Top of the Great Era

Chapter 2906: The Four Soft Giants

After the technical meeting, domestic affairs came to an end for Zhou Buqi.

He could finally start his long-awaited vacation plan.

Before that, we need to notify Zhang Yiming.

When I went to his office, he was talking on the phone with Ziweixing International.

Zhou Buqi was not in a hurry and just found a place to sit down.

After Zhang Yiming ended the call, he smiled and said, "It's Zheng Xiaoli. I asked her about the situation in the American technology circle. Although Ziweixing is mainly based in China, we must be the first to learn about the technological trends in Silicon Valley so that we can respond in a timely manner."

Zhou Buqi smiled and asked, "What did you find out?"

Zhang Yiming said: "There's nothing new here... but there are two things related to you, which are quite important."

"What is it?"

"First, BlackBerry has announced that it will lay off 4500 people worldwide."

"Uh..." Zhou Buqi had been prepared for this. "BlackBerry is going to give up its mobile phone business. They have to lay off employees. It depends on how they deal with the BlackBerry brand in the mobile phone business. It's still quite valuable. Let's see if Lenovo wants it. If Lenovo doesn't want it, I'll grit my teeth and let Xiaomi take over this business."

Zhang Yiming didn't care much about the mobile phone business. He just said calmly: "BlackBerry is in big trouble now. They announced that their revenue plummeted by 50% in the past fiscal quarter, and the inventory expenses generated by the new flagship phone led to a net loss of US$9.65 million."

"So, after the new CEO took office, he quickly gave up the mobile phone business and relied on his own advantages in the field of operating system security to provide in-car services. This is a very correct idea. Even if BlackBerry continues to make mobile phones, it will not be able to compete with domestic mobile phone manufacturers." Zhou Buqi immediately realized something and raised his eyebrows. "What do you mean? You want to provide in-car services too?"

Zhang Yiming smiled but said nothing.

Zhou Buqi said straightforwardly, "I just had a technical meeting with Wang Jian and others, and I talked about this. The projects I don't express my opinion on may succeed or fail. It's up to you whether to do it or not. The projects I clearly support must have great potential, and we must be brave to do them; the projects I oppose must have no way out, and we must decisively give up and don't have any thoughts about them."

Zhang Yiming avoided the topic and said lightly: "Another interesting thing is that a Silicon Valley reporter broke the news that Qualcomm did not pay Apple this month's technical service fee. It is not clear whether it was delayed or refused to pay."

The so-called technical service fee is the fee that Qualcomm paid to Apple when it acquired Apple and made Apple switch from Infineon to Qualcomm, which is US$10 billion a year.

This money is not a one-time payment.

Instead, pay monthly.

In this way, the bills can be spread over each month, and the operating pressure on book funds will be reduced.

Now, Qualcomm no longer pays Apple the $10 billion annual "technical service fee", which is enough to show that Qualcomm is already angry and humiliated, and further proves that Boss Zhou's plan has been successfully implemented!

After all these operations, China and South Korea are going to take action against Qualcomm.

The angry Qualcomm directly targeted Apple, the "mastermind" behind the scenes.

"Good! Good!" Zhou Buqi was very happy and confident, "Now there will be something good to watch! I can take a long vacation without any worries."

Zhang Yiming asked: "When are we leaving?"

Zhou Buqi said: "In the past few days, things in China have basically been settled. We just need to wait for the news."

"There will be a strategic decision-making meeting tonight. There are three important development plans. You can also come and discuss them."

Zhang Yiming seized the opportunity and didn't want to let him go easily.

Zhou Buqi could only ask for leave from home, saying that he would work overtime at night.

This meeting might last until 12 o'clock in the evening.

The first thing is about cloud computing.

Now, the domestic understanding of cloud computing is becoming more and more comprehensive, and this market is gradually opening up.

However, many customers always encounter many problems during use.

The Ziwei Cloud platform is not a popular platform and the threshold for use is relatively high.

  Ziwei Cloud operating system is not as easy to use as Windows system, and the process of paying for various services and subscribing to various data packages is also confusing. The most important point is that there are more and more cloud products now, and there may be more than ten products for data sorting alone, with various models, standards and adaptations. How to choose?

Therefore, Ziweiyun needs to expand its team.

At least 1500 technical staff will be recruited to carry out outsourcing work, mainly to send them on business trips to important customers of Ziwei Cloud, to help them solve some difficult problems and teach them how to use Ziwei Cloud services.

After a round of expansion this summer, Ziweixing’s domestic employee number now exceeds 2.

The monthly expenditure on employee salaries, benefits, allowances, and travel subsidies alone exceeds 8 million yuan.

An average of 4 yuan per person!

However, this data is somewhat deceptive because there is a middleman between the company's expenses and the income received by employees. The average salary that Ziweixing employees actually receive is about 16k per month. The trouble with this issue is that Ziwei Cloud is a long-term loss-making project.

  If we don’t count the transfusions from other internal businesses, Ziwei Cloud’s revenue this year will only be 8.4 million yuan, and the expected loss will exceed 70 billion yuan!

If the company continues to expand, the loss next year may exceed 100 billion.

There is also a more important point, which is the second topic of discussion.

A technical project.

Ziwei Cloud has invested a lot in infrastructure, and a very important investment is to purchase foreign processors. Whether it is Intel or AMD, server chips are very expensive. Ziwei Cloud needs to use good ones, and a chip costs $1.

So you must do your own research.

The chip developed by Ziwei Cloud is not called CPU, but CIPU in professional terms. It is a CPU specifically used on Ziwei Cloud's cloud servers. It can connect computing, storage, and network resources through virtualization, pooling, and scheduling technologies to enable rapid cloudification and hardware acceleration, thus becoming the hub of the data center.

Now the samples have been tested, the performance is good and the stability is okay, but the power consumption is too high.

Further upgrades are necessary.

Therefore, Ziweiyun is applying for a 15-month research and development fund worth 16 billion yuan to develop a new generation of CIPU.

As for whether the new generation of CIPU can be used...

  Not necessarily!

If we want CIPU to be truly widely used, we must make the newly developed CIPU more cost-effective than the server chips of Intel or AMD at the same time. If the cost-effectiveness of self-developed products is so poor, using them will not only not reduce costs, but will greatly increase them, then there is really no need to use them.

This leads to great risks in R&D.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to use it.

Wanting good performance, strong stability, and low power consumption... this is really difficult.

You know, this is still the option after castration. Dedicated chips do not need to be responsible for adaptation to the public, so there is one less compatibility link, which greatly reduces the difficulty of development.

If we develop general-purpose server chips like Intel and AMD, it will be even more difficult.

There is certainly no doubt about this investment.

Zhou Buqi didn't quite understand the technical logic, but since they had applied, he had to support them. In any case, they had indeed achieved certain results in terms of performance and stability. The next step was to overcome the difficulty of power consumption. At least they had a clear goal and direction.

The third thing is an investment business.

It is also the thing that Zhang Yiming values ​​most.

"Now, the online car-hailing market has gradually opened up, and the public has also gained a certain understanding of the reliability of online car-hailing 'black cars'." Zhang Yiming turned his head, holding a PPT presentation pen in his hand, "There are now more than a dozen online car-hailing companies in the industry that have received financing. The three with the largest market share are Kuaidi, Didi and Sudi."

The PPT contains a shareholding structure chart.

It's very interesting.

The three online ride-hailing companies belong to the three major domestic Internet giants.

Behind Kuaidi is Alibaba, behind Didi is Ziweixing, and behind Sudi is Penguin.

This is a very serious and solemn matter.

Because it involves competing with two giants, Alibaba and Penguin, in a new track, the process is bound to be dangerous and must be done with extreme caution.

The executives attending the meeting all looked grim.

Be able to realize the bloody storm that may be set off behind this decision.

Zhou Buqi had foresight about the information gap, so he acted calm and relaxed, saying with a smile: "What's going on? Now netizens are all famous, aren't they called the 'Software Four Giants'? What about the other one? What about Baidu?"

In this life, there are four major Internet giants in China.

In addition to Baidu's B, Alibaba's A, and Penguin's T, there is also Ziweixing's E.

The combination makes bate, which means "soft".

Someone on Weibo gave a very cute and girly name, called the "Soft Four Giants".

Then it spread.

It has become a common saying.

"Baidu?" Guo Pengfei now looked down on Baidu. "Baidu can't keep up. It's fallen behind. Baidu is now busy delivering food!"