot be bought by anyone who wants to buy it. If it is an Arab tycoon or a Japanese chaebol, sorry, just go and cool off.
This part of the equity will only be sold to capital forces in the United States that have a decisive influence on the federal political economy, so as to provide assistance when Eagle Reiter encounters pressure from antitrust and other aspects.
People are always greedy.
Simon also knows that 10% of the equity will definitely not satisfy the outside world, and this part of the financing is just a prelude.
Yigret will also launch its IPO plan as soon as possible.
Counting the equity awards promised to senior executives such as Tim Berners-Lee and the option incentives of many employees, in the next few years, Westeros Company's shareholding in Igrit will quickly drop to less than 70%.
San Francisco, Palo Alto.
At the headquarters of Igret, when the financing plan was finalized, what Tim Berners-Lee and the other two thought more about was their share of the equity incentive plan.
According to the original agreement, each of them can receive up to 5% of the equity rewards of Ygrit Company in the five-year contract.
With the current development momentum of Yigrit Company, unless Simon regrets and breaks the contract, the 5% equity stake is basically a certainty.
Then, even based on the US$15 billion valuation of this financing, 5% of the equity will be worth US$750 million.
$750 million.
This amount of wealth alone is enough for them to occupy a relatively conspicuous position on the list of the 400 richest people in the United States.
When they first joined this company, none of the three people felt that they could gain so much.
Therefore, during the rest of the afternoon, Simon could clearly feel that Jeff Bezos's tone was obviously somewhat high-spirited when explaining to him the Yigrit company's upcoming Yigrit advertising alliance plan. .
No one can predict their future.
The current US$750 million has already satisfied this descendant of Cuban immigrants who came from a lower class background.
If Jeff Bezos knew that in another time and space he would become the richest man in the world with a net worth of more than 100 billion U.S. dollars, I don’t know what he would think.
Of course, ifs are always just ifs.
"We have tested the advertising distribution system on more than 20 cooperative websites. I feel that accurate automatic advertising delivery is not the best solution at this stage. For the time being, we should adopt a customized advertising strategy to customize special advertising for different advertisers. advertising package.”
In another conference room at Yigrit's headquarters, Jeff Bezos finished explaining the technical details of the advertising alliance plan and then began to introduce the specific implementation plan.
The advertising alliance plan was naturally formulated by Simon based on the advertising alliance plans of major Internet giants in his memory.
When it was first proposed, not every senior executive of Yigrit agreed with the plan. Many people believed that the advertising alliance plan might lead to the emergence of a large number of Yigrit's competitors. Therefore, compared to the advertising alliance plan, Yigret should focus more on its own expansion in the content field.
At this stage, the news information, online forums, micro-blogs, e-mails and other businesses of the Igret Portal are developing rapidly, which also provides sufficient content support for the advertising business of the Igret Portal. Because of the company's strong position in the content field, some management inevitably believe that Igret alone is enough to support the content supply of the entire Internet.
This obviously goes against Simon's original positioning of Ygritte.
In Simon's plan, Igret will be a high-tech company focused on building an Internet platform, and will definitely not become an Internet media company focused on producing content.
With the popularity of the Internet, hundreds of millions of Internet users have differentiated demands for online content, which simply cannot be provided by an Internet media company.
Providing a content display platform for Internet users through services such as search engines, micro-blogs and online forums, and allowing more content providers and Internet users to produce their own content, is the only way for Igret to survive.
In the Internet 1.0 era, Internet media companies such as Yahoo and AOL competed to gain territory. As a result, they seemed to be prosperous, but they all declined rapidly after the advent of the Internet 2.0 era.
The current Igret portal is just an excess for Igret Company.
The Google search engine and Facebook microblog that Yigrit has started to operate independently, as well as the Amazon online mall that has rapidly emerged in the past year, are the foundation for Yigrit to become an Internet super giant in the future.
However, of course Simon will not preach this fundamental development strategy everywhere.
Within Yigret, only a few core managers know his specific ideas. Therefore, it is inevitable that there will be many different voices in the process of developing the advertising alliance plan.
With the absolute control of Yigrett Company, Simon will naturally not be disturbed by such objections. Instead, he will ask the management to implement the plan without any doubt. Knowing Simon's long-term plan for Yggrit Company, Jeff ·Bezos and others are also very supportive of this plan.
Through the Igret Advertising Alliance Program, many websites that cannot carry out commercial business independently will have a clear profit channel, which can accelerate the blooming of a hundred flowers in the Internet field. Only with richer content in the Internet field can Igret's various businesses develop faster. This is actually a mutually beneficial relationship.
It was already four o'clock in the afternoon when Igret's work schedule ended.
Simon's day's work was not over yet. He left the headquarters of Ygritte Company and rushed to Tinker Bayer Company founded by C girl Claire Gein.
According to Simon's vision, Tinker Bayer has recently developed the first prototype of a digital music player. While there is still some time, Simon plans to go and see for himself.
Arriving at the headquarters of Tinker Bayer, which is not far from Ygritte Company, Lady C and Neil Brantley, another partner of Tinker Bayer, were already waiting for Simon. They also saw Lady C. Behind her is the petite little Jennifer Bray.
After greeting Girl C and several others, Simon couldn't help but stretched out his hand to rub the girl's head when he saw little Jenny coming forward, and said with a smile: "Don't you need to go to class today?"
There was no way, the little girl was only as tall as Simon's chest, so she was perfect for rubbing his head.
Jennifer did not resist Simon's actions, but instead shrank her neck coquettishly, her eyes with long eyelashes narrowed slightly, like a cat being petted by its owner, and she did not forget to respond to Simon: "I happen to have no classes in the afternoon."
Although he knew the girl's age very well, Simon still felt like he was teasing a minor.
Looking at it again, Claire, Neil Brantley and others were all wearing professional suits, but the little girl was wearing a very casual light yellow sweatshirt and jeans, with a pair of white flat shoes on her feet, which made her look even more awkward standing in the crowd. Alien. It seems that some parents brought their children to the company when they were at work.
Simon actually understood that Janet arranged for little Jenny to enter Stanford University. Because of what happened at the concert, Girl C and others naturally regarded her as their own woman, so they were so 'indulgent'.
After smiling, Simon didn't say anything more and walked toward the interior of the office building with everyone.
Jennifer Bray followed the crowd obediently, looking at them quietly with her beautiful eyes.
She had discovered something just now.
The person accompanying Simon as his assistant this time was actually A-girl Alison Norris. 'Big Jenny', who had always been very wary of them in the past, did not come with Simon this time.
Although she didn't know the reason, the little girl realized that this seemed to be a good opportunity.
Simon had no intention of paying attention to little Jenny's thoughts. When he came to a laboratory in the office building, he quickly saw the prototype of a digital music player that had just been developed recently.
According to a series of trademarks filed by Tinker Bayer in advance, this machine will be named iPlayer.
Simon feels that iPlayer is a more suitable name for a digital music player than iPod. As for iPod, which has also applied for a trademark, it may be used on other electronic products in the future.
Neil Brantley first showed Simon the basic structure of the prototype.
The prototype in front of me is about the size of a current tape player. It is still far from the matchbox size standard in Simon's memory, but it is also the limit of what current technology can achieve.
You know, the core storage device of iPlayer, a 1.5-inch micro hard drive, is already about the size of a matchbox.
The 1.5-inch, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch standards for mechanical hard drives specifically refer to the size of the platters inside the hard drive. The entire hard drive is often much larger.
In Simon's memory, the 1.5-inch micro hard drive was once as big as a piece of 'bubble gum', rather than the current 'matchbox'. The main reason is that the internal mechanical structure has not yet achieved optimal compression. The current 3.5-inch hard drive is also much larger than the 3.5-inch hard drive in Simon's memory.
Moreover, despite their large size, the capacity of microhard drives at this stage is very small.
The prototype developed by Tinker Bayer uses a microhard drive that IBM has not yet mass-produced, with a capacity of only 20M. According to the MP3 audio format developed by Yigrit Company, with a high degree of compression, the average size of each song is about 3M, and a micro hard drive can only hold six or seven songs, which is not as large as a record.
However, with the rapid growth of the computer industry, it is only a matter of time before the capacity of mechanical hard drives doubles.
Neil Brantley said that as long as the market demand is sufficient, major hard drive manufacturers, which have accumulated technology for many years, are fully capable of rapidly increasing the capacity of micro hard drives.
In the short term, only one to two hundred megabytes of capacity is needed, which is enough for current digital players.
In terms of storage media, Simon has certainly considered flash memory.
However, current flash memory chips usually only have a capacity of a few hundred K, due to the development of semiconductor technology and the same limited market demand.
Although flash memory has many advantages over mechanical hard drives in terms of storage stability, reading speed and energy consumption, due to its small capacity, the only way to develop digital music players in the next five to ten years is to use micro hard drives. A set of solutions.