Chapter 90: A Momentary Lapse

“There is actually something... I’m not sure whether I should say it. It has to do with Huang He,” Li Dan said, moistening her lips.

“Then just say it.”

“About a week ago, our front-desk administrative assistant resigned. She left in such a hurry that she even gave up half a month’s pay. There was no one to take over her work, so she handed everything directly to me.”

“What are you bringing this up for now?” Xiao Ma asked, frowning.

“At the time I thought it was strange. She had been doing fine, so why would she quit in such a rush? So I asked her. She said she felt she had let the company down, that she had been the one to ruin it, and that she had no face left to stay here. So she resigned.” Li Dan said.

“She ruined the company?” Zeng Qing laughed aloud. “That woman really thinks highly of herself. She’s just a lowly receptionist. What makes her think she had the power to ruin a company? How absurd.”

“Yes, I thought it was pretty absurd too. So I asked her why she would think that way. Then she told me that, about four months ago, a rustic tycoon came to our company and said he wanted to buy our shares. He even said that if we handed the company over to him, he could make us become the greatest internet company in all of China.”

“At the time she thought he was a joke, so she treated that tycoon very badly. She even said some rather unpleasant things to him, and in the end she sent the angry man off.” Li Dan’s story sounded rather entertaining, but her expression remained solemn.

“Li Dan, what exactly are you trying to say?” Zeng Qing asked impatiently.

At that moment, Xiao Ma seemed to remember something. His expression changed drastically, and he stared at Li Dan before blurting out, “That rustic tycoon you mentioned—could it be Huang He?”

“It was Huang He,” Li Dan nodded. “Later I checked her work log from that day. There really was a record of Huang He’s visit, and even some of their conversation had been written down. To be honest, that receptionist was quite responsible. You can tell from the fact that she recorded the dialogue.”

“No way. Are you saying Huang He, the man behind OO, once wanted to invest in our Tengda? You can’t be mistaken, can you? Could it have been two different people with the same name?” Zeng Qing and Zhang Zhidong reacted at the same time.

“There’s no mistake. At first even the receptionist thought she must have mistaken him for someone else. But later she watched the JDFT program and saw what Leng Zhimeng looked like. She recognized her immediately. Leng Zhimeng was the girl who came with Huang He, and she still remembered that the girl called Huang He her brother-in-law!” Li Dan said.

“Brother-in-law? So Leng Zhimeng really is Huang He’s sister-in-law!” Everyone’s mouths fell open at once. Good heavens, they had just eaten up the juiciest gossip imaginable, and with this revelation, many of the mysteries that had puzzled them were suddenly resolved.

No wonder a high school student like Leng Zhimeng could become CEO. So she had used her brother-in-law’s connections. That made perfect sense.

But wasn’t Huang He the one who ran off with his sister-in-law?

Everyone secretly mulled over the relationship between Huang He and the sister-in-law, then broke into sleazy, knowing laughs. Xiao Ma, however, paid no attention to that. He had sunk into a deep and bitter anguish.

If Li Dan had not said it, he would never have remembered. But the moment she mentioned it, everything came flooding back.

Back then, it had not been that the receptionist slighted Huang He. The receptionist had already told him that Huang He had come by, and had relayed Huang He’s words as well. It was he who had looked down on the man, assuming he was nothing more than a rustic businessman, and had rejected him without a second thought.

Now that he thought about it, if the whole strategy behind OO had truly been laid out by Huang He, then Huang He had not been lying. He really was a man who understood instant messaging software, understood customers, and understood the internet.

And he had come with a huge sum of money to invest.

Xiao Ma felt as though his heart had been thrown into turmoil. He was filled with regret, wishing he could turn back time. If only he had met Huang He back then, and sold him a portion of QQ’s shares, then all those strategies and brilliant ideas in Huang He’s head would have belonged to QQ. Huang He would have done everything he could to help him operate QQ, and he would have brought in over a hundred million in capital as well, money that could have been used to buy servers and let QQ develop far more quickly.

But now it was all too late. Huang He had become his enemy, his most terrifying rival.

Xiao Ma could almost imagine it: when Huang He had come to visit and had not even been granted a meeting, only to be sent away by the receptionist, how furious he must have been. And then all that fury had been transformed into hatred. So Huang He had simply taken the technology, the capital, the ideas, and the creativity that were originally meant for QQ, and built OO himself instead.

In other words, it had all come down to a single thoughtless decision on his part, and now he was left with this situation.

At the thought of it, Xiao Ma was overcome with remorse and desolation.

“Boss, there’s no need to think too much about it. What has already happened has no ifs or maybes. Besides, we still hold the advantage. Our user base is still several times larger than OO’s. As long as we handle this properly, OO still won’t be our match!” At the crucial moment, Zhang Zhidong spoke up, finally pulling Xiao Ma a little free of that miserable state of mind.

After all, he was one of the chosen sons of twenty-first-century China. At most, he would be discouraged and regretful for a while; he would not be so easily beaten. Soon enough, his fighting spirit returned.

“Zhidong, let me ask you something. If we set up some traffic control and limit QQ Voice so that its bandwidth stays within what the servers can handle, could you do it?”

“No problem!” Zhang Zhidong said without the slightest hesitation. “If it’s just simple traffic limiting, that’s easy. I could have it done in one night. But if we do that, I’m worried the users who can’t use QQ Voice will be very dissatisfied. If we’re going to limit traffic, there should be a reason for it, right?”

“That’s simple. Just charge for it,” Zeng Qing said quickly. “Look at the foreign services like ICQ and MSN. People have to pay membership fees to use them, and they make a fortune.”

“So I was thinking, why can’t we charge too? For QQ Voice, we could make it a paid service. A certain price per minute, just like phone charges. As long as it’s cheaper than making a normal phone call, we could earn a huge sum. The profit problem that has been troubling us all this time could be solved at once!” Zeng Qing became more and more excited as he spoke, as if he had found a wide, sunlit road for his own child.

The others nodded repeatedly as well, thinking that charging was an excellent idea, one that would solve multiple problems at once. They should have started charging long ago.

In fact, many people might not know that back in 2002, QQ announced that registering a new QQ number would cost one yuan, under the pretense that the fee was meant to prevent mass registration of fake accounts for fraud.

Later, once MSN entered the domestic market, QQ immediately withdrew that fee policy.

Besides, this was not the future era when the entire internet was free. On the contrary, paid online services far outnumbered free ones. Charging for a service was entirely reasonable. The only question was whether Xiao Ma would agree.