Rebirth Tokyo 1986

Chapter 416: Speed ​​​​up
The development of the chat software was simple, and in less than a month, good news came from the special economic zone.

"Oh, it's already available for download on the website?"

"Yes, under the chairman's guidance, the software is already in internal testing."

Yoshinori Shimada, the project manager of the chat software, was incredibly impressed with his own chairman.

I don't understand how the chairman can create such aesthetically pleasing chat software without any reference points.

Yes, it's absolutely beautiful.

Compared to the bulky and cumbersome software on the market, the chat software that Xinghai Group is about to launch is a complete game-changer in terms of UI, art, and other design aspects.

Perhaps this is what is meant by an unparalleled genius, someone who must be a cut above the rest of the world.

Masato Takeshita, of course, was unaware of his subordinates' fervent admiration for him, and continued discussing serious matters on the phone.

"Can I download the chat app from the official website now?"

"Yes, you can chat freely after downloading and installing it."

"Great, let's chat on QQ later."

With such a catchy and easy-to-remember name as QQ, Masato Takeshita naturally wanted to use it for his own account right away.

Therefore, as early as the initial establishment of the Xinghai chat software project team, Xinghai Group spent money to buy all the relevant domain names for the construction of the official website.

The price was very cheap; dozens of related domain names only cost a few thousand dollars.

Of course, the reason it's so cheap is related to the scarcity of websites on the market, and also to the scarcity of merchants who specialize in domain name trading.

Anyone can easily register an easy-to-remember domain name by spending a small amount of money, as long as they are willing.

"Yes, President!"

After hanging up the phone, Masato Takeshita quickly opened the QQ website.

He looked at the sky-blue page background and the simple, bright page layout, and muttered to himself with satisfaction.

"Not bad, not bad, that's the right feel."

The young man felt like he was opening the QQ official website from 2005; it looked very pleasing to the eye and didn't have so much messy content.

"The software size is also just right, less than 300KB."

After installing the software, Masato Takeshita looked at the familiar chubby penguin icon in front of him and felt a surge of emotion that brought tears to his eyes.

The chat software project team almost perfectly replicated the model provided by the young man on PTT, and it was almost indistinguishable from the QQ icon of the previous life.

This gave the young man the illusion of returning to a past life.

"So beautiful!"

It took the young man several minutes to regain his senses.

He double-clicked to open the QQ icon, and then looked at the QQ interface and the small icons below it with great nostalgia.

"That's great, they must be rewarded handsomely when they return."

Masato Takeshita decided to give more bonuses to the project team members.

One part of the reward was for creating the chat software, and the other part was for their loyalty in carrying out the mission.

In total, it's about twice the size of Xinghai Mailbox.

However, these are all things that are far off; he is more focused on QQ itself right now.

I clicked the icon, then clicked to register an account on the QQ software.

A few seconds later, the interface for registering a QQ account opened.

Although they knew that QQ would have at least hundreds of millions of users in the future, in order to reduce the memory burden on users in the early stages of development, the young man still asked the project team to start releasing accounts with a six-figure sum.

"Great, the registration process should be simple and straightforward."

QQ focuses on social networking with strangers, so during the registration process, you only need to enter your account and password twice to receive a message indicating that your QQ registration was successful.

Very convenient, very free.

If you don't want it anymore, you can discard it and register again at any time.

"Yes, although there are some slight lags, it's generally very smooth."

Masato Takeshita didn't test it in his own office; instead, he just used a regular employee's computer.

Because his office computer was custom-made, and the network was a fiber optic line used by only a few people.

If you test it on his own computer, you won't be able to see anything at all.

The situation is different for ordinary employees; their situation is no different from that of outsiders, making them the most suitable for testing.

Next, he quickly entered a QQ password that mixed up English letters and numbers.

Although this type of password is a bit more complicated, it is far more secure than simple numbers or letters.

Of course, if you don't pay attention to security, your account can still be easily stolen.

Internet cafes, in particular, have a lot of messy stuff on their computers, making them the easiest places for accounts to be hacked.

However, there's no need to rush right now, because in the early stages of chat software development, no one would bother to steal accounts.

Account theft and other such problems will only occur when the user base reaches a certain size and there is profit to be made.

Thinking of this, Takeshita Masato quickly found paper and pen.

"No, I have to write this down. Account theft is extremely harmful to both users and the company."

If account theft is frequent and users lose their personal information, the company will face a serious crisis of trust.

If you're not careful, you might be crushed by public opinion about your account being hacked.

Just like some games that are of very good quality, but will lose a lot of users if cheating is rampant.

After carefully noting it down, the young man prepared to enter his account and password. But before that, he made sure to log in anonymously.

Invisible login, Masato Takeshita's favorite chat function.

This way, you can avoid being disturbed while playing games or working.

"The random user feature is great, but it's a pity that it's only available in the workgroup right now."

Random online users is a feature that Masato Takeshita added by referencing games.

Once you click on it, it will automatically recommend QQ accounts to you.

However, this feature is not yet perfect, and further adjustments can be made in the future for gender, age, and other factors.

Masato Takeshita looked at the row of QQ numbers in front of him, casually clicked refresh, and then saw Yoshinobu Shimada's name.

Clearly, as the project developer, he directly registered his real name online.

"I am Masato Takeshita, please add me as a friend."

The young man had barely sent the message when the other person quickly added him as a friend. Immediately afterward, Yoshinori Shimada typed a greeting.

"President Takeshita, good morning! I am Yoshinori Shimada, the leader of the chat software project team. Please take care of me."

"Yes, let's teach each other."

Masato Takeshita was very pleased because they not only followed his idea, but also placed QQ in a smaller, vertical format on the right side of the computer screen, thus reducing the impact of the chat software on the interface.

At the same time, following his instructions, the chat box was shrunk to about one-third the size of the entire computer screen.

In this way, chatting won't interfere with other work, and screen switching can be achieved more quickly.

Of course, QQ also supports full-screen chat. Simply click the zoom button above the chat box to easily achieve full-screen mode.

After chatting for over ten minutes with newfound curiosity and finding no problems, Masato Takeshita began to add more staff.

He wanted to know if there would be any problems if he chatted with multiple netizens separately.

"Great, still so smooth."

Masato Takeshita was delighted and praised everyone's hard work directly via QQ text message. He also reiterated his serious promise that he would distribute bonuses to everyone as soon as QQ was back online.

When the money is right, employees will have enough motivation and passion.

The testing phase concluded quickly, and QQ was finally launched in mid-March. However, unlike Xinghai Mail, QQ was initially only available in English and did not receive resource support from the Xinghai Group.

Everything was done to keep it secret and avoid alerting the enemy.

"So, how many people chose to register today?"

"A total of 1536 users have registered, and 426 users have chatted with each other."

Without the traffic support of Xinghai Group, Yoshinobu Shimada and others could only promote QQ by spamming various websites that support message and email functions, as well as various chat rooms.

The results were quite good; it attracted hundreds of users to chat on the first day.

Of course, in order to retain these users, Shimada and his team also resorted to similar tricks as Pony Ma.

Pretend to be a girl and chat with these people.

Everything is for retaining customers; everything is for developing QQ.

"Very good results. We should increase our promotion in various open-source communities. Programmers who like to browse open-source communities are very likely to accept QQ."

"Yes, Chairman, please rest assured that the open source community is a key focus of our promotion."

Chatting has always been a basic human need, and this is also true on the internet.

Once people discovered the convenience of QQ, they began to spontaneously promote it to those around them.

"I recently found a really useful piece of software online, why don't you give it a try?"

"A chat software called QQ has recently come out online. You should download it too; it'll make chatting online easier."

"Do you know QQ? Download it, it's very convenient for chatting."

One person tells ten, ten tell a hundred. Thanks to word-of-mouth promotion from loyal users, QQ's new user base grew day by day.

Soon, QQ's servers started to overload, and Yoshinori Shimada quickly requested backup.

"President, we need more servers for support."

"Oh, is that not enough? Then buy another $500 million."

Chat software has two modes for storing chat content: local storage and server storage.

The former stores the chat content on the user's computer; if the user logs in to their account on a different computer, a blank screen will appear.

This model is very cost-effective and suitable for small startups that struggle to attract investment.

The latter stores chat content on the company's server, so logging in from a different computer has no impact, which is very beneficial to the promotion and popularization of chat software.

The downside is that it requires purchasing many servers, which costs a lot of money.

In his previous life, Little Ma almost went crazy because of the high cost of servers.

He begged for help countless times, only to be rejected countless times. In the end, he was so exhausted that he suffered a back injury and was bedridden.

Even so, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and try to attract investment despite his illness.

Xinghai Group is not short of money, so it naturally chose the Pony Ma model.

Soon, with a command from Masato Takeshita, the chat software project team's account received an additional $1000 million in cash.

In terms of financial strength, Xinghai Group has demonstrated its capabilities to the fullest.

After transferring the money, Masato Takeshita called Yoshinobu Shimada with a smile.

"How much has the user base grown? Send me a copy of the QQ data so I can share in the joy."

"Yes, President!"

Soon, a fax containing information about QQ was sent to Masato Takeshita's office, detailing various data about QQ.

"hiss!"

The young man couldn't help but gasp when he saw the data above.

"So many, and the number of users exceeded 200 million in just one month?"

The emergence of Xinghai Internet Cafe and its support for offline messaging functionality.

Although QQ was launched earlier, it still developed more rapidly.

In its previous life, ICQ had 30 registrations in six weeks, while QQ had 200 million in a month.

Of course, this is also due to QQ's more targeted nature and the fact that it's free.

Useful things are easy to spread widely on the internet if they are free.

"These are really impressive figures. It seems Xinghai Group will have to step in and provide support next month."

QQ chat has become an unstoppable force, and imitators will definitely emerge next month.

After all, QQ is very easy to imitate, so it needs more support.

For example, setting QQ as the desktop background on computers in Xinghai Internet Cafe, as well as on the desktop background of all internet cafes using the Xinghai Internet Cafe Management System.

In this way, even if Yahoo and Microsoft were to enter the fray, it would be difficult for them to compete with QQ.

The reason why ICQ was able to compete with Yahoo and Microsoft Chat in its previous life was because of a series of decision-making errors by ICQ later on.

Not only do they charge for account registration, but they also place a large number of advertisements on the chat software.

It's important to know that instant messaging software is among the least suitable types of software for advertising. The appearance of ads is extremely discouraging for users.

ICQ's advertising strategy is self-destructive, giving its competitors an opportunity.

With Masato Takeshita providing guidance, QQ would naturally not make such a foolish mistake.

It's just burning money; Xinghai Group isn't afraid of any competition.

At this moment, the young man suddenly wanted to know about the versions in other languages.

"Is the Japanese version ready?"

"It's just finished and will be online tomorrow."

"What about French and German?"

"It's still in production and is expected to be released within two weeks."

Shortly after QQ was launched, Yoshinobu Shimada began working on the remaining versions.

However, the project team had too many things to do, so the production was a bit slow.

"Yes, that's right. We need to capture the vast majority of the market before others can react."

Chat software has a strong monopolistic nature; a single market segment can typically only support one type of software.

For example, once QQ completes its expansion in Japan, other apps that also focus on chatting with strangers will find it difficult to succeed.

Conversely, once a chat software dominates the Japanese market, even a strong QQ Global will find it difficult to compete with the pioneer.

This is determined by the nature of the industry, and it is also the sector where the Matthew effect is most pronounced.

Other internet sectors, such as e-commerce and search, do not have such a strong monopolistic ability.

The Chinese internet in later generations is the most obvious example.

Baidu faces competition from search software such as UC, 360, Quark, and Bing; Alibaba faces competition from e-commerce giants such as JD.com and Pinduoduo.

Penguins, on the other hand, have basically no rivals once they've developed.

The only two threats at the time were Renren.com, which focused on real-world social networking, and Microsoft MSN, which was an outsider.

But it is still no match for QQ.

As for YY language, it belongs to a niche field in a vertical market, and even if it develops for a lifetime, it will never pose a threat to QQ.

However, precisely because of the strong monopoly of chat software, the deployment of chat software must be rapid.

Once someone else has already captured a market, it will be very difficult to enter, no matter how well you develop.

For example, Line in Japan has far fewer assets than the Facebook Group.

However, despite its first-mover advantage, Facebook's repeated attempts to launch attacks have all ended in failure.

(End of this chapter)