The day after the web technology standardization meeting ended, the official website of iview browser issued an announcement announcing that it will release version 2.0 within the next 30 days, ensuring compatibility with existing old web pages while fully supporting the new standards.

As soon as the announcement was released, it immediately shocked the entire Internet industry, especially Netscape, and was caught off guard. You should know

The new standard has been greatly changed, and HTML has many new features. Iscript has corrected some syntax, and CSS is something that was not before. To fully support the new standard, it not only requires developing new functions, but also rewriting old code. The workload is very large. In the traditional development model, it takes at least 3 to 6 months to complete. If complex compatibility issues are considered, it may take longer.

Because of this, Netscape cto Mark Anderson's first sentence after seeing the announcement was: "This is impossible!"

The second sentence is: "Autun betrayed us, and he wants to start a total war."

The third sentence is: "How did he do it?"

How did it do it? Of course it is open source...

iscript was "invented" by Du Qiu, and CSS was discovered by Du Qiu. He has great autonomy in setting these two standards. So as early as May, he started the research and development of iView 2.0. By the time the W3C standardization meeting was held in September, about 60% of the code had been completed. At this time, Netscape had just decided to cooperate with Snapdragon to jointly formulate standards, and a line of code had not been written yet.

At 8 pm on September 14, Du Qiu released the development plan and source code of iview 2.0 on the Internet, and wrote a passionate proposal, calling on all open source software enthusiasts to unite and complete the iview 2.0 completion plan code-named "Cruel Angel" - "Evangelion" is about to premiere on TV. This code with a strong sense of tandem not only meets the situation, but also creates news topics in Japan. After all, Japan had the second largest number of Internet users in the world in 1995, and it is a market that cannot be ignored.

In the eyes of many people, Du Qiu was still an unknown person in March, and Snapdragon was just a bag company. IView 1.0 was released in open source, which was just a helpless choice for a cook without rice. Now Du Qiu is famous all over the world and the company is at a critical moment of financing. Therefore, competitors, venture capital managers, media reporters and even believers in the open source software concept all agreed that iView 2.0 cannot be open source and will definitely become a pure commercial software like Windows.

So when Du Qiu announced open source, the glasses of countless people were broken. The unprecedented development model attracted a large number of programmers who were not interested in the open source concept. The gimmick of treating money as dirt attracted the attention of many media, including the popular magazines in the IT industry "Wire" and "Red Herring", as well as the old traditional media "Fortune" and "New York Times". The intensive exposure and fierce controversy made the popularity of the iView browser soar. While continuing to paralyze Microsoft, it also brought huge pressure to Netscape.

On October 1, 1995, Netscape held a monthly board meeting. During the meeting, Netscape's largest shareholder Jim Clark asked Mark Anderson: "Mark, how is our development progress of navigator 2.0?"

"It's a mess, and now only has less than 15% of the work plan completed."

"It has been more than half a month since the web standard has been announced, and you have completed less than 15% of the work? IView has completed 90%!"

"Jim, we hired too many programmers in the first half of the year, which seriously delayed the development progress."

At this time, a director couldn't listen and scolded: "It's ridiculous! There are too many programmers, shouldn't the development progress be faster?"

"We have recruited more than 500 programmers in a few months. These people are from all over the country. The development capabilities and programming concepts vary greatly. The teams lack cooperation, and the communication time is even longer than the typing time, which is very inefficient."

"IView 2.0 has thousands of programmers participating in the development, from all over the world, how can they be so efficient?"

"The core development team of iview 2.0 is only 18 people, each of which is the best in the open source community. These people are fans of autumn, with the same concept, no internal friction, and the cooperation efficiency is very high. There are thousands of open source enthusiasts to help them test and fix bugs. Of course, the development progress is very fast." Mark Anderson was a little exhausted and explained: "The biggest trouble in developing a browser is not a technical problem, but a compatibility problem. In this regard, open source software has advantages that closed source software cannot match. They fixed more than 400 bugs in 15 days, and updated the version almost every hour, and we can't do it at all."

"Can we use their source code as samples and write our own programs in another programming language?"

"No, I have consulted a lawyer. The software is the same as the novel. Even if the text is different, as long as the ideas are similar, it will be considered to be infringement."

"Netscape lags behind Microsoft in marketing and Snapdragon in technology. If this continues, the company's stock price will fall."

"It's better for us to raise the purchase price and talk to autumn."

KPCB partner John Duer is also a director of Netscape. He didn't say anything just now. He shook his head and said, "This Chinese has a big appetite and needs at least $1 billion before he will consider a merger."

"What?!"

"Is he crazy?"

Netscape's stock price rebounded for a few days after the W3C meeting, and then fell again. It has barely maintained at around $2 billion, and $1 billion is equivalent to half of the equity. If merged at this price, Du Qiu will surpass Jim Clark and become Netscape's largest shareholder. With his outstanding technology and his reputation as the heyday, he has the ability to turn Netscape into a part of Snapdragon, rather than Snapdragon into a part of Netscape.

"John, will you really invest in Snapdragon at a valuation of $1 billion?"

"Because Netscape and Snapdragon are competitive, I didn't participate in their financing plan, I just heard from my colleagues." John Duer tapped the conference table with his finger and asked Mark Anderson: "The other Chinese... seems to be called dylan, and once boasted to Steve Case that in addition to iView 2.0, autumn is developing a new project worth tens of billions of dollars. Do you know what it is?"

"have no idea."

"So from the perspective of professional fields, what direction do you think will be a project?"

Mark Anderson rubbed his forehead, pondered for a moment, and said: "Maybe it is a search engine. There are more and more pages on the Internet. If you want to find accurate information, you need the help of search engines."

"I think so too." John Duer nodded slightly, looked around the conference room, and suggested: "Don't worry about Snapdragon, let's buy a search engine company."

John Duer is one of the four major tyrants in the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley. He invested in the 1980s, including lotus, sun, and Compaq. At the beginning of this year, he had a unique vision. When others were not optimistic about it, he won 25% of Netscape shares for US$5 million, which increased by more than 100 times in just a few months. He has unquestionable authority in the investment field. Therefore, the proposal quickly won everyone's approval and began to discuss which search engine company to acquire.

Du Qiu didn't know that because of Chen Dayou's bragging, Netjing embarked on a different development path from the original time and space. In fact, what he developed was not a search engine, but an email system, an email system that can be used in the browser, which valued its company's company by valuing $1 billion - if it was a search engine, it would be worth adding another 0 to satisfy Du Qiu.

While iView 2.0 is developing rapidly, although Du Qiu is in Silicon Valley, he still has to face all kinds of domestic investors. Some of these people come from the city, some from the province, and some from Pujiang and Beijing. After a series of unspeakable operations, Snapdragon's equity structure has undergone great changes, from a single company with only three shareholders to an umbrella group with more than a dozen shareholders and more than a dozen subsidiaries.

These dozen subsidiaries did not bring much money to Snapdragon, but they increased the fixed assets several times. The invisible benefits of only time traveling through the party can be used in estimation. Correspondingly, Du Qiu split the shares into ab shares, and his shareholding volume dropped from 65% to 54%, and his voting rights increased instead of falling, reaching 75%, and still firmly controlled the company's development direction.

On October 10, 1995, the "Cruel Angel" plan was successfully completed and iview 2.0 was officially released. This time, Google's strategy of operating Chrome in the original time and space was adopted. Two versions were released, one was a stable version for ordinary users, closed source, and monthly updates, and the other was a pioneer version for professional users, open source, and updated at any time. Doing so can not only reduce the trouble caused by fragmentation, but also unite third-party developers, which is conducive to promoting various private goods in the future.

Benefiting from a wide range of reports that lasted for a month, the various new features and features of iview 2.0 were highly anticipated. Once released, it immediately caused a sensation. The 24-hour download volume exceeded 100,000, which not only dragged down the company's servers, but also caused the campus networks of Stanford and Berkeley University, which provided diversion downloads, to collapse. This gossip news quickly became a hot topic in the media industry, because before that, no mainstream software company had completely abandoned floppy disks and CDs and distributed software only through the Internet.

"When will your imail be done?"

"It should be almost the end of the month."

"The faster the better, the faster the better!" Chen Dayou looked like a young wife with deep grudges and reminded: "Du Qiu, the company must raise funds next month, otherwise, let alone building an email server, it will not even be able to pay the employee's salary."

"The $4 million I got from Microsoft was spent so quickly?"

"Investing in Yahoo cost 1 million, renting offices and buying servers cost 1.2 million, 8, 9, 10, and 950,000 yuan in three months, and there is also..." Chen Dayou reported the expenses carefully and finally concluded: "If I hadn't brought more than 300,000 US dollars in advertising fees every month, we would have gone bankrupt."

After he settled the accounts, he felt a little guilty and short-sighed and asked, "Du Qiu, do you think we can really raise $1 billion?"

"Sure, just don't worry."
Chapter completed!