My Lord, you need to stand up!

Chapter 991 True Genius, False Genius

This time, Wei Dong gave the profits to He Yuzhu.

Steve was indeed the mastermind who would later usher in the mobile internet era.

It was immediately apparent that Wei Dong's CD was even more valuable than the CD drive itself.

The business jet with a dozen or so seats still features rotors on its wings, but it is small and exquisite, and flies quietly and comfortably.

Everyone is curious.

Originally, Wei Dong had also invited Fa Ge to visit a major IT company together.

Chow Yun-fat said he would do his job as head coach from start to finish.

The plan was to have Wei Dong go to Silicon Valley to complete the transfer and profit sharing.

Hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Even knowing it was meant for him, he could resist taking it and not spend sleepless nights thinking about it.

This is a kind of cultivation.

Of course, it is also a test from the lord to his subordinates.

Chow Yun-fat's future is worthy of this test.

Qin Yuye was not afraid of any test, and she struck various elegant poses on the plane after performing her best every night.

She wasn't sitting on the front cabin sofa having her secretary take pictures of her.

It's like a flight with the windows overlooking the clouds, a glimpse of a North American cedar tabletop—it's clearly not an ordinary flight.

Let's take a few more pictures together, arm in arm with my husband.

She's practically a natural at it.

It made Wei Dong feel like he was looking at his own circle of friends on WeChat Moments.

Yu Xiaoqiu had no choice but to go to work. She was good at framing and composing photos, so when she went shopping, the shop owner bought her a top-of-the-line DSLR camera in preparation for capturing the best beach scenery.

It comes in handy now.

The film crew dared not arbitrarily change shifts across regions, and professionally stayed focused on their assigned tasks.

Hong Kong workplaces have long taught them to adhere to the professional attitude that players are stars, bosses are superiors, and they are just doing the work.

They even wandered around taking pictures when the boss's wife threw a party.

They now also offer a complete video recording TV set, plus several pre-edited training videos of their basketball and windsurfing teams.

It allows bosses to easily check their employees' work performance by simply plugging in a power source on the plane.

With so many people following me, carrying a nine-inch color TV wouldn't be a problem.

As it turns out, this not-so-new business class cabin came with a built-in video recorder.

Instead, Wei Dong asked Yu Xiaoqiu to take a look: "Notice that these documentaries, which are roughly edited on camera, lack a lot of special effects. You should take this opportunity to take the filming crew to the special effects studio that Steve acquired to learn and see who has the ability to participate. If you can understand some of the technical content, you can bring a team to study here after returning to China. Even if you pay to import the technology, the whole TV station might treat you like a big shot."

The girl in her early twenties had a different perspective: "I'll take care of it when I get back to the basketball team. These past few days, I've seen that the visual effects of ATV and foreign TV stations are indeed far ahead. Dong Sheng Advertising really needs to catch up with the world's leading level. However, I'll still do my job as your secretary and help you with your job search at universities in Beijing."

They didn't have the ambition to expand their territory, but rather they astutely grasped the importance of working in higher education and wanted to safeguard this field.

Qin Yuye added fuel to the fire: "I'll go take a look at the back cabin. I heard you can fly directly to Hong Kong. You guys can chat."

Yu Xiaoqiu smiled and helped the proprietress up, then they went off together, chattering away.

Wei Dong shook his head and continued watching the videotape, but he was wondering whether the popularity of videotapes in the North American market could be changed by DVD players in the future.

That's right. Based on the knowledge of the handless security guard, he thought that North America had also experienced the VCD revolution like the mainland.

The flight, which took just over an hour, took them to an airport ten kilometers from Apple, a method that Wei Dong found truly convenient.

Moreover, aren't he carrying too many Taoist priests, guards, and nuns with him?

Wouldn't it be better to have more staff, such as business assistants and technical consultants?

Even when it comes to opinions on film and television, the secretary, whom he rarely has, is always whispering in his wife's ear.

resignedly.

Women are so unreliable.

Beautiful women are especially unreliable.

So when he saw Lin Wangfu, he asked his secretary to call He Yuzhu over, preferably with a few more people.

Pozai is now fully involved in adjusting the motherboard's optical drive interface. It's not difficult; it just requires satisfying Steve's obsessive nature and ensuring the motherboard looks good too.

Apple has already begun various tests on the optical drive internally.

On Steve's desk was an Apple 87 computer with a CD drive attached, which Lin Wangfu and his team had manually connected to the motherboard.

The 386 computer at that time wasn't very complicated.

The paranoid man held the exquisitely packaged CD that Wei Dong had requested to be made: "I've asked all the software developers I can contact to provide trial versions of their software. Kungfu Software will then produce these CDs and include them with the computers. Once they find a particular software interesting, they can pay the software company to purchase the full version. What do you think of this idea?"

Wei Dong was internally screaming, "Holy crap!"
The CDs he brought were all labeled as trial versions because these small software programs were really just for trial use and were very basic!
For example, the fortune-telling software made by Yuan Xinzi is only a few hundred kilobytes in size and is purely a scam.

There is no official version!

The trial he mentioned was to let users try out the CD drive. With so many software options, they could slowly search and try them out, like mining on Taobao, to see what software they liked.

At most, we'd just label it in English and show it to Apple. If they were genuinely interested in a particular software, it would mean it could be developed into a large and successful application, like spreadsheets or PowerPoint.

It's to let Apple test whether these software programs have any potential.

I never expected that this product would be so shameless as to be broken down and given to consumers for trial use, and you actually have to pay for it!

Is this a two-pronged approach?
Rang Weidong actually lacked innovative ability; he simply followed the successful practices he knew under the Heavenly Eye and tried them out.

This is Steve's original move.

With his wife translating, Wei Dong sat down across from Steve at his desk and asked, "Have you figured out how to sell this software?"

Steve replied matter-of-factly, “We’ve gradually built Apple stores across the country. While they’re not as impressive as your glass pyramid, after this year’s launch event, we decided to start building these glass pyramids from major cities on the East and West coasts, gradually moving towards the Midwest. Consumers can come to the store and buy software discs for $9.9 or $19.9. Although we could also let users bring their own memory cards to copy the software, I think discs have a more ceremonial feel. Your product director told me that the cost of a disc is about three dollars?”

The actual cost is less than three yuan per sheet!

This is still the current cost of producing one million sheets per month. In the future, when it becomes as cheap as cabbage, it seems that it could cost as little as three cents or three cents.

Wei Dong, however, countered from a sales perspective: "This CD contains about four hundred software programs of various sizes, most of which are definitely junk software that nobody wants. Are you planning to stock hundreds or thousands of copies for each store? And then go through the tedious process of stocking and delivering these products to these places, do you know how large a distribution system that would require?"

He can do this. Dongsheng Trading's sales network covers provincial capitals and prefecture-level cities across the country. With the Yangtze River as the main artery, supplemented by a fleet of trucks and two or three railway passenger lines, the "long"-shaped sales network can basically cover the inland areas.

Anyway, there isn't much purchasing power at the county level right now, and county towns generally assume that good things should be bought in the city or provincial capital.

Countless small-time dealers would bring rare items from big cities to smaller towns to sell.

With the addition of a supply and sales system, Dongsheng's main products can indeed be sold nationwide.

This is also the result of the marketing conference in Shanghai at the end of last year, which led Han Guobin and his team to organize their own sources of goods in various places and cross-sell through the entire system, creating a new situation.

Each branch office can leverage the increasingly sophisticated overall sales network to sell products.

Can North America do it?

The key issue is that the salaries of sales and logistics personnel lead to extremely high costs!

So it's not very realistic.

Steve paused for a moment, then thought seriously: "Another way is by mail. They send a money order with the address to the software company, and then mail the CD to that address."

Wei Dong applauded: "This method is good, but it's only a transition. Your idea is excellent, but ultimately it needs to be implemented with the internet..."

His wife kept asking, and Wei Dong had to use the word "NET" to replace it himself—he knew all of this!
Steve's expression kept subtly shifting as he listened!
"For example, there's an Apple website, like a university library. Whoever clicks on it, finds the software they want, pays, and can download it—it's like DOWN!"

Qin Yuye couldn't help but wonder how good her husband's English really was!
Steve, however, didn't care about these details at all: "Pay? How do I pay?"

Because when Wei Dong pointed at the computer screen, he also grabbed the mouse and gestured, and even pretended to stuff money into the screen with his hand?
Wei Dong paused for a moment, but it didn't stump him: "We can issue an Apple Card, fifty dollars a piece, like a lottery ticket. You scratch off the winning area on the back, reveal a password, and fifty dollars will be deposited into your account, and then you can keep buying software online."

This is a common trick used by the neighboring elementary school to trick kids into buying things, and it seems that this was also done around the turn of the millennium for recharging online game points cards and long-distance phone cards.

Steve's expression must have been that of a child opening up a new world: "Pete...you're a sales genius!"

Qin Yuye quickly and happily relayed the translation.

Wei Dong, however, told him not to listen to his smooth talk: "The key point is how we actually make money from this business. Are we helping to produce millions of CDs? Or printing prepaid cards? Hmm, promoting fiber optic cable laying? You don't need to look at these. What is he muttering about?"

He doesn't mind sharing how he does it, because in practice, he can always get a share of the profits.

Steve was never stingy with his praise for geniuses; he knew that if he stifled a genius's "inspiration," he would never receive inspiration again in the future.

Just like he isn't the strongest hardware genius, nor the strongest software expert, nor even the most brilliant marketing master.

But they always manage to extract the best ideas from the most brilliant people and incorporate them into their own products.

So the more talented you are with Steve, the more you'll be rewarded.

In particular, a constant stream of brilliant ideas is what prevents him from being eliminated.

(End of this chapter)