American Entertainment 1982

"Great companies start in garages, MicroPort, Microsoft, Lotus, and Actor." Roland Hansen, vice president of Microsoft, looked at the No. 9 garage with the Actor sign not far away, and said to Tommy Hawk next to him. He praised with a smile.

Tommy shook his head: "Actor is far from qualified to be compared with the three software companies you mentioned."

"I heard from Benjamin that Actor seems to have moved to a new office, so what kind of team is staying here?" Roland Hansen looked at the dozen or so employees in the garage who were busy answering the phone at this time, and asked curiously road.

Tommy looked at the now crowded garage. Once upon a time, there were only three people here. He, Jason, Holly, and three college students were here to imagine the future of actors.

Now, Holly has taken a leave of absence from school and is flying around as Actor's vice president in charge of outreach, dealing with various external matters, such as interviews or public relations.

Jason also chose to take a break from school, and is currently guiding training at various universities, and cooperating with Holly to make some appearances and interviews.

If the two of them were here at this moment, they should feel the same emotion as themselves, missing those years that only belonged to three rookie entrepreneurs.

After regaining consciousness, Tommy introduced to Roland Hansen: "This is the company's customer service and technical support department. There are currently 30 part-time employees, all of whom are students at Stanford University. They come here to earn some money after school. If the place of work is too far from the school, it will be difficult for them to go to class, and the labor cost of full-time customer service is too high, so in the end I decided to leave the customer service department in the No. 9 garage to provide jobs for school students.”

"You don't look like a traditional developer." Hearing Tommy's introduction, Roland Hansen nodded slightly and said: "Those entrepreneurs who are programmers themselves often improve the treatment and treatment of employees as soon as they get the money." Office environment."

Tommy smiled and asked: "Mr. Hansen, do you mean the traditional developer you mentioned, Mr. Paul Allen who quit Microsoft management due to illness?"

Last year, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen found out that he had Hodgkin's lymphoma during a physical examination. any decision of the company.

This is Microsoft's external statement. In fact, early Hodgkin's lymphoma will not affect work, and the cure rate is very high. The real reason for Paul Allen to leave Microsoft is the irreconcilable relationship between him and Bill Gates. contradiction.

When Paul Allen participated in Microsoft's decision-making, Microsoft still retained some geek temperament, but after Paul Allen was out and Microsoft became a company owned by Bill Gates alone, the style of the entire company changed, more so than before. Ambitious, but also more greedy.

For example, although the company’s income is good, Microsoft still chooses to hire a large number of temporary employees, and then add complex and secret non-competition agreements and non-disclosure agreement clauses to the contracts of these employees. This will allow Microsoft to save a lot of employee benefits, such as medical insurance. Such expenses, and because of the non-competition agreement and non-disclosure agreement, these temporary employees are dissatisfied with Microsoft, and they dare not resign easily, because once they resign and join other companies in the same industry with better benefits, Microsoft's legal department will be the first Time to sue him and send him a resignation gift package.

Numerous developers in the computer software industry have slammed Microsoft for unscrupulously exploiting employees, but apparently to no avail.

Even after Paul Allen knew what Bill Gates had done, he called and scolded him for not being worthy of being called a computer practitioner, but just a vampire who mixed into the computer industry.

"That's right, many programmers think that if the company makes money, it should improve the company's treatment, and everyone gets the money, but Bill doesn't think so, I don't think so, so he recruited me from the cosmetics industry to sell software." Roland - Hansen turned his body sideways and looked at Tommy Hawke: "I'm glad you didn't consider yourself a developer. Speaking of which, guess why I asked Benjamin for your contact information and wanted to chat with you? "

"I guess, I was one step ahead of you?" Tommy asked without hesitation, turning his eyes to the other's face.

"That's right, I asked Benjamin before, is this guy named Tommy Hawk from Actor Company, like me, who also came from selling cosmetics before?" Roland Hansen looked at this guy named Tommy Hawk with complicated eyes. The guy said in a serious tone:

"I have designed the Microsoft Word promotion plan for so long, and because of you, most of it is now abandoned. Otherwise, the name that now appears on the top of the professional sales lists of those computer magazines should be Microsoft Word, not OSS."

Tommy shrugged: "OSS is sold so much because it's free, not because it's more professional than Microsoft Word."

"I always feel that your words are mocking me." Roland laughed.

With Paul Allen out, Bill Gates immediately replaced the vice president in charge of promotion and sales according to his own wishes, and then recruited Roland Hansen, the vice president in charge of marketing at Neutrogena, an American cosmetics company.

The first thing Roland Hansen did when he took office was to announce that Microsoft's own document processing software, Multi File, was renamed Microsoft Word, and that it was compatible with the documents of WordStar, the world's number one selling document processing software.

Just like Actor's compatibility with Lotus's documents, Microsoft is not interested in obtaining authorization from MicroPort, which is a direct and rude unauthorized compatibility.

When MicroPort asked Microsoft why it wanted to be compatible with its own software files without authorization, Microsoft's response was that we did just that, and if we were unhappy, we would go to court to sue us.

However, the owner of MicroPort, Seymour Rubinstein, is an old man, and he and Bill Gates have been friends for many years. The two have been in love and killed each other for many years.

Therefore, MicroPort did not initiate a lawsuit at all, but assumed that the whole incident had never happened, and did not give Microsoft any chance to gain popularity. This made Microsoft Word compatible with WordStar files, but did not find any chance to make waves, and continued to be the bottom of sales. .

No matter whether it is an individual or a large company, they are not interested in using this document that needs to spend hundreds of dollars to buy a new auxiliary device called a mouse, and then re-memorize the operation instructions as thick as a book to get a perfect user experience. processing software.

Unable to catch the heat of Minimally Invasive, Roland Hansen is ready to promote Microsoft Word like promoting branded cosmetics.

Since we can’t beat WordStar in terms of professionalism, we should launch an attack from the utilization rate. We will not do high-end luxury goods for the time being, but promote Microsoft Word as civilian cosmetics, such as cooperating with various computer magazines or software distributors, magazine subscribers and You can get a personal experience version of Microsoft Word for free for any amount of consumption in the software store.

As a result, just after negotiating the entire promotion plan with those magazines and software distributors here, Roland Hansen found that the software sales lists of major computer magazines had changed their names, and they were consecutively on the list of document processing software sales. WordStar, which occupied the top spot for four years, was actually replaced by a software called OSS. At the same time, Lotus1-2-3's position as the number one spreadsheet software was also replaced by OSS.

Roland-Hansen got all the information of this software at the first time, and personally experienced the effect of using this software, and then found that Microsoft Word was not comparable to OSS in terms of ease of use.

OSS does not have as many functions as other software to show its power and professionalism. It is a simple and practical document processing function and spreadsheet processing function. It has a clear positioning and meets the basic business office requirements. Most importantly, it is very user-friendly. Easy to get started, the entire instruction manual is compressed to only ten pages.

What's even more frightening is that it's completely free now, as long as you call Actor and leave your address and phone number, and you're willing to pay the postage, you can receive a copy of OSS software.

Roland looked at Tommy: "Seize the market for free to cultivate users' habits and brand image. It seems that no company in the computer software industry has used it like this. Only the cosmetics industry often does this kind of thing, so when I saw your news, The first reaction is that you have sold cosmetics before."

"I sell everything, Mr. Hansen." Tommy said with a wink at the forty-nine-year-old marketing guru.

"How many users does OSS currently have?"

"100,000 sets were sold in the early stage, and 100,000 sets were given out through the training classroom plan, and there were nearly 200,000 people who applied through the free advertisement in the newspaper immediately after my interview." Tommy was full of pride. He told Roland about the sales of his own software.

Free sales are also sales, so Tommy is confident in what he said.

But Roland immediately popped Tommy's balloon: "This data is a bit watery. According to the approximate data I know, OSS has a maximum of 300,000 users."

"Three hundred thousand people, that is to say, there are three hundred thousand people sitting in front of the computer hungrily to learn the free OSS software." Tommy continued to talk without changing his face when Roland poked the data into water.

The number of 300,000 users is indeed scary. After Microsoft’s own document processing software was renamed Microsoft Word and re-launched, the sales in the United States have not even reached 30,000 sets. Originally, they wanted to use the way of selling consumer goods, relying on free To increase the number of users, the result was preempted by Actor Company.

Thinking of this, Roland continued: "And Actor Company develops another software to sell to the outside world, these 300,000 people will be potential buyers."

"The word potential can be removed, Mr. Hansen. I don't know if you have noticed that Mr. Benjamin Rosen of Compaq has used Actor's customer information to sell 20,000 PCs in one month." Tang Mi looked at Roland:

"Because of the training classroom plan initiated by our SSD General Assembly, a reward mechanism is designed for students, which allows students who get an A and do not have a personal computer to use a credit card to purchase a computer in installments. If the training is over and he does not get a computer job, SSD We will help him repay the loan in installments, and many students who didn’t get an A can’t control their desire to spend, so they used the money to buy the Compaq computer we recommended, but for the time being, our activity only supports Compaq computers.”

"So how does that guy Benjamin repay you, you will push up Compaq's market value a lot." Roland was a little surprised at first, and then asked.

Tommy looked at the person in charge of his customer service team, Gary Goode, who was about to 'connect' with Jason when they met for the first time, and said with a smile:

"He invited IBM to join EFF, so when students buy computers in installments, the brand besides Compaq and IBM will appear soon. At the same time, our training courses have only OSS from the beginning, and we consider adding other software, such as Stanford University alumni The Intuit company they founded, the financial software they developed will free accounting from the piles of paper documents, and Parker, also started by Stanford students, they designed and developed a simulation analysis software that allows those scientists Or university labs for..."

"How can Microsoft join this EFF, and then there will be training on Microsoft mice in your training classroom?" Roland Hansen asked decisively without waiting for Tommy to finish speaking.

EFF is obviously using the training plan to cultivate user habits. Roland thinks that the operation training of the Microsoft mouse is necessary. It is obviously faster and epoch-making computer auxiliary hardware, but people who are used to keyboard operations think that the existence of the mouse is unnecessary.

Since people who develop habits feel that the mouse is dispensable, let these people who have no computer foundation get used to the auxiliary hardware called the mouse first.

Tommy said to Rosen: "We welcome all companies that are enthusiastic about helping companies in the same industry, have a sense of industry responsibility, and are willing to help each other. For example, there is a company that needs help at this time, called Actor, and it has encountered some troubles."

I haven’t slept since last night, I’m not lazy, I’m just stuck, I feel bad no matter how I write, it seems that I suddenly can’t type, I even designed two people to meet in a nightclub last night A mentally handicapped drama...

But there is no other way for this kind of thing, just bite the bullet and continue writing to break through~~I will continue to write~Don’t accompany me tonight everyone, I can do it alone~