Rebirth of Northern Technology

1994, October

The World Wide Web Association, also known as the W3C Council, was established. Hiroshima Asian Games.

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Longjiang Provincial Business School, computer room.

Li Lina checked her watch. It was 9 o'clock and she had to go back. It would be unsafe to go back later.

She greeted several people in the room and planned to leave.

In this computer room, the 10 computers in the second row are the property of Betu.

Baitu Software Company was formally established in August. At that financing conference, many software teams successfully got financing. Circuit board design software is one of them.

Teacher Wang Fengli was appointed as the general manager of Baitu Software Company.

Betu Software, in a big fire at the financing conference, received countless investment intentions.

After selection, in the end only accepted an investment of 1 million, accounting for 20% of the total equity. Since the total equity is 5 million shares, the new investor gets 1 million shares.

For the rest, the talent fund holds 30%, or 1.5 million shares. The School of Computer Science holds 1.5 million shares. The other 1 million shares were allocated to members of the project team and related teachers of the Department of Computer Science.

As one of the main members of the development team, she was allocated 50,000 shares, second only to a few teachers.

But Li Lina was not satisfied. She paid for her out of pocket, took out 60,000, and got another 60,000 shares as an investor.

Even including investors, she can be regarded as a larger individual shareholder.

Many of the other investment shareholders are alumni of the University of Technology, and most of these people's investment in shares is 100,000 or 50,000.

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After Manager Wang Fengli got the money, the first thing he did was to expand.

The domestic labor is not high, and the main force of the development team is all students, almost free labor. Therefore, the bulk of the money is spent on computers.

This time it cost more than 700,000 yuan to buy nearly 40 computers, ten of which were moved here.

The main reason for putting Baitu Software's second base in the business school is that the students in the industrial conference programming are all in a hurry. Even the students with double degrees were mobilized.

Since the investment conference, all project teams have been expanding, regardless of whether they have received investment or not.

Through the coordination of the talent fund, other school student resources supported by the fund have also been used. The business school was selected because it was not far from the University of Technology.

As the person in charge of the UI and data group, Li Lina was assigned here to coordinate and guide.

More than 30 students are organized here to do some auxiliary programming work. The business school joined the talent fund late, and software majors have just entered the sophomore year.

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The company's product, PCBA software, has initially gained market competitiveness after more than a year of polishing.

Industrial software on the market is divided into two camps. One is the PC software camp led by Protel and AutoCAD. The other is the Unix camp headed by MentorGraphic and ProE.

In these two camps, in terms of product functionality, the Unix camp has won.

Many functions, such as real-time simulation, stress analysis, and even simple automatic design, are already available.

But the Unix camp also has shortcomings.

The first is the high cost of hardware.

A Unix workstation starts with at least RMB 100,000.

Although there are reasons for large memory, large hard drives, dedicated graphics cards, high-performance CPUs, and even high display indicators, the final result is that the total price is too high.

At this time there is a workstation, an Audi said.

The second problem is that the software is rare.

These software generally use the encryption method of the hardware dog. Thanks to the powerful features of Unix, piracy is rare and rare.

The third question,

Software licensing fees are extremely high.

Manufacturers in the Unix camp were mostly spin-offs from the software departments of large electronics giants or aerospace and military companies. The high cost that comes with it naturally brings high prices.

A complete set of PCBA software authorization costs more than US$100,000. The licensing fee for IC design software is as high as $250,000 or more!

It is these three factors that lead to the small domestic market for industrial software such as PCBA in the Unix camp.

The total cost is too high, even with photovoltaics, it is difficult to bear, not to mention the average small and medium-sized enterprises. Even though the software is free, few can afford workstations.

In addition, the software is too complicated.

Although the related software is powerful, it also increases the difficulty of using it.

As the software is not popular, the relevant information is lacking. In this case, it is difficult to use the software well without the training and guidance of the manufacturer.

But how can the manufacturer send someone to support pirated users?

Under the combined effect of the two, it gives the software of the PC camp a huge market opportunity.

As the PC becomes more powerful, the software of the PC camp such as Protel also grows up at the same time.

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The batch of software supported by the talent fund is mainly to fight against opponents in the PC camp. Because their absolute strength is relatively weak.

After more than a year of development, LinaPCBA can basically compete head-on with Protel.

Although there may be deficiencies in the details, Lina software has its own killer features.

One reason for the popularity of Protel and AutoCAD is that its price is very low, about two or three thousand dollars for a set, and another reason is that pirated copies are everywhere.

This is especially important for poor students in schools. After these students graduated, they brought Protel to the workplace.

The same idea has also been borrowed by Baitu, and it is even worse.

The charging model of Lina software does not adopt the fixed price method prevailing at this time. Instead, it adopts a low-cost or even free model of basic software.

The whole software simply does not have a hardware dog.

All software is genuine!

Copy the software at will!

As for the license fee, personal use, or teaching use, it's free!

If the company is commercial, it logically needs to pay. But even if it is paid, the price is not high, only $199.

As a result, it was quickly welcomed by the market, whether at home or abroad.

In the several rounds of Sino-US trade negotiations, the core issue has always been intellectual property rights. Especially state-owned enterprises and scientific research institutions. At least a fig leaf is needed.

Well now, our software is all genuine, there is nothing to check, there is no problem of pirated installation.

This is especially important for leaders who do not understand technology.

If you don’t have a free copy, why do you spend a lot of money? What do you mean by that? Be careful of being sued.

For some domestic industrial software suppliers, failure is where they fail.

Competing with foreign products, other functions are not as strong as the other, but software encryption and protection are better than foreign manufacturers.

In this way, it is strange that the software can be promoted.

Second is the price. The commercial license is US$199, which is less than two thousand yuan, which is affordable compared to computer hardware with a price of tens of thousands.

A unit has 20 or 30 computers, it is still possible to buy a few sets of copyrights and install the facade.

In particular, most of the emerging electronics companies in Bingcheng have inextricably linked relationships with the University of Technology.

Regardless of whether you can use it or not, Lina software has become popular.

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This is the case in China, and the situation in foreign markets is similar.

It’s not uncommon for individuals to be free and companies pay. Many tools and software in later generations are distributed in this way.

But this model is not common now, because it faces two obstacles.

First, in the absence of a network environment, the software must be sold through offline physical stores.

It is obviously impossible to sell free software in physical stores.

But with the advent of the Internet, users can download it by themselves.

The second one is price.

For example, compression software, dozens of dollars, you pay if you want, or if you don’t, I don’t bother to trouble you.

LinaPCBA is the first product that reduces the price of industrial software to tools, and it’s not for personal use. So it caused a sensation as soon as it appeared, and even appeared in the industry news media.

Through word of mouth, it spreads among enthusiasts in a manner similar to the spread of the virus.

PC industrial software such as Protel was defeated.

This is not bargaining, it is just beheading.

Directly reduce a zero price war, they can't afford it anyway. Not to mention the free copy of software, and the personal free model.

Backed by the big tree of the open source software fund, Baitu Company has a strong sense of seeing adults hitting children when competing in the PC software market.

For companies such as Protel, the program development team is only a few dozen people.

The manpower invested by Baitu has been equal to this figure. What is even more frightening is the manpower and material resources that the open source software fund can mobilize.

The biggest cost and risk of software development lies in the development of core functions, which are provided and borne by the open source software platform.

The dozens of developers in Baitu only need to focus on the component database, the ease of use of the interface, and the system integration.

Coupled with the low cost of labor in China, victory is only a matter of time.

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But companies such as Baitu were not satisfied with this.

It is also continuously integrating various research results of the Open Source Software Fund. Hope to have the strength to attack the Unix camp.

Many functions of Unix competitors, such as circuit emulation, are not impossible, but they cannot run due to hardware limitations such as the performance and memory of the PC.

The top PC configuration in 1994 has just reached 48666, 8M RAM, 500M hard disk (close to 40 thousand), and most users are still using 386.

This configuration is able to run the Protel and AutoCADDOS version with rudimentary functions.

Since the workstation has high performance, is it possible to directly develop software for Unix workstations?

the answer is negative.

To develop software for a workstation, the first thing is to completely reinstall the machine used by the developer.

If you replace nearly 50 Microcomputers of Baitu with workstations, the cost alone will be as high as more than 5 million.

Unix development tools and SDK are different from the PC environment, such as ObjectWorksC++ or Saber-C. The cost of development tools on the Unix platform (average price is above US$3000), just thinking about it is touching and tearful.

Due to the scarcity and expensiveness of the Unix platform, there may not be a few people with Unix development experience across the country.

Entering the Unix platform will also face multi-platform problems.

Unix is ​​a general term for a broad category.

The name of the operating system used by Sun workstations is Solaris, HP's system is HP-UX, and Digital's is called DigitalUNIX, such as IBMAIX, SCO, SPARC, etc. There are at least more than twenty kinds.

Each system needs to be equipped with separate transplant personnel and machines, which is not a problem of 5 million.

Not to mention whether the machine can be bought or not, it means that if I have bought it, I haven't done anything yet, so tens of millions of dollars have been lost.

In addition to the cost of hardware, before software is sold, there are compatibility certifications for each system, and money is needed everywhere.

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