Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 219 Losing his wife and losing his troops

When the Tencent team realized that raising marine fish in a freshwater pit would not only fail to save money, but might even lead to the loss of the marine fish, the alumni directory was already on its last legs.

The entire team discussed the issue behind closed doors for an entire night, but couldn't come up with a good solution. The only thing they could do was to first unbind QQ from the alumni directory, and then send a system message to all users informing them that their QQ friend relationships had been completely severed from the alumni directory, and that they could rest assured to complete their profiles and enjoy the new social experience brought by the alumni directory.

After a frantic night of revisions, QQ finally released the message the next morning.

However, the alumni directory was abandoned after only one night.

For users, it was never considered a product from the beginning; it was just an opportunity to get freebies. Once they'd gotten what they wanted, they wouldn't care anymore. No matter how you changed it, they wouldn't play along.

There's really no need to play it, since we already have Renren.com, and its ecosystem is clearly better. It's based entirely on real-name social networking, and it's not only more fun on that platform, but you've already built up a group of friends. Why bother with alumni directory?
Chen Cheng was very pleased with the result. It seemed that Renren.com had now dominated the market share of real-name social networking, making it difficult for others to get a share.

Of course, this is not a major blow to Tencent. As long as they can recognize their own positioning and adhere to the advantages of large-scale social networking, this mishap can be regarded as a failed attempt, which is crippling but not fatal.

The real concern is that they're trying to make money from everything. If they really go all out on the alumni directory, they'll only be the ones who suffer, and it won't have any real impact on Renren.com.

The sudden failure of the alumni directory has also drawn attention from the entire internet industry.

NetEase originally thought that the launch of Alumni Directory would definitely destroy Xiaonei.com, and there was no need for them to compete with them. They just needed to make their photo album product bigger and stronger. However, they did not expect that Alumni Directory would lose without a fight. This made them even more glad about their product positioning. They did not plan to make any social products. It would be enough to make NetEase Photo Album successful and retain more users for NetEase.

IDG and other investors have begun to pay attention to Xiaonei.com because of its alumni directory.

Li Dong from IDG approached his team leader early in the morning and, with his keen judgment, told him: "Tencent's alumni directory is definitely doomed. It collapsed from the start and there's absolutely no chance of a comeback. Should we contact Xiaonei.com now?"

The team leader was also somewhat disappointed, lamenting, "With such a large user base, even if it doesn't immediately replace Renren.com, it should at least be able to compete with Renren.com on equal footing. It's normal for us to compete with each other and have back-and-forth exchanges. How could it be defeated without even a fight?"

Li Dong said, "I read some posts on Renren.com's 'Fish Pond' forum. People's thoughts are that they are unwilling to develop real-name social networking based on QQ, because they are worried about the risk of privacy leaks. This may be Tencent's natural weakness in making such products."

The team leader nodded slightly and sighed, "This is Tencent's first attempt to expand its product line, and we didn't expect it to fail so completely. We even lost a lot of QQ members for nothing. It's like losing both the wife and the army. It must have been a huge blow to their morale and development."

Then, he tapped his fingers on the table repeatedly and waved his hand, saying, "Let's contact Renren.com and see if they need funding. Even Tencent couldn't make this product work, so they should have no competitors in China in the future."
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At this moment, Chen Cheng was meeting and communicating with the Inspur server team in their newly rented data center.

The Inspur team that came this time was very well-equipped, consisting of six technical personnel and two business personnel. The team leader was the technical vice president, who was also a shareholder of the company, named Ding Yuan.

Ding Yuan himself was one of the earliest backend technology talents in China. He is very proficient in the entire set of server technologies and is also the main decision-maker for the company's product development.

When Ding Yuan first met Chen Cheng, he was somewhat incredulous. He couldn't believe that this young man, who looked quite young, was actually the founder of Xiaonei.com.

After a conversation, he was able to confirm Chen Cheng's identity based on the professional content of their conversation.

He and his team specially prepared a detailed plan for the campus network, which not only provided detailed design drafts and configuration lists for the campus network's computer room and listed their product advantages, but also introduced their service advantages in detail.

The current wave is in its initial stage. Due to its high cost-effectiveness, it has indeed gained a certain user base in the field of small and medium-sized enterprises. However, large Internet companies and large data centers still mainly use HP and IBM equipment and solutions.

In Ding Yuan's words, Xiaonei.com is almost the website they are talking to with the largest user base and the greatest development potential, so everyone in them attaches great importance to it and hopes to take over the entire business of Xiaonei.com's self-built data center this time.

Currently, large enterprises are indeed hesitant to consider domestically branded servers. On the one hand, they worry about insufficient stability. On the other hand, large companies generally invest in US dollars, and foreign venture capital firms often advise and help them connect with foreign brand suppliers. This is because there are too many nepotisms involved. Venture capital firms are usually large US funds, which often hold shares in these high-tech US companies. They invest in company A, and then A uses a portion of the funds to invest in company B. Both A and B are companies they have invested in, which aligns with the Chinese saying "keeping the good stuff within the family."

Chen Cheng has no investors, and the advantage of not having investors is that he is not subject to the constraints of others and can choose suppliers at will.

He still trusts Inspur, after all, it will be the brand with the highest market share in the country in twenty years, and can be regarded as the pride of Chinese products. Now, becoming their deep partner will not only reduce costs now, but also ensure that costs will be lower than those of other companies in the future.

Most importantly, domestic products are indeed full of sincerity. According to Ding Yuan, once the contract is signed, Inspur will directly set up a backend service team in Jiangcheng and in the campus where the intranet computer room is located, on standby 24 hours a day.

Chen Cheng was indeed very satisfied with Ding Yuan's attitude. After checking the entire quotation, he found that Inspur's unit price was already at least 20% lower than HP and IBM's. Ding Yuan, on behalf of Inspur, promised to give up up to 15% of the contract fee.

Currently, Inspur's initial offer is 5.8 million, with a 15% discount, which is 4.93 million. Chen Cheng suddenly thought of a solution and asked Ding Yuan, "Mr. Ding, if I add your Inspur logo to the bottom bar of the Renren.com page and write 'Powered By Langchao,' could you give me a few more percentage points?"

The term "Powered By" is not common at present, but it will appear on the startup pages of various Android phones and the boot pages of various PCs in the future.

"Powered By Android" roughly means that it is driven by Android or supported by Android technology, which can be considered a mutually beneficial cooperation model.

Putting this logo at the bottom of the campus network won't attract the attention of ordinary users, but professional users or those who want to start a business in the future will definitely remember the name of the Langchao brand.

This is definitely a good opportunity for Inspur to advertise and increase targeted exposure.

Ding Yuan was suddenly filled with longing.

He knew that the target users of Renren.com were mostly college students or young and middle-aged people who had graduated from college.

Although only a small percentage of these people will embark on the path of internet entrepreneurship, conversely, at least 90% of future internet entrepreneurs will come from this group.

If Inspur's brand can sow a seed in the hearts of its customers at this time, it will surely reap abundant rewards in the future.

So he said excitedly, "Mr. Chen's suggestion is great, but it involves the issue of return on investment, so I can't give you a definite answer right away. I have to go back and discuss it with our founding team."

"no problem."

Chen Cheng smiled and said, "President Ding can discuss this slowly when you get back. If you can reach a cooperation agreement and set a profit-sharing ratio, just remember to deduct this part from the funds for this cooperation later."

Ding Yuan asked with delight, "Since President Chen has said so, can I take that this contract is now finalized?"

"can."

Chen Cheng readily agreed, “However, Renren.com has not yet been established as a company. I am operating it as a personal website. Therefore, we will sign this contract in my personal name and in the name of Langchao Company. I will pay the first installment of the contract to your company in my personal name. After my company is registered, I will transfer the money to your company account. At that time, I will trouble your company's finance department to refund the money I personally paid. Then, we will supplement the contract with a business-to-business agreement between our company and your company.”

Ding Yuan nodded in understanding. In fact, many websites are currently operated as personal websites. Even those websites with annual revenue of over ten million are under personal names. After all, the current supervision in various aspects is not so strict, and websites do not even need to be registered.

Subsequently, Chen Cheng paid the first 30% payment to Inspur Company. Ding Yuan immediately instructed the company to start preparing the goods. Server racks, power supplies, dust removal and ventilation and cooling equipment will be transported to Jiangcheng first for installation. Server-related equipment will arrive later. At that time, the hardware construction and testing phase will begin. Once the server room is ready, the server relocation can begin.

Because the server room Chen Cheng rented is very close to the current server room, and he has already reached an agreement with the other company that once the hosting is stopped, he will directly buy the rented server. In this way, he only needs to find a time when there are the fewest online users late at night on a weekday, notify them in advance to shut down and relocate the server, and everything can be done and the server can be restored in a few hours.

Renren.com is quite different from QQ. QQ is an instant messaging software for the whole society, and even late at night on weekdays, there are still many users online and using the chat service.

The users of Renren.com are almost all students and office workers, and there are not many users who can stay up late on weekdays to play it.

Moreover, the campus network is mainly used for browsing late at night, and there is no particularly strong demand for it, so the impact of migrating the server late at night will not be significant.

According to Chen Cheng's plan, after the first phase is completed and put into use, the second phase of the computer room construction will begin immediately. Before long, the campus network's web chat application will be launched, and then he plans to launch another new product, campus games.

As far as I remember, QQ Games, the platform that initially hosted card and board games like Dou Dizhu and Mahjong, won't be launched until next year.

However, QQ's alumni directory initiative has been misled, which will definitely affect the development progress of QQ Games.

We don't have to develop a large social network or directly compete with QQ, but we must do everything that QQ can do in the future within the Xiaonei.com ecosystem, and continuously strengthen our own competitive advantage.

On-campus gaming platforms are the next stage of development!

(End of this chapter)