Top of the Great Era

Chapter 1477 Lucas Precipitated by Technology

Zhou Buqi led Boss Ma around Los Angeles and San Francisco, in fact, to show his muscles.

It is a display of strength.

Age discrimination is pervasive in the business world, it's a mindset.

Older people are considered to be unable to keep up with the times, backward and conservative and do not understand new trends; younger people are considered to be too inexperienced, impetuous and impulsive and do not understand social reality.

In fact, Zhou Buqi knows that many people in the country are waiting to see his jokes.

There is too much luck in his success.

Like the lucky ones under the age.

Seeing him building a tall building, seeing him entertaining guests, seeing his building collapse.

Seems like they're waiting for him to break down.

People outside the circle and people they don't know well are fine, they can think whatever they like, Zhou Buqi doesn't care.But Boss Ma is different. After all, he is an old acquaintance in the circle. It is necessary to properly demonstrate his strength and correct his cognitive bias.

Only when the cognition is accurate can confidence be strengthened and business cooperation can be carried out more easily.

Just like cloud computing.

Ali's size has grown to its current scale, which is almost the same as Amazon in the past few years. It has reached a stage where it has to make a decision. Should it be a cloud computing platform?
If you don’t do it, you will spend a lot of money to buy high-end and high-priced servers, and all the profits will not be enough to buy IOE basic equipment.

Once done, you can use cloud computing related technologies to abandon expensive IOE equipment and instead purchase low-cost modular equipment.

But this road is too risky, and it needs to invest far more funds than high-end IOE equipment in the short term.

So now Boss Ma is choosing one of the two.

But the appearance of Ziweixing gave him a third option, which was to buy Ziweiyun's services.This requires confidence.If Ziweixing's strength is too weak and its level is too poor, Ali will definitely have doubts.Maybe after some evaluation, I found that the risk of cooperating with Ziwei Cloud is greater than developing Alibaba Cloud by myself.

Zhou Buqi's sense of ownership during Boss Ma's trip to the United States is a process of building confidence for the other party.He even suggested a trip to London, where the development is better and the policies are more powerful!
It's a pity that Boss Ma doesn't have a schedule. His flight will return home tomorrow morning.

On this day, Zhou Buqi was not idle either. He went to LinkedIn in the morning and went to a magical company in the afternoon——Lucasfilm.

Lucasfilm is headquartered halfway between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

This is not only a Silicon Valley high-tech company, but also a Hollywood film company.

According to George Lucas, what he dislikes most is the restraint of creativity and inspiration by major Hollywood studios. He has made movies all his life, but none of them have been shot in Hollywood.

Unfortunately, George Lucas himself went to Finland for a summer vacation.

Fortunately, Zhou Buqi's popularity was so high that Lucasfilm's staff almost shut down the entire company's business, and came here to receive them.

The interior of this company is a special effects museum. There are many posters and props of past film projects in the corridors, which will make people feel a strong sense of history.

In this process, the most important thing to show is how to make a film that shocked the world like "Star Wars" with the technological level of [-] years ago.

Many shooting skills, model design and optical principles are amazing, and Boss Ma is very interested.

Zhou Buqi is different. Although he does not understand technology, he is very self-motivated. He is striving to improve his understanding of technology bit by bit.

Then, he heard a story that made him feel that "success is no accident".

Lucasfilm established Skywalker Sound Effects Studio for sound effects and Industrial Light & Magic Studio for visual effects.

There is also some work to modify the pictures, and a staff member made a software in his spare time to complete this task.Later, this person went out to start a business alone, and he became a software giant Adobe, and this software was Photoshop.

And that's not all the tech saga that belongs to Lucasfilm.

There were no digital movies back then, and movies could only be made on film.

But many special effects images are made by computers, how can we transfer the special effects images on the computer to the film?
In order to solve this problem, Lucas set up a computer development studio and wanted to produce a computer that could transfer computer images to film.

Then, this computer was made, and it was called Pixar.

In order to verify the effectiveness of the Pixar computer, a special animated short film was produced, and the effect was very good.Then, the studio changed its name to Pixar Studios.

With the successful development of the Pixar computer, the help to Lucasfilm is gone, and I want to sell it.It was Jobs who took over. He bought the technology company whose core business was still Pixar Computer for $1000 million.

After taking Pixar, Jobs started a decade-long strategic adjustment and business design for Pixar, which is mainly divided into four major businesses: Pixar computer, Pixar special effect rendering software, Pixar feature-length animation and Pixar animation advertisement.

Later, when Jobs went to Apple, Pixar's hardware and software ideas were poured into Apple, and Pixar began to focus on making cartoons.

Zhou Buqi was startled by such a big historical background.

It turns out that Jobs had already constructed his prototype of the business model for the future world when he was working as Pixar more than ten years ago.

Computer + software + animation + advertising is actually the ecosystem model of "hardware consumption + software consumption + content consumption + advertising consumption" under the current Apple model.

In the project of Ziwei Star Global, Zhou Buqi has been interested in Lucasfilm for a long time. With the two super IPs of "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the movies, TV series, and cartoons produced are all Can make money continuously.

Has super attractiveness.

However, after researching now, it is discovered that the value of Lucasfilm is not only that, the company's exploration in the field of technology is also very desirable.

Lucasfilm has three major technology companies: Skywalker Sound Effects, Industrial Light & Magic Special Effects and Lucas Game Studios.There are also many small projects, such as converting film to digital version, converting digital version to film version, converting 2D version to 3D version, converting regular version to giant screen version...

Almost all the technologies that promote the progress of the film and television industry are related to Lucasfilm.

Zhou Buqi was very interested in this.

The development of the streaming media industry is inseparable from the advancement of technology.

Even in the distant future, AR and VR visual effects, as well as new presentation methods of holographic viewing, including a broader metaverse, are often technological advancements in the same strain.

In this field, the one with the deepest technical accumulation is of course Lucasfilm.

This is not just about Ziwei Star Global, but about the possible strategic layout of Ziwei Star in the future.

After leaving Lucasfilm, on the way back to Los Angeles, Zhou Buqi said bluntly: "I am very interested in this company."

"Yeah, who isn't interested?" Boss Ma nodded, "Star Wars is really a sign of the times."

Zhou Buqi laughed and said, "That's not what I mean by interest."

"Ok?"

"I want to buy this company."

"what?"

Boss Ma was very surprised, thinking that this kid was bragging.

Zhou Buqi snorted and glanced at him, "Don't you believe me?"

Boss Ma said: "You are crazy!"

Zhou Buqi said: "I asked, the performance of Lucasfilm has not been very good in the past few years. If it weren't for the release of the theatrical version of the cartoon "Attack of the Clones" last year, it might have lost money. This company is too old. There are too many old men with high salaries, and they need to be replaced."

Boss Ma has seen it now, this kid is not joking, "Do you really want to buy it?"

"What's the point? The current Lucasfilm has reached a bottleneck." Zhou Buqi made a simple analysis, "The new "Star Wars" cannot be filmed. Although Industrial Light and Magic is still the world's number one, the British , New Zealand, Australia, and France's special effects industries have made rapid progress, and the gap is already very small. There are also outsourcing of low-end special effects in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. If Industrial Light and Magic wants to maintain its leading market position, it must rely on global Globalized layout. With the strength of Lucasfilm alone, it is difficult to develop a global industry.”

Boss Ma still didn't quite believe it, "This is too mysterious."

"Look how I bought it!"

"Do you really want to buy it?"

"Of course!"

"Do not believe!"

Boss Ma thinks this kid is bragging.

Zhou Buqi himself lacked confidence, but he had to be tough, "I'm telling you, I've already bought MGM! There are also Marvel and Summit Entertainment! Next is DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures! Ma, don’t you understand movies?”

Boss Ma's ears were callused when he heard this, he sighed and had to accept, "I know you are amazing."

Zhou Buqi was very satisfied, and said with a smile: "Forget it, let's not talk about movies. Well... after you return to your country, make arrangements quickly to let Ali and Ziweixing meet. This year's Singles' Day is less than three months away. The cloud service is still immature, so we should leave more time for Ziweiyun and Taobao to practice."

Boss Ma finally agreed, "Okay, I'll arrange it when I get back. You, Ziweiyun, are you in the overseas market?"

"It's been done a long time ago, and 20 cloud data center plans have been launched this year, with an estimated investment of... 50 billion U.S. dollars."

"Don't talk!"

"Hehe, it's actually 35 billion U.S. dollars."

"Not a word of the truth!"

Boss Ma snorted coldly.

Zhou Buqi said seriously: "Okay, let me tell you the truth, our plan is to invest 20 billion US dollars, and we may continue to increase. There is only one possibility for Ziweiyun's future, and that is success! Choose Ziweiyun , you will not regret it!"

(End of this chapter)