After Wang An taught his son a lesson, he took the time to tell Gu Ao about his plan the next day.

When he first heard Wang An’s arrangement, Gu Ao was still a little confused for a while:

"You plan to let the family forces completely withdraw from the current company and set up their own business to focus on WPS software?"

Gu Ao couldn't help but be surprised. After all, in his opinion, Wang An would not be willing to leave the business he had started his own company, nor would he be willing to let his son leave completely.

Although the Wang family still holds part of the company's shares, they can choose not to care about their affairs and only pay for it.

"I figured it out." Wang Anyu sighed earnestly, "My rise, the reason why I was able to beat ibm back then was not because my computer was better than ibm. I was the overlord of the computer industry. From giants to small machines and servers, they have been dominating for decades, and no one has ever shown signs of surpassing them.

I just took the lead in ibm in the personal computer segment and maintained this lead for more than ten years.

However, you must be self-aware and see clearly. Being ahead in the field of personal computers is just a result, an external manifestation, not a reason. The reason behind it is that I am good at making computers with business office functions, and I am good at meeting the needs of high-end business elites.

However, since 1974, the performance bottleneck of personal computers has been limited in the past 12 years. The most suitable scenario for its performance is business office, so I happened to be gifted with God and temporarily took the lead in the industry.

However, CPU, memory, and hard drive are moving forward every year. Personal computers are about to enter the era of multimedia explosion. In the future, business office is only a small part of the functions of personal computers. My ability range and age are destined to be impossible for our Wang family to explore again. It is your responsibility to develop.

The whole machine is no longer suitable for our struggle direction. We will only make good business office software for several lifetimes and become an organic part of a certain aspect of the multimedia whole machine in the future. This is the best choice. Although I don’t trade stocks, I think Buffett has a good saying: Don’t do things beyond your ability.”

When Gu Ao heard this, he couldn't help but feel respectful.

Wang An, a man with a self-knowledge, is really amazing.

Of course, Wang An was able to see this, and thanks to Gu Ao for driving their family out of the position of the largest shareholder, giving him the opportunity to jump out of the mountain and look at the mountain, looking at the mountain, and looking at the mountain, the bystanders.

If Gu Ao hadn't driven him out of that position, Wang An would have wanted the authorities to be fascinated until he died.

"It's great that you're willing to think so. I believe the son can definitely achieve a new career. I've saved some fun and don't have to worry too much about the new generation of products in the future. There is no supporting office software." Gu Ao said openly, but he didn't forget to add a word.

"However, please forgive me. Since you want to set up your own software, I cannot completely pin my hopes in one basket. First of all, after purchasing your software in the future, we will have to do multilingualization by ourselves. In the future, we will not be limited to the European and American markets, but will also adapt to the office environment of more languages.

Secondly, we will also introduce a certain amount of internal competition. There may be two teams, each with independent design, finally evaluation and optimization, and a small-scale market test feedback result. But don’t worry, I will definitely promote it based on the best choices, and I won’t see who the software is from.”

Internal competition in the R&D process is definitely rare in 1987, because the software industry has not yet formed a monopoly super giant. Competition from other external companies alone is enough to encourage software developers to continue to move forward.

The fierce internal competition in later generations was mainly due to companies like Tengyun, who had already formed a monopoly, so they were responsible for their own development.

Or it is Huawei who needs a spare tire plan due to supply chain security issues, so they do two sets and one set to keep.

But Gu Ao was very sensible. He knew that the first and even the second generation of computers after he took over would still need this process.

Because once faced with competition from Microsoft's open operating system, if the ecosystem of the closed operating system brand has not yet risen, there may not be enough external contractors to support them. In this way, it is impossible to rely on natural competition. Without introducing internal competition from left and right, it is possible to put more severe products on the market.

Of course, Gu Ao will not blindly continue to compete. This will not only waste resources, but also lead to difficulties in choosing consumers and not concise enough.

Just imagine, if a group of consumers see an office and WPS in the official software sales channel at the same time, and then make different purchases, they will face different optimization directions and different user habits in the future. If they don’t want to change it later, they will still have to pay the cost of re-learning, then they will definitely lose their hearts.

The most important thing about office things is simplicity and unity. This is a tool, not a game. What tools require is monopoly and standardization, rather than fancy playability.

Therefore, this internal competition should only continue until the small-scale pilot project is put into effect, and the pros and cons are determined and the outcome will be immediately terminated.

Then all-in supports the product that performed well in the small pilot internal test.

This idea is a bit like the a/b testing and "select as quickly as possible, quickly iterate" research and development ideas in the Internet era in later generations.

A/b test is not a person in the Internet industry, so maybe I don’t know much about it, so I’ll say a few words.

This thing is mainly famous for Facebook's small dramas. Before the early 21st century, the software industry paid more attention to rational design. After the early research and development was completed, the subsequent tests were also very rigorous. Basically, the project manager's requests were all done, and what was inconsistent with the design was a bug.

However, as Internet products tend to be more inclined to entertainment consumption and socialize and tend to "experience", it is actually not a good thing to design too closely at the beginning. Because the model of 100% of the project manager's early argumentation is only suitable for those issues of clear right and wrong.

But there is nothing right or wrong about experiencing this thing. Just like many company testing departments, when you look at the test-case, you can say that a function is wrong, but you can't say that a function is beautiful or not, and whether it is comfortable or not.

This thing is too subjective and so pertinent. You can't expect the project manager to stand with the mainstream aesthetics every time, so even if you want your people to be like Tengyun's engineers, "every time you deliberately stand in the position of a newbie," it may not necessarily work.

This is not a matter of empathy, but the elite cannot use fantasy to fantasize how Xiaobai thinks.

Around 2006, the A/B version of the Facebook genre began to spread, and it was a better tool at this time. It did not require the project manager to put himself in his shoes, but instead directly put several appearances that expressed their opinions and updated content, and placed them in a small range for tens of thousands of users to use.

For example, among the tens of millions of Facebook users at that time, one in 1000 received a random upgrade reminder to upgrade the Facebook client on their computer (later the app on their mobile phone). In fact, different people got different beta version upgrade files.

After a week or two, we can see which version of the big data performs well, and we will uniformly determine the upgrade to this version. This trick was gradually expanded to all Internet giants around 2009. Everyone no longer spent time thinking about "what is a real novices", and from then on they began to learn from the a/b version to test this research and development method.

Let big data tell you what a real novice is.

As for the previous article, "released first, test market feedback, and then iterated quickly", it is just the pre-ideological basis for the a/b version of testing. This trick was used in the late 1990s. It was used to speed up the debugging and response cycles, so that you can put it on the market first if you don't have enough tests. If you have any problems with market feedback, you can upgrade quickly, and save a lot of workload of testing engineers. On this basis, if the content of the upgrade is different and there are several comparison groups, it is the "a/b version of testing".

As for the upcoming 1988, Microsoft engineers are still very arrogant and they absolutely cannot understand such research and development methods.

Moreover, given the slow spread of commercial secrets, as long as Gu Ao does a good job of keeping confidentiality and does not explain the benefits of this method internally, these advanced R&D management ideas will be kept confidential until the Internet is born.

(In history, Facebook's R&D management ideas took two or three years to spread to all industry giants. At that time, the information was many times better than it is now.)

However, because there is no software upgrade channel as convenient as online download, Gu Ao cannot use guinea pigs on a large scale through remote operation mode.

But this is just a problem of technical means. Gu Ao can completely modify it slightly and become a guinea pig in the area of ​​the company's core sphere of influence, looking for the most important channel dealers and the most brainless hardcore users to be the guinea pig for A/B testing.

Of course, in order to keep this system stable and stable, it is definitely not possible to consume the passion of fans, and feedback must be given. For example, those users who actively use the beta version and report bugs and feedback can get the official version for free in the future without purchasing.

It is equivalent to the software usage rights exchanged for testing labor.

These are all later stories and have not been implemented yet.

...

There is still a last detail to be solved in the transformation negotiations with Wang An, that is, Gu Ao had already acquired most of the equity of Wang An Computer, and Wang An’s company’s brand assets are undoubtedly the most important value of this company.

Gu Ao spent 1.2 billion US dollars, and most of the money was for this brand, as well as the market recognition and consumer inertia behind the brand.
Chapter completed!