Chapter 47: The Yellow Crane Bound

[PS: An extra chapter will be released tomorrow.]

“Chairman, what are our other two trump cards?” Although Huang He’s words had left Chen Shoufu drenched in sweat, he realized that the pitch-black road ahead now seemed to be dotted with a few stars.

Thus, Chen Shoufu grew even more curious about the next two trump cards.

“Our second trump card is walking over right now,” Huang He said with a smile. Chen Shoufu paused, then saw Leng Zhimeng approaching.

Chen Shoufu had mixed feelings towards Leng Zhimeng.

First, he was grateful to her—without Leng Zhimeng, he would never be earning twenty thousand yuan a month as he was now. But deep down, what he felt even more was resentment and jealousy.

He already knew Leng Zhimeng’s situation: a girl just out of high school had somehow ended up as the company’s CEO, pressing him down at every turn. How could he possibly feel comfortable with that?

If Leng Zhimeng were truly capable, it might be easier to accept. Yet she scored only 251 on the college entrance exam, while Chen himself had scored a whopping 609—the pride of his year. To have someone with 251 lording over someone with 609 was simply intolerable.

Then there was the company itself. It had been running for almost a month, but all research and development fell on his shoulders alone. Leng Zhimeng acted as a hands-off manager, barely involved in anything. Everything was left to Chen Shoufu; he barely got as much sleep in a month as he used to in a week.

Leng Zhimeng, meanwhile, would either sit in her office enjoying the air conditioning, report to the chairman, or simply vanish—her presence or absence made no difference to the company’s day-to-day operations.

Under these circumstances, unless Chen Shoufu had ulterior motives, it would be impossible for him to truly respect Leng Zhimeng.

But then he learned that Leng Zhimeng was Huang He’s sister-in-law, and he immediately submitted. There was nothing to be done—his own sister wasn’t married to the boss, after all.

What Chen Shoufu didn’t realize was that a sister-in-law was naturally doted on, half of the brother-in-law’s support, but a brother-in-law—every brother-in-law would love nothing more than to boot him as far away as possible.

Chen Shoufu had already accepted the fact that Leng Zhimeng was his superior. After all, the company’s actual control was in his hands; he was effectively the CEO. He simply pretended not to see Leng Zhimeng.

But now, with Huang He claiming that she was their second trump card, Chen Shoufu couldn’t help but feel it was an exaggeration. What kind of trump card was Leng Zhimeng? What use could she possibly be?

Should they marry her off to Brother Ma, so Huang He and Ma would become brothers-in-law, and from then on share the instant messaging market together?

“Zhimeng, why don’t you tell your general manager what you’ve accomplished this month,” Huang He said with a smile.

“Alright.” Leng Zhimeng nodded, then continued, “Brother-in-law, General Manager Chen, over the past weeks, I’ve done everything I could, contacting people through various channels. In the end, I found the twelve major disc distributors in the country and reached an agreement with them: for an average price of 100,000 yuan per company, totaling 1.2 million, we purchased the disc bundling rights for the coming year. From now on, every computer disc they ship—system discs, software discs, it doesn’t matter—will be bundled and burned with our OO client.”

“These twelve distributors cover about 90% of the country’s pirated disc market. This way, every customer who buys a pirated disc—whether installing a system, a program, or a game—will have our OO automatically installed!” Leng Zhimeng declared.

“Excellent,” Huang He nodded in satisfaction, then turned to Chen Shoufu. “So, what do you think of Zhimeng’s work?”

“…Amazing…” Chen Shoufu’s mind went blank for a while before he finally, wholeheartedly, gave his praise.

“It seems that unless Leng Zhimeng leaves, I’ll be beneath her for the rest of my life!” Chen Shoufu lamented inwardly, realizing that all his contributions over the past month likely paled in comparison to hers.

Leng Zhimeng’s strategy was nothing short of a masterstroke.

For OO now, the only way to survive was to steal users from QQ. The Coral OO before had been a desperate move just to stay afloat.

But if users could be persuaded to willingly install a legitimate OO client on their computers, who would bother with underhanded tricks?

Yet for OO, the hardest part was getting users to install the program in the first place. With everyone around them already using QQ for chat, what reason would they have to download some new platform called OO?

In truth, for new software, gaining enough initial installations is a matter of life and death.

Leng Zhimeng’s work perfectly solved this problem.

Back then, throughout China, 90% of systems, programs, software, and games were installed via CDs, and 99% of those were pirated copies.

Some might say, didn’t QQ users all have internet? Wouldn’t downloading be easier?

Of course not. In 2001, the internet was abysmal. If your download speed reached 10kb/s, you were already on a fast connection. Downloading a 100MB program could take hours.

Moreover, there was no BT download, no Thunder, no eMule, nor any kind of download manager. Everything depended on the browser’s built-in download function—painfully slow, and if the connection dropped, hours of progress could vanish in an instant.

So, in 2001, unless you were downloading something under 50MB, you’d have to be out of your mind to try downloading from the internet. A five-yuan pirated CD could install a several-hundred-megabyte game in just a few minutes—only a fool would choose to download instead.

Back then, QQ had wrestled with this problem, too. Their solution was to keep installation packages as small as possible. The earliest version was just 2MB; even as QQ grew with new features, by 2001 the package was only 12MB. Tencent even spent heavily on multiple download servers to ensure users could finish downloading in about ten minutes. This allowed QQ to spread rapidly across users’ computers.

It’s said that, in 2001, Tencent’s expenses for compressing their installer and boosting download speeds had already reached tens of millions of yuan.

Yet they never imagined that Leng Zhimeng would solve the problem with just 1.2 million.

With 1.2 million, she’d secured the cooperation of all the country’s pirated disc vendors, covering 90% of new computers and software installations. In the future, out of every ten people installing something new—software, games, or operating systems—nine would find OO automatically installed. Users wouldn’t even need to know what OO was, yet they’d already become its users.

A conservative estimate put OO’s monthly installations at over two million—a takeoff speed that would leave Brother Ma dumbfounded.

By the way, there was also demand for QQ installation discs in the market, but due to a special agreement Leng Zhimeng reached with the disc vendors, an amusing phenomenon soon appeared.

Many users who bought pirated QQ discs would install them at home, only to find that the icon appearing on their desktop was not QQ, but OO.

Of course, these new users couldn’t tell the difference. Since QQ and OO looked nearly identical, they happily assumed they were using QQ. Years later, they’d still tell others they had always been loyal QQ users!