Rebirth of the Internet Overlord

{Time: June 1, 2004}

{Location: United States - California Flower Planting - Special Administrative Region}

June 1, 2004 was a Tuesday. At less than 8:00 in the morning, Larry Page walked into the office at the same time as in the past. Employees kept passing by him along the way.

But no one dared to say hello to him who looked ugly.

He walked all the way to 10 meters in front of his office. When he saw the door of the office open, he realized that the person who had specially greeted the secretary and paid attention to him had arrived.

Secretary Shelly saw him, and he glanced at her and turned into the reception room next to him. After a while, Shelly walked in.

After closing the door, Shelly said, "Mr. Chandler said that you haven't answered his calls in the past few days, so he came here to see you today."

Chandler in Shelly's mouth is the person in charge of the stock issuance company scheduled for Google's IPO this time. Larry Page has been receiving calls from him constantly in the past few days, but the troubled Larry Page has never

I want to answer that phone call.

Perhaps two months ago, he would have been happy to receive a call from Chandler. He would have discussed with Chandler some things about Google's IPO on the phone, and even told him similar information that Google was developing well. But these two months

, he has no such mood.

After thinking about it, Larry said to Shelly, "Go and find Sergey for me. I have something to talk to him about."

Shelly knew that her boss was in a bad mood, so she nodded and walked out of the reception room.

Within three minutes, Sergey Brin walked in without even knocking on the door.

The two looked at each other and fell silent.

After a long time, Larry Page said angrily, "I haven't answered Chandler's calls lately, and he just came to my door this morning."

"I know, I saw him looking for me in the reception room over there. Fortunately, I hid." Sergey sighed.

Larry Page glanced at him and smiled bitterly, "Look what we have experienced recently. First, on April 1st, Yahoo canceled its cooperation with Google. Of course, this matter even involves John Doerr of Sequoia Capital.

With Michael Moritz dealing with it, we had actually anticipated that such a day would come.

After all, Yahoo was originally born as an online directory. When the b2c project started in 2002 was doing well, they wanted to go through the old path of search engines and canceled their cooperation with Google. After acquiring the overture search engine

It is understandable to integrate development with Yahoo search engine.

But there will be a transition period of more than a year during the development of their search engine. Why did Terry Semel spend technology royalties on the European Bing search engine during this gap of more than a year?

!”

Terry Semel is the current CEO of Yahoo, but Sergey knows that Terry Semel, who he and Larry are familiar with, does not have the final say in some matters. The person behind them is named Yang

Zhiyuan's spiritual leader of Yahoo is the one who can really decide things.

Therefore, Sergey could only shake his head helplessly when he heard his old friend's complaints.

Larry Page did not seek answers from Sergey. He kept talking, "Compared to our Google contract, Bing can only get 20 million US dollars in technology fees from this year. But you also saw it.

, Yahoo actually uses Bing’s technology on its geographical websites in Britain, France and Germany!”

"Isn't this a tiger-raising problem?" Larry Page slammed the table in a circle.

In fact, they knew about this obscure European search engine company early on, because as early as February 1 this year, Bing had already logged into the United States!

Although it seems to have many bright spots, Google has seen too many companies that only have technology but no profit. Ask and Overture, which of these two search engines didn't start earlier in the United States than Bing. But without any means of profit, they are not

Was it swallowed up by Yahoo? Is it because Yahoo, which has a market value of hundreds of billions, has no profit point in the search engine and Google is not developing as fast as they do?

It can be said that as long as Google continues to develop like this, it was originally expected to be listed in August this year. But now the emergence of Bing has changed everything hugely!

"If Bing is allowed to develop like this, won't it just be like how Yahoo supported us and become an emerging player like us?" Larry Page became more and more angry. "You must know that after Bing entered the United States,

Our advertising revenue has shown a negative growth trend for three consecutive months.

By June, our advertising revenue could only reach the level of August 2003! This is a drop of nearly 30%, and the [Red Man Plan] company that provides advertising interfaces to them, why has it increased in the past year?

After rejecting our acquisition invitation from Google for the first time, we reached a cooperation with Bing?"

Sergey was also helpless about what his old friend Larry told. It was not that they had not cared about the small company [Red Man Plan]. When [Red Man Plan] appeared in their field of vision, it was because they wanted to acquire it.

The blogger actually gave them the first step to acquire it.

Then, they mastered the most topical personal media channel, the blog! And the [Celebrity Project] found a profit model and began to accept advertising and promotion from the blog.

At that time, the "Influencer Project" suddenly climbed to 5% of the online advertising market share. Although this was a negligible share for Google, for the "Influencer Project" with only 4 people at the time, they were already considered significant.

It is an emerging company that is growing rapidly.

So, they made an offer to acquire the company [Red Man Plan], but whether it was 10 million, 20 million or even 40 million. Jenny, the young female CEO of [Red Man Plan], never paid attention to them!

Sergey doesn’t know where her confidence comes from. Does she think that her small company with only 20 people can compete with Google? Or, they want to wait for a price and obtain greater benefits.

?

But when they were raising money on Google, they suddenly discovered that the market share of [Red Man Plan] continued to rise after the second half of the year, once occupying 11% of the market share. And just when they wanted to sell [Red Man Plan] again at a price of 80 million

】When the company issued an acquisition invitation, Bing suddenly came!

Since Bing set foot in the United States in February this year, it has brought its complete [Bing Marketing Platform] to participate in the Internet advertising competition in the United States. At the beginning, Google was not afraid of this still weak opponent. But [Red Man Plan] invested in [

After embracing Bing Search, their Google advertising revenue plummeted rapidly.

As of the last day of May, Google's advertising revenue had dropped by 30%. And they only belatedly investigated in mid-May that after the [Bing Marketing Platform] of [Bing Search] opened to the [Influencer Plan], the integration

[Bing], which has joined blogs and small and medium-sized sites, has occupied 17% of the Internet advertising share in the United States!

“With the arrival of Bing, American Internet companies seem to have changed. All the rising stars are related to Bing. Companies such as [LinkedIn], [Myspace], and [Red Man Project] originally had no idea why they stood.

We immediately fell into their arms? Is our Google necessarily worse than their Bing?"

"Hey, man, calm down."

Larry Page's voice became louder and louder, which forced Sergey to remind him. He knew that Bing's rapid rise in recent times had made his old friend very angry.

In fact, Sergey also felt powerless. Originally, they still had 100 million US dollars in advertising revenue throughout 2003, but when 2004 was about to pass halfway, the emergence of Bing brought their good growth momentum last year to a halt.

However, Sergey was also helpless at the same time.

After all, if they only compete in the search engine and advertising fields, then Google can definitely compete with Bing.

But what they are willing to do is that they are not in contact with Bing in the search engine field. Bing is taking the lead in other expansion areas where Google has not yet grown.

Just in the early morning of April 1, five minutes after they released gbmail on Google, the latest news came from Gmail.

Gmail has officially opened the one-number system for users, cooperating with Internet platforms including [LinkedIn], [myspace], [Red Man Plan], [acs], [Yahoo], [bloger], and [bing]. Gmail provides a

A one-stop account service, as long as people use a gmail account, they can log in to the user system of the corresponding website.

This also means that people who have a gmail account will also have a [LinkedIn] professional social account, [myspace] personal social account, [Influencer Plan] advertising group account, [acs] cloud service account, [Dumb Tiger]

Forum, dumb tiger messenger, b2c account, [bloger] main blog account, and [bing] advertising account.

That is the sacred mission that Google has given to the under-development gbmail for more than a year. They originally planned to launch the one-number service within Google services on April 1, and then officially launch the cooperative site in 2005.

One Number Pass service.

But their far-sighted plan was given a head start by such an inconspicuous email address as gmail!

Moreover, Gmail officially announced that it will open up account registration, and announced that they have 50 million mailbox users worldwide! They have also developed 3g capacity and 500m attachments, and will increase mailbox capacity at a rate of 10kb per second!

That's Gmail. Gmail used to implement invitation registration. They had already acquired 50 million email users before! Not only that, they also continued to add new capacity for users!

How did they do it?

What’s even more annoying is that even Bing, a new company that has only been involved in the US market for two months, is involved. Just before Google was preparing to acquire Picasa, a picture sharing website, Bing submitted its Duobao Box on April 1st.

(dropbox) products.

It is a network disk tool that provides network storage of pictures and files. It has the same function as Picasa, which Google wants to acquire. But they don’t know who is doing the product development, and they even teamed up with [gmail] to create Duobao

Box is the concept of mailbox capacity. This means that gmail users can use Duobaobox to manage files and mailbox attachments, and Duobaobox will also provide larger attachments for gmail users!

Since then, not only did they spend 10 million to make gbmail a complete follow-up to gmail, they even announced on the day it was first launched that gbmail has no ability to compete with gmail for the market!

Even looking at the results, it is clear that even if gbmail, which is open for registration, is forcibly launched, it will only get a mere 130,000 users in April and May.

Although gbmail is only a product that is not related to Google, the failure of gbmail has affected Google's reports...

"We have no way to explain to Chandler," Larry Page said, looking up.

Looking at the complicated look in his old friend Sergey's eyes, Larry knew that he was just as distraught as himself.

But he could only sigh and said, "Man, although I am reluctant, I have to say it."

"Our IPO plan in August is probably going to go to waste."

Sergey lowered his head and said helplessly.

***+***

Although it was midnight at night, Ning Zimo felt that he should be in good spirits, but looking at the gray screen, he couldn't cheer up.

The avatar in the squad list quickly emptied its health bar just like him.

Sima Lin turned to look at him with a frown, while Junya pouted and asked curiously, "Brother, who is this??? with a gold border, and why did he hack us to death in one fell swoop?"

Ning Zimo glanced at her. On the three computer monitors side by side, there was a gray screen. On the monitor in front of Junya, her troll huntress soul was scratching her arm, and Sima Lin's head-turning shaman was also scratching her arm.

He flicked his tail to the side.

Just now, Junya's wild boar was too low-level and attracted the sentry at the gate of Astrana. In front of the level 55 elite sentinel, their group of 18-level trumpets were completely powerless to parry, and they were so heroic in just one round.

The sentry was sent to Sister Angel.

But how can I let my sister take the blame?

Ning Zimo turned around and shouted to the other end of the phone:

"Chen Shijun, you bull-headed warrior, can you be careful where you move? Don't you know that you are too big and can easily attract targets?"

"Can……"

"What's the matter? You're just picking your feet!"

"wft!"