The CD Walkman, which had made a great contribution to Polaris in the past, has now reached saturation, and with the advent of the Internet era, the CD Walkman is facing the fate of being eliminated at any time.
Polaris Company is also aware of this. They are currently developing an MP3 player and are also cooperating with Qianxun Technology Company to jointly develop related music websites and software.
It’s just that the Internet has just begun, and only China is a step ahead in this regard. However, due to domestic per capita income issues, not many families have access to the Internet.
Although trading companies have Internet cafes all over the country, most people only choose to listen to music online. Most people who want to buy MP3 players are not willing to pay the money.
According to the "urinary nature" of Polaris Company, the pricing will definitely not be very cheap, but in order to expand the sales volume, it will not be as expensive as the CD Walkman.
At present, the price of MP3 is divided into two levels according to the memory size. The first level has a storage memory size of 10G, which is larger than the memory of the first generation Apple IPOD, and the second level has a storage memory of 20G.
The price of the former is 500 yuan, while the price of the latter is 800 yuan, which is half the price compared to the CD Walkman.
The main purpose of Polaris' adoption of this strategy is to expand sales and make money through music content. Only the more people use MP3 devices, the more music content they can sell.
There is a very obvious difference between this and CD Walkman. People who buy CD Walkman will not buy too many CD records. It is more difficult to make money from the content.
However, because of the Internet nature of MP3 music content, it is relatively cheap for ordinary people to obtain music. At the same time, because the price of a single piece of music is relatively low, most people can afford it.
This provides very good conditions for expanding the music content market. As long as more people buy MP3 devices, the expansion of the content market will be easier, and it will be easier to make money from the content.
Moreover, the price of MP3 is not only much lower than that of CD Walkman, but it is also much smaller than that of CD Walkman, making it more convenient for consumers to carry it with them.
Coupled with Polaris Company's always excellent industrial design capabilities, the appearance is quite beautiful in industrial design, making people unable to take their eyes away from it. It is very lovable.
Of course, the emergence of this product is indispensable without the support of Byte Data Company. Although this company has a monopoly on flash memory technology, it has not rested on its laurels, but has continued to improve its technical capabilities in this area.
There are also some flash memory chips implemented using other technologies on the market, but their capacities are generally low and their stability is relatively poor. Although they are cheap, they have not occupied the mainstream market.
This is due to Byte Data's continuous innovation in flash memory, which prevents competitors from keeping up with them. According to the current speed of flash memory development, competitors will always have to lag behind them.
The consequences of this phenomenon are quite detrimental to competitors. If their technology cannot keep up with the pace, it will be difficult to make profits. If things go on like this, they will definitely go bankrupt.
Unless these companies have the support of a large consortium behind them, they will spend a lot of money to maintain the company's operations, and then spend huge capital costs on research and development, in order to maintain the company.
But Byte Data is not a vegetarian. Not to mention that they have achieved good profitability, but there are also capital giants behind them. This kind of confrontation requires no competitor at all.
Byte Data Company is not thinking about acquiring rival companies. It is completely unnecessary. Moreover, they have also understood the essence of Zhao Yi, which is to let competitors continue to bleed in the competition and weaken the capital strength behind them.
Not to mention the monopoly of flash memory chips, in the field of traditional disk storage, due to Byte Data's increased competition last year, many products have achieved price reductions.
This is a disaster for competitors. Seagate and Toshiba have struggled to support themselves in this field. Not only have they not made any money, their sales performance in the past year has not been enough to cover their research and development expenses.
As for Western Digital, they have not yet entered the field of hard disk R&D and production at this time. It is estimated that they will think twice before entering even if they want to enter this market environment.
Byte Data now has an absolute dominance in the enterprise storage field, with the market share reaching almost 100%. In the personal consumer market, the market share now reaches more than 95%.
If the enterprise storage market relies on their superb technical strength to gain the trust of enterprise users, then in the consumer field, in addition to technical strength, they also rely on their own super capable brother companies.
Polaris' personal computer business accounts for 60% of the world market, occupying a very large market share, and all Polaris' personal computers use Byte Data's hard drives.
In this business alone, Byte Data's hard drive products account for a large proportion of the entire market. Coupled with their leading advantages, technological advantages, and subsequent price reduction competition, they have always firmly controlled the consumer market. .
In the past, because there were no good use scenarios for flash memory, the only large-scale use of flash memory chips on the market was U disk products, which completely swept the previous floppy disks into the garbage heap.
In the past, USB disks had their own advantages and disadvantages compared to CD disks. USB disks were convenient and fast, while CD disks had larger capacity and higher cost performance. For low-cost consumers, CD disks were more economical.
This is why personal computers still retain CD interfaces and USB interfaces, just to balance the needs of the two.
However, now Byte Data has developed a larger-capacity flash memory chip due to the needs of Polaris. In addition, after so many years, the technology has become quite mature, and the production cost has been greatly reduced.
The disadvantages that existed before compared with CD disks will no longer exist. Now Polaris Company has begun to launch 512M USB flash drive products. By then, CD disks will no longer be used.
With the global development of the Internet, Polaris is gradually phasing out CD disks and replacing them with flash memory chips and hard drives.
Even the new generation of home entertainment products that Polaris plans to launch will adopt the Internet and local storage model. In the future, you only need to connect to the Internet to download relevant entertainment resources online.
In this way, it will not only allow users to obtain entertainment resources at a lower cost, expand the sales volume of content, but also effectively eliminate the problem of piracy.
It just takes a certain amount of time to completely replace CD disks. After all, the number of products using CDs is still very large, so you don't give up just because you want to.
Moreover, the Internet has just begun, and there is still a long way to go before everyone can access the Internet, so Polaris will still sell products with CD components in the future.
The reason why Polaris is keen to launch Internet-enabled products is mainly based on the following three considerations:
The first point is to enrich Internet application scenarios and help the Internet develop faster. Zhao Yi has always wanted to speed up the pace of Internet development, so Internet application scenarios must be improved, otherwise users will have no motivation to access the Internet.
The second point is to consider their own interests. Their home consoles and personal handheld game consoles have sold hundreds of millions of units around the world, but it will take many years until these devices are retired.
If you want to speed up the replacement of equipment, you must release new products. However, based on the current performance of these two products, they fully meet the current gaming environment and there is not much need for upgrades.
If an upgrade is really carried out in this area, it can only be a small upgrade, but players are not willing to buy it, so the Internet function is particularly important.
This can be said to be their biggest selling point as a next-generation console. Not only does it allow consumers to easily obtain game resources, they no longer have to go to physical stores to buy CD game disks.
At the same time, a networking mode has been added, which is a feature that was completely unavailable on previous game consoles. After all, playing alone and playing with multiple people have completely different experiences.
In the future, when developing console games, Polaris will integrate the function of playing games online and make some modifications to existing games to give old games a second life.
The third point is to prevent piracy. After the non-networked devices are sold, Polaris has no idea what users use them for, and it cannot monitor these devices. This provides a good breeding ground for piracy.
Don't think that there is no piracy in developed countries in Europe and the United States. In fact, it is human nature to get something for nothing. It does not differ between countries and races. It only differs from the local strictness in combating piracy.
Zhao Yiyi agreed very much with the business strategy of Polaris Company. At the meeting, he also introduced the concept of smart home to Zhang Ruimin.
Now that the Internet is developing in full swing, all home devices in the future will have networking capabilities, which provides very good conditions for smart homes.
In the past, because the prices of home appliances were getting lower and lower, it became more and more difficult for Polaris to obtain profits. If smart home products achieve great success, then the profits in this area can be well guaranteed.
After Zhang Ruimin listened to Zhao Yi's introduction to the concept of smart home, he immediately felt like he had found a treasure.
Before, they had only cooperated with Zhao Yi's plan and the strategic deployment of their brother companies. In addition, they did have great interests in it, so they were so active in applying the Internet to their products.
But after the concept of smart home comes out, it is time for Polaris to build its own smart home ecosystem. As long as this system is completed, the benefits in the future will be unimaginable.
As long as your smart home products enter one household, the probability of that household purchasing their other products will increase significantly for a long time in the future. After all, mutual cooperation is the essence of smart homes.
By then, their TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, water heaters, dishwashers, dryers and even microwave ovens and other equipment can all be perfectly controlled and coordinated with the central control system.
Before you get home, you can remotely control your air conditioner to turn on the air conditioner, let the water heater boil water in advance, and bake the food that you put in the microwave oven in advance. You can immediately enjoy the convenience brought by these devices when you get home.
This is just a simple example. Others include anti-theft monitoring, smart alarms, remote collaboration, etc. Almost all electronic devices can be added to the smart home family.
Moreover, Polaris Company already has the conditions for a smart home control center, which is a personal handheld computer, also commonly known as a tablet computer.
This, in turn, increases the use scenarios of tablet computers, giving tablet computers more added value, and sales will definitely increase significantly.
In home application scenarios, Zhao Yi's companies also have excellent natural language processing capabilities. Using radio equipment, they can voice control almost all devices.
In this era, this is simply a black technology. Even if other consumer electronics companies have developed smart home devices, they can never be as comfortable as Polaris in this voice control core.
There is an obvious gap in this area, so no matter how good their individual smart products are, it will not help. There will still not be too many users buying their products.
Moreover, purchasing a voice-controlled device from Polaris Company is not just a voice-controlled device, but a chat companion of your own, bringing a touch of warmth to people who live alone.
Compared with cold equipment, this is easier to win the favor of consumers, and once consumers get along with the intelligent voice control system for a long time, they will also have some feelings.
Moreover, the intelligent voice control system will also record the user's habits and understand the user's situation. The longer they get along with each other, the more inseparable the user will be from the intelligent voice control system, because it understands you better than anyone else.
So in this case, even if the equipment breaks down or they change their home, they will still choose to buy Polaris' smart home without asking for furniture or anything else.
Because these data will be backed up to Polaris' servers, users only need to enter their ID, and all previous data can be restored.
The intelligent voice control system is still their old friend and has never left their side. As long as they are normal people, they will not refuse such considerate service.
Zhang Ruimin is so excited precisely because he understands the situation very well. Winning a treasure is an important strategy for Polaris Company to achieve greater glory, completely differentiating Polaris Company from other consumer electronics companies.
In the future, there will be a difference between Polaris and other companies in the global consumer electronics field. Both brand awareness and brand reputation will reach unprecedented heights.
In the face of such a Polaris company, Apple's popularity and reputation in the previous life would be far inferior to Polaris Company, so are they afraid that their consumer electronics products will not earn high profits
And after such a layout is completed, Polaris will become very difficult to deal with, because their products are not ordinary products, but have a strong emotional bond with consumers.
As long as the government cannot find a very reasonable reason and rashly adopts restrictive policies against Polaris, their citizens will not agree. For the sake of their own votes, they have to stop targeting Polaris.
At this online annual meeting, after Zhang Ruimin got such a good idea, he couldn't wait to go offline immediately, reorganize the company's R&D layout for the next year, and incorporate smart home into the core layout.
But at the end of the meeting, Zhao Yi had one more thing for Polaris Company to do, which was to move the Polaris Game Studio from Shenzhen to Jiujiang.
Polaris Game Studio is a very mature industry. The value created every year is already very huge, and it can immediately bring huge financial income to Jiujiang.
And after all, the gaming industry is also an important part of the Internet industry. As the future Internet capital planned by Zhao Yi, Jiujiang will have unique advantages in the Internet industry in the future.
In addition, the game industry is very insensitive to location advantages. In other words, it doesn't matter where the game studio moves, as long as the talents follow.
At present, domestic game talents are basically under the Zhao Yi Company. Not to mention the size of the wild game studios, the salary and technology are still very different, and they have basically accepted the shares of Polaris Game Studio.
Polaris Company has resources and technology. If it does not accept Polaris Company's investment, although it will not be suppressed, it will be very difficult to develop quickly and the process will be very arduous.
Moreover, the domestic software industry is now basically dominated by Zhao Yi's companies, and the talents who come out to develop games have basically spent time in Zhao Yi's companies.
These enterprises are inextricably linked. As long as they are a normal operator, they will not refuse the capital injection and support of Polaris Company. Moreover, having a big tree to enjoy the shade is not only capital and technology, but also connections.
The difficulty for small companies to survive in China is not only due to capital and technology, but also to other aspects. Although Zhao Yi does not want to see this situation, this situation will not be significantly improved in a short period of time.
By joining the big family of Polaris, these small studios and companies will not face much obstruction in these aspects and can develop the company with peace of mind.
The reason why Zhao Yi moved Polaris Game Studio to Jiujiang is that it is difficult for several current Internet companies to become a big success in the short term, or to achieve very large operating income.
If Jiujiang wants to develop rapidly, it must improve urban infrastructure and provide better opportunities for more Internet companies to settle in.
The municipal government and even the provincial government will be more active in seeking more favorable policy conditions for Jiujiang's Internet industry, accelerating the development of the city's Internet industry, and forming a clear competitive advantage.
Moreover, the move of Polaris Game Studio to Jiujiang will bring huge financial revenue to the city government, so the government departments will be more attentive to the city's industrial planning and more active in developing the Internet industry.
If you have never eaten meat, you will not know the taste of meat and will not be greedy. Once you have eaten it, you will involuntarily secrete more saliva every time you see meat.
The Polaris Game Studio that moves to Jiujiang will be renamed Polaris Game Company. It will have greater autonomy and may be able to obtain greater development prospects. (End of chapter)