San Francisco at the end of September does not feel like autumn at all. The sun is still bright and the trees are green.
Mountain House in Woodside.
The time is September 25th, Saturday.
These days, Simon is basically in Los Angeles on weekdays and spends two days on weekends in San Francisco accompanying his female assistant.
In fact, he was driven to San Francisco by Janet.
Because Veronica flies from New York every weekend to see the kids.
Most of the days on vacation seem very leisurely, because it is maternity leave, so it is somewhat monotonous.
I played guitar with the female assistant for a while and read a few pages of a book. The afternoon sunshine made me tired, so I curled up next to Simon and fell asleep. The outdoor environment was not suitable for pregnant women to sleep in. Simon carried the sleeping female assistant into the bedroom and returned to the backyard under the eaves. He sat at a round table drinking coffee and looking through some information that Girl A had compiled today.
No longer entangled in various detailed tasks every day, Simon can finally conduct a serious review of the entire Westeros system.
The recent focus is on the impact of the Westeros system on the distribution of Daenerys Entertainment movies due to the opposition between the Westeros system and traditional paper media due to the launch of the 58list website.
Daenerys Entertainment's three labels, including this year's Venice Golden Lion Award-winning Kieslowski's "Red, Blue, and White," released yesterday by Highgate Pictures, have released a total of Four movies.
One of the more important ones is Brian De Palma's new film "Dawn of the King", which was released on September 10. This old gangster film that Palma is good at stars Al Pacino and has a production cost of US$30 million. , the number of opening screens is 1,679.
The other two films, one is the Cold War drama "The Accusation" starring Anthony Hopkins, distributed by New World Pictures. There is also "The Golden Gate" released by Gomen Films. This is a film adapted from a novel starring Meryl Streep, telling the story of the ups and downs of a Chilean girl with prophetic powers.
In fact, only one of the four movies, "Dawn of the Owl", was completely produced by Daenerys Entertainment, and the other three were distributed through agents that either bought out or shared a share.
Based on the word-of-mouth and box office data of the four films, Daenerys Entertainment’s publicity and distribution department determined that the opposition between the Westeros system and the print media had clearly affected the company’s film distribution.
Take "Dawn of the Lovers" as an example. After the film was released on September 10, the media's overall score was 7.1, which is slightly better than a passing score and not considered outstanding. Many film critics commented that Brian De Palma and Al Pacino were repeating the "Scarface" of the past, so the plot was cliched and lacked breakthroughs.
In comparison, the reputation of emerging Internet platforms can reach about 8 points based on comprehensive statistics.
The difference is very obvious.
However, in terms of box office, "Dawn of the King" had a box office of US$11.39 million in its first week, a 26% drop in the second week, and another US$8.36 million. The cumulative box office in two weeks was US$19.75 million. The total box office in North America is expected to be around US$35 million.
Such commercial performance basically met Daenerys Entertainment’s expectations.
With a production cost of US$30 million, a publicity expenditure of US$10 million, and a North American box office of US$35 million, the project is certainly not a success. However, relying on overseas distribution and follow-up channels, it is not a big problem to recover the cost and achieve a certain profit.
Simon had already anticipated this outcome when he approved the project.
Daenerys Entertainment cannot always be successful, and occasionally it needs such tepid projects to support its 'facade'.
After a comprehensive evaluation, traditional paper media has obviously affected the reputation of the movie "Dawn of the Lovers", but it has not had a significant impact on the box office. This is actually not surprising.
Currently, only about 25% of Hollywood movie promotion expenditures are spent on traditional print media. The more important platform is television channels, which account for 50%. Other channels such as theater posters, street advertisements, and radio advertisements account for the remaining 25%.
The proportion of publicity and distribution expenditures occupied by print media also means the weight of this publicity and distribution channel's impact on the commercial performance of a film.
25%.
It does not have decisive influence.
Of course, this ratio is actually for standard commercial films, such as artistic films produced by Gaomen Pictures. It is impossible to have too high publicity expenditures. In many cases, they mainly rely on word-of-mouth from paper media for dissemination.
"The Golden Man", which was released on September 17, received a negative reputation from the media, with an overall score of only 2.6.
The quality of the film is indeed unsatisfactory, but the Gaomen Pictures team also said that the mainstream paper media was obviously too harsh on the film.
As a film with an opening of 513 screens, the box office in the first week was only US$1.71 million, and the total box office in North America is expected to be only about US$5 million at most. However, the film's budget was as high as $25 million.
It was a waste of money.
Fortunately, the film was not produced by Daenerys Entertainment, and the budget mainly came from Europe.
For a project that is doomed to fail, the difference between the box office revenue of $5 million or $7 million is actually not that big. The change in traditional print media’s attitude towards Daenerys’ entertainment is visible to the naked eye.
Daenerys Entertainment has been experiencing good relationships with film critics in recent years. It is obvious that Simon overestimated the independence of film critics.
Also easy to understand.
Daenerys Entertainment can give some small favors to film critics, but this group has to rely on the royalties from the paper media platform to make a living, and it is impossible to be completely independent.
This is actually not a bad thing.
Lack of independence actually means that it can be affected by external forces.
Simon thought for a moment, put down the information, opened the laptop on the round table in front of him and started writing emails to several executives of Daenerys Entertainment.
The key to Daenerys Entertainment's next movie announcements is to ensure key projects, such as movies in several important schedules. For other movies, they only need to do their best.
If some print media goes too far, if necessary, they can kill chickens to scare monkeys.
In addition, it is necessary to strengthen the cooperation between Daenerys Entertainment and Igrit Portal, and guide as many users as possible to log in to the Internet platform to view movie reviews and participate in film discussions. As long as users can be introduced to the Internet, this will be the main battlefield of the Westeros system.
The number of Internet users in North America has reached one-third of the total population, and they are all the highest quality consumer users.
As long as it is operated properly, relying on the home field advantage of the Westeros system on the Internet platform can offset the negative impact of traditional paper media on the promotion and distribution of Daenerys entertainment movies to the greatest extent.
After I finished writing an email, it was already past four in the afternoon.
Girl A appeared quietly, helped Simon sort out the scattered information on the table, and said, "Mr. Gates is here."
"Let him come here."
Alison nodded and turned to leave.
After a while, Daimon's classmate came over under the guidance of Girl A. Simon then stood up and shook hands with him, and the two sat down at the round table together.
When Girl A left again, Daimon, who pretended to take a sip of coffee, without any trace of attention, turned his attention away from Alison's graceful figure wrapped in the OL suit.
Feeling a little dissatisfied with Simon for not even showing up to greet him, Gates didn't say much and went straight to the point: "Simon, what's going on with Linux?"
Just this Wednesday, Igret suddenly released a completely open source version of the Linux 1.0 operating system source code. This is the result of the work of the Igret Linux team for more than half a year. Compared with the founder Linus Thomas, Watts' rough kernel, this version of the operating system kernel has 200,000 lines of code. Although it is not perfect, it can basically achieve practical applications.
Among the mainstream operating systems in the computer industry, there has never been one that can be completely open source and free.
Therefore, you can imagine what kind of impact this completely free and open operating system will have on the industry.
The reason for disclosure is that Yigret released this product to further demonstrate the openness of the company.
Of course, privately, this openness is actually for long-term layout considerations.
For the computer industry, a piece of software, whether it is a large-scale operating system application or a simple program that only implements one or two instructions, can form an industry and even achieve a monopoly only if there are enough users.
The company's plan will not directly conduct commercial operations on the Linux operating system, but intends to rely on the Linux platform to provide further application software, solutions and other services.
This is the way Red Hat operates in my memory.
Later, in order to strengthen its layout in open source applications, IBM acquired Red Hat for more than 30 billion U.S. dollars, which proved the feasibility of this business model.
However, the premise of all this is that the Linux system must be popular enough.
Igret is promoting this process in advance by releasing the source code of the Linux operating system that it has invested a lot of money and manpower in developing.
At this time, facing the question from Damen, Simon just said calmly: "Bill, you must have understood that this is a public open source operating system project. Moreover, Yigrit's goal is the field of server operating systems and will not affect Microsoft. It will cause too much impact. I know what you are worried about, Bill, and I can assure you that Igret will not further develop a desktop operating system based on Linux."
Daimon's expression did not ease. Instead, he was a little excited. He unknowingly raised his voice and said, "But you should also know, Simon, Microsoft has just launched Windows NT. You are disrupting the situation!"
"Unix is already open enough, but many people still have concerns about this product. Bill, do you think everyone can accept a completely closed-source server operating system?"
“Why not, if only we could provide a more stable service?”
"There is no absolutely stable service. Any operating system will inevitably encounter various problems. What everyone needs is that once they encounter a problem, they can find the source of the problem very conveniently and quickly, and then solve it. A closed-source operating system, Just like a car with a completely welded hood, no matter how reliable the operating system is, users will still have concerns."
Damen seemed to be losing his patience: "How to sell welded cars is our business. Simon, you must stop the development of Linux. Don't forget, you are also the largest shareholder and the second largest shareholder of Microsoft."
"Sorry, Bill, I can't promise you that."
Daimon stared at the young man opposite him fiercely. After a moment, he realized that he didn't seem to have much to do with him, which made him even more angry: "Okay, then, promise me, Igret will not continue to post in the future. Linux source code."
Although this 1.0 kernel has made great progress over Linus Torvalds's initial version, it still needs to be continuously improved if it wants to compare with other widely used operating systems.
Simon said simply: "Okay, I can promise you this."
Bill Gates was speechless for a moment.
Simon also did not explain to the other party that Igret had supported Linus Torvac to establish the Linux Foundation to coordinate free global software development volunteers to continue to improve this operating system.
Even if Igret no longer releases the latest Linux source code, the Linux Foundation will gradually launch operating system versions above 2.0.
Of course, there is still the participation of Yigrit's Linux development team in order to guide the development of this operating system in the direction that Yigrit hopes.
Bill Gates also knew that Simon was hiding something from him, but for a while he couldn't continue to get to the bottom of it. He could only change the topic: "As for the pre-installation of IE browser, I think we can talk about it again."
Simon smiled and said, "Bill, you can discuss this matter with Jeff and the others."
Simon originally wanted to pre-install the IE browser directly on the Windows operating system, but was rejected by Damen classmates. He had no choice but to settle for the next best thing and instead cooperate with OEM manufacturers such as Compaq, HP, and Dell.
With the further popularization of the Internet, whether IE browser software is pre-installed has also become one of the influencing factors for consumers when purchasing personal computers.
Therefore, even though pre-installing the IE browser on each computer costs an additional $10, major mainstream OEMs have successively begun cooperation with Yigrit, and even Apple is no exception.
Now that the mainstream OEM manufacturers have been basically settled, there is no need to cooperate directly with Microsoft.
After all, doing so will bear greater monopoly risks.
Simon also knew why Daimon-san suddenly changed so much.
Microsoft's MSN portal was recently launched.
The conditions that could be given to America Online were basically given to Microsoft by Ygrit.
Microsoft is also imitating America Online and cooperating with other Internet service providers in North America to launch Microsoft's News Box to increase traffic to the MSN portal.
The news box, which was similar to the later advertising pop-ups, was a window opened by Yigrit for the two competitors.
Compared to many other sites, AOL and Microsoft have been lucky enough.
But Daimon-san is obviously not satisfied yet.
If the IE browser becomes a pre-installed software for the Windows operating system, Damen probably thinks that Microsoft should use this as a condition to require the default homepage rights of the IE browser, thereby further increasing the traffic of Microsoft's MSN portal.
This is actually a pretty big investment.
Even if Igret can provide certain price discounts for Microsoft's pre-installation, based on the annual sales volume of Microsoft's operating systems, it will still require hundreds of millions of dollars in expenditures every year.
However, the Internet wave has begun to surge, and even Microsoft is inevitably worried about being left behind in this industrial transformation. Therefore, it believes that as long as it can obtain enough online traffic, the expenditure is completely worth it.
If Simon, he would actually be so decisive.
Therefore, it is even less possible to agree to Damen's request at this time.
Igret's dominant position in the Internet field cannot be challenged. Even if he knew that Microsoft later failed in the Internet industry, Simon did not intend to give Microsoft an opening. Who knows if there will be other changes in history.