At two o'clock in the afternoon, Eric took Caroline to the agreed coffee shop on time, and Roger Wilson was already waiting there.
Roger Wilson was about forty years old, tall and tall, wearing a light gray suit, wearing rimless glasses, and combing his hair meticulously, without the slovenliness of a technical engineer in people's impression.
After introducing each other politely, find a place to sit down.
After ordering coffee, and waiting for the waiter to leave, Roger Wilson looked at Eric indifferently and said, "Mr. Williams, is the filming of 007 going well? Everyone is looking forward to it?"
Eric nodded and said, "Of course, everything is fine, and, Roger, you can call me Eric."
"Okay, Eric," Roger Wilson nodded with a smile, and said, "Actually, we were very surprised to learn that you were interested in ARM."
Eric smiled. After all, the other party was still an engineer who focused on technology, and he started to take the initiative to enter the topic so soon.
The waiter brought the coffee over, Eric paused for a while, and waited for the other party to leave again, then said: "I have always been very interested in the IT field, and, in my opinion, ARM technology has a very wide range of applications. Because of the application prospects, Caroline was asked to collect technical information about ARM."
Roger Wilson thought for a while and said, "Eric, may I know your specific expectations for ARM technology?"
"Of course," Eric nodded, looking at Caroline.
The girl took out a Newton tablet from her bag and placed it on the table.
Eric opened the tablet and said, "I hope to buy ARM and continue to focus on the development of application software chips."
If you want to buy ARM, you need a reasonable reason after all, otherwise it is impossible for ARM's technical team to follow a purposeless boss.
Eric's purpose of buying ARM is very simple, in order to prevent the large-scale proliferation of ARM technology, and even cut off the technology authorization of possible competitors.
But the reason for this monopoly is certainly not humane.
As for the research and development of mobile phone chips, Eric already has Nokia and Qualcomm in his hands. As long as these two companies are fully authorized by ARM technology, their research and development capabilities in mobile phone chips will definitely far exceed ARM itself.
After careful consideration, Eric set his sights on the tablet.
Roger Wilson took the Newton tablet from Eric, and briefly operated it a few times, but his expression was a little sad, and said: "Eric, the last time I had a phone call with Apple CEO John Sculley , They may stop the production of Newton tablet next year, so this product should be regarded as a failure.”
Roger Wilson's subtext is obviously saying that Eric's choice to develop a tablet handheld computer is not a wise move.
But Eric disagreed with Roger Wilson's point of view. He said: "Roger, Newton itself is a very good product. The reason why it failed is that it did not find its own suitable price and market positioning. According to my According to the collected information, the overall shipment of the handheld computer market last year reached 3 million units, and in the first half of this year, this number has reached 2.6 million. It can be said that this is a very fast-growing market.”
Roger Wilson quickly calculated that if Eric was right, at an average price of $500, the market size of tablet computers this year would reach about $2.5 billion. Although this figure is insignificant compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars in the personal computer market, it is enough to prove the value of the existence of tablet computers.
The original intention of ARM was to develop processors for Apple's Newton tablet. Roger Wilson and most of ARM's engineers are still very emotional for tablet computers.
After thinking about it, Roger Wilson said, "So, Eric, what kind of tablet do you want to build?"
Eric said: "I plan to make this tablet computer a peripheral hardware product of Yahoo Networks. If we can cooperate, ARM will be responsible for the development of the chip, and Yahoo will develop a special operating system for this tablet computer." , integrate Yahoo's browser, instant messaging, e-mail and other service software into this tablet. I hope this product will focus more on entertainment and practicality. It can not only connect to the Internet, but also read books and listen to music etc."
"According to what you said, this is actually a mini handheld PC terminal," Roger Wilson said: "However, Eric, have you considered how to connect to the network? The biggest advantage of a tablet computer is its mobility. , you can use it anywhere, but if you have to drag a long network cable around to use the Internet, I think most people will feel that it is more convenient than a laptop."
"This is easy to solve," Eric said with a smile: "At the beginning of this year, I happened to have Firefly Electronics buy a complete patent for a wireless LAN technology called WIFI, which can realize terminal devices within a short distance. The connection to the Internet, although the transmission distance is only tens of meters, is enough to meet the requirements of a person using the Internet at home or in the company area.”
"This seems to be very similar to the Bluetooth technology introduced by Ericsson," Roger Wilson said. "But, Eric, we may be able to integrate WIFI technology into the tablet computer, but where does the signal source come from?"
Wireless routers that integrate WIFI technology will not start to emerge until ten years later. Although Firefly controls a large share of Cisco, Cisco's main business area is the enterprise-level router market, and it does not involve personal consumer terminals on a large scale, and neither does Eric. Will deliberately interfere with Cisco's business ideas.
Since Cisco can't provide any help in this regard, it will be difficult for Eric to use the power of Firefly to push other router companies to develop wireless routers.
However, this problem is not difficult to solve.
Eric said: "As long as a person's home is connected to the Internet, it is very easy to create a signal transmitter, or you can call it a 'hot spot'. We only need to equip the tablet with a WIFI technology Chips and signal transmitter peripherals, compared to the price of hundreds of dollars for tablet computers, the production cost of this mini WIFI signal transmitter may only be ten dollars, so it is like a tablet computer charger, it will not It will cause too much burden on its overall cost and selling price, and the feasibility is very strong." (To be continued.)