My Lord, you need to stand up!

Chapter 986 It's 88, time to get rich!

In fact, this play is different from the original work that Wei Dong saw in his previous life.

Hong Kong has been the expert in making ghost movies for the past ten years or so.

The theme of humans and ghosts being separated is always popular.

In contrast, Western films rarely depict the separation between the living and the dead; they tend to feature more demons and monsters.

Moreover, they are all disgustingly ugly designs that provoke people.

Last year, when I asked Weidong to come up with the outline, I tried my best to persuade him not to make it into a demon-slaying story, but to make it beautiful, it must be beautiful.

It just so happens that Wang Xin wasn't very good at making ghost movies, so he handed it over to the Hollywood team that Demimore found to make, and only provided a few people to assist.

The highlight is Leung Ka-fai's performance, which greatly enhances the artistic and literary atmosphere of the entire film.

He focused intently on what the boss meant by "aesthetically pleasing" and tried his best to align himself with that.

The handsome features of the Eastern men are very different from those of the white male protagonist in the original work.

Even though Wei Dong had never seen it before, the partial shots shown on the screen now only made him feel that they were rough and stiff.

Later on, the most watched shows in the security booth were all kinds of special effects dramas.

Those fantasy-themed special effects have indeed raised his standards. Just point out a few details: "They missed something here, what was it again? The modeling is all messed up, isn't it?"

Having gotten used to high-quality, silky smoothness, I feel something's off if there's even the slightest flaw.

For beauties like Zou Huimin, even the slightest flaw in their makeup or eyebrows is like a stone in their eye.

Just when his wife thought she was the most beautiful translator in the world, she now felt she needed to improve her skills. Not only did she need to know how to style her hair, but she also needed to buy several professional vocabulary dictionaries to study!

In short, translating and piecing together words was a difficult task.

This also made up for the fact that Wei Dong's clairvoyance, which he didn't quite understand, was exposed.

Yu Xiaoqiu and the others could only stand by and admire him. Even Xiong Guoming, who might occasionally have a little bit of his own thoughts, would be completely wiped out at this moment.

You even know this?!
Instead, Di Kun and Gui Zhenfei huddled together in front of the connected television screen, trying their best to understand and discuss what this "modeling edge" meant.

I didn't expect that mainland China is even involved in this kind of technology?
Gui Zhenfei, though seemingly confused, explained that the headquarters had organized a massive software base in Jiangzhou and Pengzhen, which was linked to many universities across the country. He had a particularly strong influence among universities, and the software development base in Pengzhen was especially successful.

They assumed that the mainland had the same level of expertise in visual effects software.

Little did they know that the entire visual effects software originated in Hollywood, and Steve had assembled a top-notch team.

Now, people are crowding over from other work areas to watch.

Steve immediately looked at it seriously again and again, confirming that Pete's point was indeed reasonable: "Then what should we do?"

Wei Dong's boasting stemmed from watching too many short videos later on: "Stack computing power, stack graphics cards, what else can you do? Just use your strength to make bricks fly..."

The poor wife's translation skills faltered again, yet she still had to maintain the facade of tacit understanding in front of her husband, resulting in a haphazard translation.

"Pitt described it this way: as long as you pile up the equipment and the talent, you'll have enough strength to even knock bricks flying..."

Di Kun and Gui Zhenfei actually thought it made some sense; Rang Zong's expression was indeed concise and vivid.

Steve also had to relay the message to a bunch of tech geniuses who had squeezed around him.

To be honest, he was a typical 20-year bachelor who had just gotten married and discovered a whole new world after the wedding night, becoming completely infatuated with it.

Because at this moment, there is no comparable pleasure in the world, a pleasure that has never been experienced before.

It naturally feels fresh and exciting.

As a result, after being enlightened by an "expert," she realized that the bride was not so beautiful after all.

Wei Dong was able to justify himself: "It's nothing more than piling up equipment and improving its performance. Look at IBM's supercomputers that used to take up several rooms; now we can achieve the same with personal computers. Since computing power is insufficient, we can only frantically pile it up. What does that require? Money, a lot of money. If you don't hurry up and sell computers to make money, where will you get such a huge amount of funds to support massive computing?"

The assistants, after hearing the translation, secretly gave Pete a thumbs up. No one dared to advise Steve not to waste his time on such frivolous things or become obsessed with these flashy new technologies.

These founders and autocratic bosses have absolute authority, and no one around them dares to voice any dissenting opinions.

Like Chrysler, when a company goes bankrupt or experiences sluggish sales, there are bound to be people around who are eager to take its place.

But with their triumphant march and unstoppable momentum, no one dared to say a word against it.

Because everyone else wants to maintain this situation and profit from it, anyone who dares to disrupt it becomes everyone's enemy.

Most people only have the ability to follow high-performing stocks; they're lucky if they can even add to the good fortune.

Only by letting Wei Dong dare to speak out, and even pointing out the logic behind it.

There's a little story behind this. One year, the electricity bill in the tax office suddenly skyrocketed for several months. After investigating, it turned out that a young man in the computer center had secretly set up some mining machines and hid them next to the server room, mining like crazy 24 hours a day.

Wei Dong had heard his colleagues explain the whole story.

With the influence of short videos, and the perception that film and television special effects cost tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of US dollars, people naturally feel that this thing is expensive.

So seize upon this point and persuade Steve.

Chrysler executives, watching from the sidelines, gained a completely new understanding of Pete's standing in the IT industry. Steve was practically the top IT figure being recommended by investment banks at this point!
From the moment he took Apple Computer public in 81, he was touted by the entire US stock market as a computer prodigy, a computer genius, and a leader of the future.

This is how Apple computers were able to break many records when they were released.

In his thirties, he still acts like a hippie. Do business elites think Pitt is more reliable?

And he's only twenty-four years old; he has decades of glory ahead of him.

It's definitely more worthwhile to invest in.

In fact, Steve's pure passion for any new technology he encountered, which allowed him to become completely absorbed in it, is what makes him a genius who can reach the pinnacle of his craft.

He glanced at the production interfaces on the computer screens around him, then at the group of people in suits and ties behind Rang Weidong.

It's really like a kid who's been escaping reality by playing games for days, only to be dragged out by investment banks.

He reached out and put his arm around Wei Dong's shoulder, saying in a low voice with a sigh, "I really have no interest in tinkering with computers anymore. It's just the same old boasting and adding specs. Making money is too easy and simple; there's no fun in it at all!"

Look at what you're saying!

After a series of power struggles that ousted others, he is now Apple's largest individual shareholder, owning 27% of the company.

So now Steve is a super-rich man with a net worth of $160 billion!
Only then can one say that making money is too easy.

This amused Wei Dong, who craned his neck to look around at the large computer equipment. The server racks, some taller than a person, were filled with flashing lights.

I couldn't find a machine with a CD drive.

The truth is, as Lin Wangfu himself pointed out, this thing has a huge drawback: the cost of producing CDs is very high.

When they secured the CD drive production license, they also spent $15 million to buy a CD production line from Holland.

Very troublesome.

To build a cleanroom, you need to electroform an expensive metal master disc, which is then pressed onto a plastic sheet to become a CD. Finally, you need to coat it with a reflective film, apply a protective layer, and print the image on the CD.

This is similar to the principle of printing. It takes at least several thousand sheets to start production, and tens or hundreds of thousands of sheets to spread the cost per sheet.

In this day and age, before CD drives were widespread, how many software companies would produce hundreds of thousands of copies to sell?
Since it cannot write its own discs and only reads from the CD drive, there are not many usable CDs.

Without enough CD content, no one would be willing to spend the expensive cost of a CD drive costing two or three thousand dollars.

This is a chicken-or-egg question.

Whether such an expensive product has a worthwhile investment prospect is something that everyone is hesitant about.

Originally, the CD side was supposed to create a buzz, but then the self-writing CD burner appeared, enabling personalized production, which led to the widespread adoption of discounted CD readers.

Wei Dong and his team "precisely" hit this popularization point.

Pointing to the computer, he described, "This is nothing. This year we've come up with something really interesting that will definitely help Apple computers achieve even greater success and become bigger and stronger!"

Steve, after clarifying that it was a CD drive, frowned slightly: "What's so special about this? It's just a new reading device, and what's the point of reading without writing?"

Wei Dong turned to his secretary and gestured, and Yu Xiaoqiu quickly took out an exquisite CD case from her backpack.

It was more exquisite than ordinary CDs on the market, with a colorful printed cardboard box and a beautiful "APPLE" logo. Steve already had a slightly disdainful smile on his face: "This design isn't very good..."

But when you open it, you're immediately stunned.

Because the list next to it is densely packed with software trial versions!

Games, novels, image viewing, word processing, graphic processing, sound effects processing—the categories are densely packed together!
He was a top-tier expert, but this year he felt a bit lonely, having no one to rival him.

Now I immediately realized what this thing was for: "Are they all products of Kungfu Software?"

Wei Dong adopted an open-minded approach: "Whatever you have here, or whatever good software is available outside, you can bring it in and give one away randomly. Do you think consumers would like that?"

These software programs were cobbled together by He Yuzhu and his team, including various successful and unsuccessful ones. They also included software from Lao Huang's company and fortune-telling software from Yuan Xinzi's company, and converted them into English versions from various sources to create a 600MB CD.

These days, software is very small, mostly a few hundred kilobytes, a few megabytes is considered large, and tens of megabytes is already considered a super large software.

Therefore, a single plate can hold a great many things.

I wonder if this kind of thing, born out of piracy, has ever appeared in the history of computer development in Europe and America.

Anyway, what Wei Dong remembers is that in the 1990s, when piracy was rampant in mainland China, many software CDs were just a hodgepodge like this.

Many of them are low-quality pirated products, just cobbled together haphazardly, and most of them are useless.

But it is precisely this sense of unknown exploration, like sifting through a garbage dump for cardboard, that is most interesting.

It comes with an optical drive that has been reduced to its "cost price" of $500.

With the addition of high-fidelity computer speakers, you can play high-quality CD music on your computer.

These 88 Apple computers, aren't they just a lucky number?

(End of this chapter)