Chapter 587: Beautiful Engineer
America, California.
At the invitation of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Lu Yiming visited Google's new headquarters.
Recently, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been running the company very well. Not only have they moved their office out of the original large warehouse, but they have also comprehensively upgraded their computer equipment.
Larry Page proudly showed off the results of his and Sergey Brin's efforts to Lu Yiming and asked, "Why, this is all not bad, right?"
Lu Yiming said approvingly: "Of course, very good. I believe you will lead Google to create miracles and become a legend in the Internet industry."
At this moment, Lu Yiming's cell phone rang, and he said to the two of them: "Excuse me, I have to answer the phone."
Lu Yiming walked to the side and just pressed the answer button, he heard Epstein excitedly say on the other end of the phone: "The channel problem has been solved. When will the goods be delivered ?"
When Lu Yiming heard this, he was slightly shocked and blurted out, "So fast?"
At this moment, he also realized that he had underestimated Epstein's power. After all, even if we take a step back, this matter is still fleecing the United States, which is not allowed by their rules. But Epstein was able to get it done so quickly, which shows that these rules are of no use to Epstein.
Faced with Lu Yiming's surprise, Epstein was also very proud in his heart, feeling that he had made a great show in front of this young richest man in Xia country.
"Of course we have to hurry up, time is money my friend."
It is obvious that as a veteran scumbag, Epstein is a complete action-oriented person when it comes to making money, and he does things in a swift and decisive manner.
"Okay, I'm in California now. I'll rush over and tell you what's next."
After hanging up the phone, Lu Yiming said to Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "I need to go to New York now."
When they heard that Lu Yiming was leaving, both Sergey Brin and Larry Page hesitated to speak. Finally, it was Sergey Brin who spoke up: "Why are you leaving so soon? I was hoping you could stay for a few more days."
Lu Yiming said with a look of regret: "Ah, I also want to stay for a few more days, but there is no way, I am born to be a hard worker."
Larry Page asked curiously, "What are you doing lately?"
Lu Yiming said vaguely: "It's just a small business, but I have to go there in person."
Sergey Brin frowned and said, "Lu, you haven't cared about Google's development for a long time. Don't forget that you are our chief strategy officer."
If he were an ordinary investor, Lu Yiming's hands-off approach would undoubtedly be welcomed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
But in their eyes, Lu Yiming is clearly an Internet genius who can see through the fog of the future. As Google's chief strategy officer, if Lu Yiming does not offer suggestions, he would be unworthy of the "salary" the company pays him.
Lu Yiming burst into laughter when he heard this. It was true that Google would transfer money to his account every month in the name of salary, but Lu Yiming never cared about this money. After all, he bought Google's shares just to be a salted fish and wait for Sergey Brin and Larry Page to take him to fly.
In order to cover up his "negligence", Lu Yiming immediately said: "Aren't you two running the company prosperous now?"
Larry Page said: "Actually, we've been in some trouble recently."
When Lu Yiming heard this, he was a little surprised and asked, "Oh? What trouble?"
The two looked at each other, and then Sergey Brin spoke to Lu Yiming.
"There's a little disagreement within Google about the future direction, so we wanted to ask for your opinion."
Whether it is Yahoo, which started out as a search engine, or other peers, they are currently developing in the direction of portal websites, and the proportion of investment in search services is constantly decreasing.
Because search engines themselves have low profitability, even Google, which started to use paid rankings, was unable to make much money from it.
On the contrary, the advertising business of portal websites is a hot commodity. After all, as the Internet winter has developed to the present, many peers have not been able to survive and have "died", and the remaining companies have expanded their market share. Moreover, with the emergence of a large number of new Internet users, web page advertisements are sold at higher prices than before.
This led to some different voices within Google.
There are two paths before us. One is that Google also follows the route of portal websites, making a lot of money and only caring about the present.
The other way is to choose poetry and distant places, and go the other way. While the entire industry is in a mess, Google stays out of it and continues to delve into the search engine field, continuously investing in research and development to complete technological upgrades.
After understanding the whole story, Lu Yiming asked, "What do you two think?"
Sergey Brin sighed and said: "Our two ideas are to continue to strengthen Google's technological advantages until we become irreplaceable in the industry."
As the founders of Google, there is no doubt that both of them are very ambitious and courageous people. They will never compromise for a little profit and forget their original intentions.
But some Google employees obviously don't think so. After all, the lofty ambitions and ideals of changing the world are just slogans, and slogans cannot be eaten, let alone exchanged for real money.
They joined Google as employees, not to help their boss realize his dream, but to live in a big villa, marry a supermodel wife, and drive a sports car to work every day.
To develop advertising business, the increase in monthly bonuses is an immediate benefit, among other things.
Because of this incident, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both somewhat confused.
Lu Yiming is well aware of the future development trend of the Internet. He knows that portal websites have no future.
A portal website is an application system that provides certain comprehensive Internet information resources and related information services.
From this feature, we can know that portal websites are taking advantage of the information gap.
However, with the development of the times, the popularization of the Internet and smart technology, people have more and more means to obtain information, and portal websites have become only in name.
Lu Yiming said seriously: "I think Google should focus on the development of search engines and increase the usage of Google."
Sergey Brin asked, "Why?"
Lu Yiming said seriously: "What is the most important thing about the Internet? It is the users. If we capture the users, Google will be invincible. What is the current search volume of Google?"
Sergey Brin immediately puffed out his chest with pride and said, "In the beginning, Google's search volume was only 10,000 per day, and now it has increased to 300 million per day!"
Looking at the current situation, this data is definitely better than all the peers.
Lu Yiming said decisively: "As Google's usage rate increases, advertisers will be attracted to us. Why? Because our users are all here!"
The two were originally more inclined to technology research and development, so they were very happy after getting Lu Yiming's approval. Larry Page said, "It's great that your ideas are consistent with ours."
He then went on to say: "Long before Google became a verb, Yahoo was the dominant Internet search engine. But now times have changed, and we have even become the provider of Yahoo's search engine."
It has to be said that Yahoo is a representative of a company that played a good hand badly. It started off well but ended badly. Excessive commercialization led to its overall backwardness in the field of technology, which was the fundamental reason for Yahoo's failure.
An Internet company that started out by relying on search, in the end, even users who logged into Yahoo’s portal website no longer used Yahoo’s own search engine, but instead used Google.
From this point alone, we can see how different the structure and future of the two companies are.
For some reason, Lu Yiming thought of a certain place.
The development of Baidu and Google cannot be said to be exactly the same in the early stages, but they are very similar.
But why did the two later embark on completely different development paths?
Google has become a super giant group with a market value of 12,000 US dollars. In comparison, Baidu has only 46.9 billion US dollars, which is not even a fraction of it.
We are all working on search engines, so why is there such a big difference?
After Google got money , it continued to make efforts in the field of technology and achieved brilliant results.
The online video company is Youtube, the operating system is Android, the search engine is Google Search, the advertising network is Adsense, there are hardware devices such as Google smart glasses, and Google Cloud, etc. It has even entered some non-Google businesses, such as medical health, fiber optic transmission, X laboratory, driverless Waymo life service, capital operation and other fields.
Through years of continuous development, Google has gradually shifted from search business to broader exploration and development of cutting-edge technologies.
To be precise, more than a decade later, Google has transformed from a search engine company into an Internet technology company.
In contrast, Baidu only cares about money. The projects and products it has produced have basically no technical content. It has been relying on paid ranking to make a living and has completely lost the ambition and courage to continue to forge ahead.
“If a person has no dreams, what is the difference between him and a salted fish?”
Sergey Brin ignored Lu Yiming's sigh and asked, "We made a Google toolbar and would like you to give us some advice."
Google's technical team is currently developing a toolbar specifically for Microsoft's IE and Firefox browsers, with the goal of making online browsing more convenient and faster for users, helping them get rid of all the hassles of web browsing.
In fact, browser toolbars are a pretty old product.
In the early days of the Internet, browsers, as the core channel for most netizens to access the Internet and obtain information, were still very simple in design and could basically only meet the needs of users to access websites by entering URLs in the address bar.
Lu Yiming asked: "Why are you doing this?"
Sergey Brin said: "We plan to improve the browser on the original basis, including a word translator, a pop-up blocker and a series of other features."
When Lu Yiming heard this, he was like, wow, isn’t this just a browser plug-in?
As a veteran netizen, he is familiar with this thing.
The current browsers are very different from the browsers used in later generations. Simply put, the current browsers are still rough, with nothing but the most basic functions. The browsers in the era before Lu Yiming's rebirth were all finely decorated and filled with all kinds of fancy functions.
Most of these functions are in the form of plug-ins, which is what Sergey Brin calls toolbars.
Lu Yiming didn’t know who first came up with this plug-in, but at least the browser he was using to surf the Internet didn’t have this thing.
Maybe it was Google?
Sergey Brin sincerely invited: "We have made a prototype, are you interested in trying it?"
Lu Yiming readily agreed: "Of course."
Lu Yiming was taken to the laboratory and tried out the so-called Google toolbar on a computer.
To be honest, the plug-ins that Lu Yiming used in his later life all survived the fierce competition and were pushed to users, so you can imagine how sophisticated they were. However, the toolbar in front of him was a completely exploratory product, far from the small plug-ins in Lu Yiming's impression.
As soon as he started, Lu Yiming felt very awkward, almost like everything was wrong.
The most important thing is that there is not even a function to directly access the web page from the search box.
In other words, if you enter a keyword in this toolbar, you will jump to the Google search results, and then click on the search results, instead of entering a WWW. URL or directly entering the keyword to automatically jump to the relevant page as in later generations.
Lu Yiming said: "I think this toolbar needs to add a function to browse the website by directly typing the website name without the URL."
He then explained the specific operation and logic of this function.
Sergey Brin exclaimed: "This is such a genius idea, why didn't I think of it?"
Although this feature is not technically difficult, if Lu Yiming hadn't pointed it out, Google would probably have to spend some time collecting user feedback before it could come up with it.
Sergey Brin flattered him: "You are worthy of being our Google CSO! Look, doesn't this solve a big problem?"
Then he complained: "You should come over here if you have nothing to do. Our product manager is not even one tenth as capable as you."
Larry Page joked: "Don't let Mayer hear this, otherwise she will be very unhappy."
At this moment, a pleasant voice accompanied by a faint scent of perfume floated over: "What do you want me to hear?"
Appearing in front of the three people was a hot and sweet-looking blonde girl. She was Marissa Mayer, the current product manager of Google.
When Sergey Brin saw Marissa Mayer coming over, he couldn't help but shrink his neck guiltily.
Marissa Mayer, wearing red patent leather high heels and brown stockings, has a bright and charming smile. She graduated from Stanford University and just turned 25 this year, which is the age when she is full of feminine charm.
As one of the company's founders, she joined Google in 1999 and is Google's first female engineer. In the future, she will even become one of Business Week's "25 Leaders in Innovation Industries."
Of course, she is still recognized as the most beautiful woman in Silicon Valley and the goddess admired by countless male colleagues at Google.
But at this moment, the goddess's eyes fell on Lu Yiming, with a bit of curiosity: "Are you our CSO?"
The CSO of this company is so elusive that most people in the company have only heard of his name but have never seen him in person.
Lu Yiming took the initiative to shake hands with Marissa Mayer.
I have to say that European and American women do have a unique charm when they are young, which makes people a little hard. But this charm lasts too short. Once they are over 35, it will change rapidly. When they are in their 50s or 60s, they are basically not good-looking. They are nothing like the Chinese people. As long as they take good care of themselves, they can still look pretty in their 60s and 70s.
Marissa Mayer had no idea what Lu Yiming was thinking, so she smiled and said, "I know you, young billionaire. The newspapers say you are a thief from the East who stole billions of dollars from the U.S. stock market."
Lu Yiming immediately denied it: "How can you say that it's robbery when it comes to stock speculation? I clearly completed the reallocation of resources legally."
Marissa Mayer was amused by Lu Yiming's witty remarks and became even more curious about him.
Putting aside the stock market, even regarding the company's internal work, she had heard a lot about Lu Yiming from Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
This made her feel a little unconvinced. After all, as a product manager at Google, her contribution to her job was actually lost to that of a "layman" like Lu Yiming.
Lu Yiming has never even come to the company for a meeting!
However, no matter how carefully she designed the product, every time she submitted it, it would be quickly sent back for her to revise or even redo, causing her to work overtime a lot.
It was not until later that she found out that the person who proposed suggestions for improvement of these projects and products was none other than Lu Yiming.
Lu Yiming only needed to take a few glances at the product she had worked so hard on on the Internet to point out a lot of shortcomings, and his words were all well-founded, making it impossible for people to refute them.
When Marissa Mayer thought of these things, she felt a little itchy and looked at Lu Yiming with a provocative look: "I heard that you are a genius?"
Lu Yiming said modestly: "No, no, it's just average."
Marissa Mayer was even more upset after hearing this. After all, losing to a genius didn't seem to be something unacceptable.
She said angrily: "Do you know how much trouble your previous 'tips' have caused me?"
However, facing the beauty's anger, Lu Yiming was unaware of himself and instead defended himself by saying, "But do you think that after the modifications according to my suggestions, those products have become more perfect?"
Seeing Lu Yiming's smug smile, Marissa Mayer became so angry that her chest bulged.
