Volume 4: White Devil Chapter 292 Facing the Future
Tommy's praise of Vinton Cerf's advertising design ability was not without reason. In fact, in 1982, Vinton Cerf participated in MCI's TV commercial brainstorming meeting by chance and out of boredom.
He had gone to the MCI lounge to read the latest comic book to relax his brain after work, and happened to hear several other MCI executives discussing work during their break. They were arguing about what style of advertisement MCI should shoot and put on the market in order to achieve similar results to the TV advertisement that AT&T launched last year.
In 1981, AT&T shot a TV commercial that was as good as a mini-movie. The entire short film was full of humanistic care. Once it was released, its long-distance telephone market share directly increased by 5%. This also led many telecommunications service providers to follow suit, wanting to replicate this success.
Winton has seen the classic AT&T commercial, which is actually a story about the relationship between mother and son. The son calls his mother in a foreign country. The son keeps crying and cares about his mother. The mother asks her son softly. The superb acting of the two looks very touching. The climax is when the mother asks her son why he keeps crying during the call. The son answers, "It's just because I love you." At the end, there is a short voiceover: AT&T, only 70 cents, let love cross thousands of miles.
As an upright science man, Winton has always felt that this short commercial is totally useless. His hometown is New Haven, Connecticut, but he has been living in California on the other side of the United States, so he needs to use long-distance calls to talk to his parents frequently. No one understands better than him what kind of emotions are involved when chatting with family members over long-distance calls, and whether both parties will be speechless or full of affection.
So he told those colleagues in the lounge who were full of praise for AT&T's ads that AT&T's ads could only deceive those who seldom used long-distance calls with the guise of so-called humanistic care, but could not generate emotional resonance among users who frequently used long-distance calls.
Then he demonstrated to his colleagues what a conversation between a mother and her son would be like in a real long-distance call. He called his own mother.
"Winton~Why are you calling?!!!" The woman's voice was loud enough to echo throughout the lounge.
Winton responded to the phone in a voice not much louder than his mother's: "Mom! I wear hearing aids! You don't have to be so loud! You scared my colleagues! Speak a little quieter! I can hear you clearly!"
"That's good! Hang up! Long-distance calls are too expensive! If you have anything to say, please write to me as much as possible!" The professor's mother yelled on the other end of the line in America, and then simply hung up the phone.
After the demonstration, the professor looked at his colleagues and said, "Which mother do you think can have a three-minute conversation with her son as shown in the commercial, and allow her son to spend most of the time sobbing? If I were to shoot an MCI TV commercial, I would simply invite the actors from the AT&T commercial and reshoot the exact mother-son conversation, except for the son's last line. When the mother asks her son why he's crying, the son tells her: Because AT&T's long-distance calls are too expensive."
"Finally, change the voiceover to: MCI, let love travel thousands of miles at the price of 50 cents per minute."
He just regarded his words as a casual chat to relax, and went back to drink coffee and read comics. As a result, after several MCI leaders discussed it privately, they felt that Professor Cerf's suggestion was very good. A few days later, they went to find Vinton Cerf and asked him to repeat the last two sentences he said that day to confirm that they were Winton's original works because they were going to use them in the commercials.
It was then that Winton learned that these guys had contacted the advertising production company and invited back the actor couple who had filmed the AT&T commercial to reshoot the MCI version of the mother-son conversation. The AT&T version of the mother-son conversation that audiences had watched before was a heartwarming film that reminded people that love for family can transcend thousands of miles.
The MCI version is a more effective comedy, with the two lines that Vinton Cerf came up with at the end.
When it was aired, viewers thought it was a rerun of a classic commercial until the final line reversal revealed it was a new commercial for MCI, another long-distance telephone service provider. They easily remembered the message the commercial was trying to tell them, which was that AT&T's long-distance calls were too expensive and that MCI only charged 50 cents per minute for long-distance calls.
In the year the ad was launched, MCI's long-distance market share increased by 6%. Together with AT&T's ad, it became the only two long-distance ads remembered by American audiences of that era. Many advertisers commented that its idea was ingenious and comparable to the classic advertising war between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
MCI Chairman McGowan later bought all the game consoles and games on the market and personally presented them to Professor Vinton Cerf to thank him for providing MCI with such a great advertising idea.
Tommy could understand his professor's interest. He didn't like to devote himself to designing advertisements for others. He just regarded it as a small game to relax and change his brain's thinking. Moreover, he really liked to do these little actions that came to him at a flash of inspiration. He had said in class many times that after the software industry flourished and the Internet became popular, there would be more and more events like when he helped MCI plan advertisements when he was bored and achieved great success. This was because the Internet could allow many people around the world to witness how ordinary people could show their extraordinary inner qualities through a flash of inspiration. This was the charm of the Internet, breaking down distance and space and telling the world how extraordinary you are.
He even predicted early on that with the development of computer hardware and software and the Internet, many junk movies would have the opportunity to be transformed. There would definitely be highly professional movie fans who would adjust those ugly movies through software, reinterpret them and put them online for everyone to compare and appreciate, allowing everyone to see how garbage can be turned into gold. Movie fans are better than directors.
"What do you want to be advertised for, Tommy? Your pure soul?" Winton asked Tommy, smiling as he looked up from reading the magazine.
Tommy sat across from me and spread his hands, "Jason pushed me to get AmigaOS for two years."
Professor Winton recalled for a moment before realizing that this thing was a graphical operating system software that Tommy's gang had picked up before.
As early as 1982, when almost all computers were still operated with text commands, five programmers from Atari Game Company, dissatisfied with Atari, jumped out to establish Amiga Company, preparing to independently develop a new game console.
Amiga means female friend in Spanish. In addition to wanting to distinguish their work from other overused terms in the computer industry, this name also represents the importance the five game geeks attached to this entrepreneurial venture and that they cherished the game console they created as if it were their girlfriend.
The company's initial start-up capital came from a dentist in Florida who loved to play Atari games. When the guys were working at Atari, the dentist often contacted them to discuss game plots or promptly inform them of game bugs. After learning that the guys had started their own business, the dentist found two good friends who were also dentists, and the three dentists pooled together $100,000 to support Amiga in developing a more fun game console.
When Amiga, with a huge capital of 100,000 US dollars, was full of ambitions, Tommy happened to be enrolled in Stanford University as a freshman in a tattered old car. The two parties happened to come to Stanford together. Tommy was studying at Stanford University, and the Amiga five-member team started a business in the Stanford Industrial Park, which is Silicon Valley.
A year later, Tommy reached the first peak of his life with OSS and his autobiography. The situation of the five Amiga entrepreneurs was just the opposite. They encountered the American video game crash in 1983.
The main reason for the crash was that seeing a few big companies making money, a large number of small game console developers flooded into the home game market in a disorderly manner. The overwhelming amount of shoddy games directly weakened gamers' interest in paying for new games and new game consoles. In the first half of 1983, total game sales in the United States were 3.3 billion US dollars, but in the second half of the year it fell to less than 300 million, which directly caused dozens of small game console manufacturers and low-end home game computer manufacturers who wanted to grab money to go bankrupt, and nearly 2,000 game halls closed down.
The five geeks at Amiga originally wanted to build the game console of their dreams, but they suffered a heavy blow right after starting their business. One hundred thousand dollars was not enough to support them until the prototype was completed. They had wanted to use the results to find new investors in the capital market after the research and development reached a certain stage. However, the overall environment of the gaming industry is now facing collapse, and many investors with cash in their hands, when they heard that it was a game development company looking for investment, did not even bother to accept the business card and walked away on the spot.
As for the original three Florida dentists, they are now completely suffocated by this investment in their dreams. In order to prevent a few guys from calling them for additional investment, they even changed their phone numbers.
In order to find new investors, the leader of the five-member group, Jay Minor, the founder of Amiga, had an idea: the gaming industry was collapsing, but the computer software industry was booming. Instead of telling others that we were insiders in the gaming industry, wouldn't it be better for us to say that we were insiders in the computer industry?
After searching through the materials that the company had previously spent a lot of money to develop, it was found that only the Amiga-Dos disk operating system was barely related to computer software. This system was originally developed for game console users, and a graphics library was added and a graphical operating interface was developed. The purpose was to allow users to more intuitively understand how to use the game console through the icons on the screen when turning on the game console, and reduce the time spent reading the instruction manual for various instructions.
So he changed the name of this thing, announced it to the public as a new generation of graphical computer operating system, and embarked on the road of looking for the right investor. The first person he identified was Tommy Hawke, the hottest star at Stanford University that year, who became a millionaire by selling his autobiography.
Jay Miner had a simple idea at the time. Tommy Hawke was a freshman who developed the OSS document processing software. Jay Miner was also a nerd who had gone through the freshman period. He knew what kind of people these computer genius students were. They must like playing games and have a crush on pretty girls. They should have a lot of common topics with the five otakus. Moreover, these people suddenly became rich, so they would not think twice when spending money and would be prone to impulse buying. Since they were all geniuses among the nerds, he would be able to trick tens of thousands of dollars out of each other's pockets for emergency use.
With this preconceived stereotype, I specially asked my SSD friends from my alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, to help make connections, and only then did I invite Tommy and Jason from Stanford University to come out.
As soon as he showed the Amiga operating system, Jason angrily accused the five nerds of cheating him out of money. Isn't this just DOS with a game console interface with a graphics shell? There is also a game joystick icon that has not been deleted. Which computer operating system would not consider improving and optimizing and adding the function of adapting to the game joystick to its system as soon as possible?
Jay had already given up hope after hearing Jason's reaction, and it seemed that Tommy and Jason were nothing like the nerds he had imagined.
Unexpectedly, Tommy looked so gullible that he stopped Jason from continuing and instead asked him about various details of the development, including the user interface, window menu, and other professional questions about how to complete the call implementation. Jay saw that the other party asked the questions in a sincere tone and had to bite the bullet and continue to paint a rosy picture in the direction of the operating system, saying that as long as it relied on the right chip, it could achieve multi-tasking and have powerful graphics processing capabilities and so on.
Then, despite Jason's obstruction, Tommy resolutely expressed his intention to invest in this operating system, and to provide financial support in batches according to the progress of research and development, with a tentative period of five years and the first investment of 500,000.
Afterwards, Jay Minor recalled that the contract he signed was more like exchanging his dreams for dollars.
Although Amiga received new capital, it had completely deviated from its original dream of becoming a world-renowned game company and instead focused on developing a true computer graphics operating system.
Although Vinton Cerf did not witness the meeting with Jay Minor in person, he heard Tommy talk about it afterwards. After hearing Tommy's reasons for investing, Vinton Cerf realized that this young man's success was not due to luck, but to vision.
That was the beginning of 1984. Apple computers were the only ones on the market with a crude graphical interface, and due to the limitations of the monitor, they could only display in black and white. As for other computer systems, whether Windows or Unix, they all still had character command line interfaces that gave ordinary people who had never been exposed to computers a headache at first glance.
Tommy had said to him at that time that the graphical interface of the operating system was the key to making computers a necessity for ordinary families. You cannot ask consumers to learn all kinds of cumbersome DOS commands in order to buy a computer. Instead, you should let computers learn to adapt to consumers and make them no longer look arrogant and keep strangers away.
It was not until 1987, one month after Microsoft launched Windows 2.0, that AmigoOS 1.0, which took five years to polish by nearly 100 graduates from related majors at Stanford University, was launched on the market with the help of two computer manufacturers, Benjamin Rosen's Compaq and Stephen Bean's Dell.
It has brighter colors than Apple's system and is more intuitive to operate than Windows 2.0. Its only drawback is that it can only match Intel's 386 chip, which was launched less than two years ago. The other two operating systems that occupy a large market run smoothly based on lower-end 32-bit processors.
Therefore, at that time, this system was only bundled with high-end machines from Compaq and Dell that sold for more than 1,800 yuan, and was not sold separately. Only about 60,000 high-end computers equipped with the AmigoOS system were sold on the market, and some of them were sold in the European market. There were only about 40,000 in the United States.
At that time, Amgia had already realized multi-tasking windowing, screen layout changes, task manager, writing board, paint, printer matching manager, schedule manager and other functions, and built-in OSS software to meet the needs of non-professionals in processing daily documents and two small games that reflect the system fluency and powerful graphic colors.
Winton knew that Jason, Jay and others had approached Tommy many times, and Jason even asked him to persuade Tommy to agree that they should optimize and even streamline AmigaOS so that the system could be used on lower-end computers and quickly enter the low-end computer market.
However, he was rejected by Tommy every time, so Jason had frequent phone arguments with Tommy for a while. He was even so stressed that he went to see a psychiatrist. After all, everyone realized that AmigaOS was a better system. Even the top executives of Compaq and Dell came to Jason and Jay, hoping to run this excellent operating system on low- and mid-end computers.
"Two months ago, Intel announced that its latest 486 processors would be available in unlimited quantities, so the 386 processors became affordable for ordinary families. And then you came back to sell Amiga?" Vinton Cerf sighed. "Quinn was right. You are like a fly. Only the smell of money can make you appear."
"No, it's not just that. I've been waiting for so long not for a big price drop on processors, but for the return of my continuous donations to these buildings over the years. I want to build a graphical web browser into AmigaOS and waive the annual fee for the MCI-Mail software program. I want everyone to go back and connect the phone lines so that they can use Amiga to open the door to a new world." Tommy looked at Vinton Cerf with a gleaming look in his eyes, his eyes full of passion:
"Also, I guess you, professor, don't pay attention to some other trivial matters, such as the patents related to web browsers supporting interactive hypertext and hyperlinks, which have been registered and held by Stanford University and are protected by the U.S. Constitution."
"You know that the court will not ultimately support Stanford's claims for the patents that you allowed Stanford University to obtain in advance. Even if no other companies lobby for it, it will not support it because that means the working environment and working methods of the Internet and browsers will be forced to change." After hearing Tommy say that Stanford University registered and held the patents for those successful research and development, Professor Winton said in an affirmative tone.
Among those projects, some are actually standard-setting work for packet network interconnection. If these things are applied for patents by Stanford University and eventually recognized by the US court, he, as the president of the International Federation for Information Processing, will be the first to stand up and oppose it. He is certain that the court will not ultimately recognize the validity of the patents, so he can calmly tell Tommy that even if those patents need to be slowly reviewed and decided due to the lack of relevant supervision and references, there will be only one final result, that is, they will be declared invalid.
"I know," said Tommy.
This answer made Winton take off his glasses. He looked at Tommy in confusion:
"My child, I have met many computer professionals. Some of them support the freedom and openness of the Internet, while others oppose it. But you are the most contradictory one. You have worked hard to promote the definition of Internet information and regulatory rights in the Communications Act. You seem to be someone who hopes that the Internet will truly be open and free. But now you tell me that you have set up very strong obstacles to Internet freedom. You deliberately let Stanford University submit the key to the Internet world, that is, the relevant patent rights of the browser. No matter how you look at it, you seem to be someone who opposes Internet freedom. So, tell me, is the freedom and openness of the Internet more important to you, or is the closed Internet more important to you?"
Tommy shrugged. "It doesn't matter to me whether the Internet is free or not. What matters to me is whether the Internet belongs to me and whether it belongs to Stanford."
"So?" Winton asked with a half-smile.
"So, if users use the key given by Stanford to open the door to the Internet, then the Internet can be free and open to them. If other manufacturers want to use their keys to help users open the door to the Internet, what Stanford has to do is to shut out all those manufacturers and users until the users change to the key provided by Stanford and open the door again." Tommy leaned forward and approached his professor:
"I want the audience who see this ad to understand one thing, that is, if you choose AmigaOS, you can sit at home and face the future."
"You want to use the FCC's non-discriminatory regulation clause and the patents you let Stanford University hold to delay as much as possible the time for Apple and Microsoft's operating software, which occupy a large market share, to help ordinary users open the door to the Internet, and use this time to quickly devour the market." Winton sighed depressedly. As the godfather of the Internet, this bastard has made his words so clear, how could he not know Tommy's purpose:
"You didn't choose to hold the patents yourself, not because you are generous enough, but because you understand that if you hold those shitty patents, those big companies will not care at all and will directly infringe and copy and launch them quickly. But if the holder is Stanford University, if they dare to infringe on the legal rights of Stanford University before the court rules that the patents that hinder the development of the industry are invalid, Stanford University and its huge alumni group of practitioners can make Microsoft, Apple and even IBM understand what it means to be in agony."
