The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

"Weibo is going to be sold. Let's talk about our thoughts. Should Baidu acquire Weibo?" Robin asked at Baidu's executive meeting.

Baidu has been on the market for more than a year. After experiencing a period of rapid growth in the first half year, Baidu has stabilized in the search engine market and has a downward trend in the second half of 2003.

There are two reasons for the decline. The most direct impact is that Microsoft launched Bing Search many years in advance, and Yahoo also launched Yahoo Search. These two giants had a direct impact on Baidu’s market share. The second reason is because of the mobile Internet. Baidu has almost no presence in this field, and the number of downloads and real active users of its mobile Baidu APP is far inferior to that of Yahoo.

Today, when mobile Internet is receiving increasing attention, Baidu's market value has been declining.

"I think we should acquire Weibo," said Shirley, Baidu's senior vice president, head of sales and operations.

Weibo can make up for Baidu's shortcomings. We have lagged behind Yahoo in the mobile Internet field. Weibo can directly help us catch up with Yahoo in the mobile Internet field.

Similar to Quora, the product logic and operating model designed by Newman can provide the best guarantee for the sustainability of Weibo. "

Everyone knows that Weibo is one of the top applications in mobile Internet users and activity, and its price is definitely very high.

The most fearful thing about this type of acquisition is that after the acquisition, it is discovered that its model is outdated and not popular anymore. Its decline is not instantaneous, but gradual. There have been many cases of this type of acquisition in the past, and many giants have fallen into this trap.

Zhou Xin's past glorious record determines that they have no worries in this regard. Whether it is Riot Games or Quora, the Internet community built by Zhou Xin has been a mainstream product until now.

Although Quora wants to sell it now, it will definitely not sell for 70 billion, but it is much better than the acquisitions in the Nasdaq bubble era, and Quora has also discounted it by 30%. You must know that the acquisitions in the bubble era are also Whether it is good or listed, there are many companies with a 0.1% discount on the market value.

Shirley worked in Washington before becoming a senior executive at Baidu. She was the chief of staff of the former government’s Treasury Department. Her acumen in this area allowed her to vaguely guess why Weibo was being sold.

Therefore, in her opinion, it is a rare opportunity.

Although Baidu's chairman is also Chinese, unlike Tencent, most of the equity behind Baidu is in the hands of financial institutions. Even Zhou Xin's Baidu shares have been slowly cashed out in the past six months.

Moreover, Robin has become an American, and compared with Zhou Xin, he is half his own.

They don't have Tencent's worries.

Tencent's actual controller, executives and backing shareholders are all Chinese, and even the main development team is based in China. It is normal to sell Weibo.

Not everyone has working experience in Washington. With Shirley’s keen sense of smell, another Indian vice president, Taban Butt, has a different opinion:

“In my opinion, the operation of Weibo has become quite mature, and many celebrities regard Weibo as the main channel for expressing their opinions.

After Newman launched Weibo, fewer and fewer celebrities insisted on running their own personal blogs. Everyone found that Weibo's high-frequency interaction and short content method was more in line with the current trend.

Including according to my observation, advertising content from brands on Weibo is becoming more and more frequent.

Especially after the launch of Mphone2, the popularization of 3G network, and the ability to send pictures to Weibo without restrictions, the amount of advertising on Weibo has increased significantly.

As for some of the so-called personal opinion leaders defined by Newman, who buy traffic promotion services from Weibo, this amount of income is something we cannot even speculate on.

I agree with what Shirley just said, Weibo can make up for Baidu’s current shortcomings, and I don’t deny Newman’s product design capabilities.

Precisely because Weibo is so good and such an excellent Internet asset, why does Newman want to sell it?

Newman is not short of money, and Weibo has great potential. It has already formed a scale effect. Although only Mphone will have Weibo pre-installed, users of other brands of smartphones will definitely have Weibo among the first applications they install after getting their phones.

It almost appears to be an application that can continue to increase the number of users as smartphones become more popular. No matter from which perspective, it is an excellent asset.

Why is Newman selling? Are there any risks that we don't know about?

I am not opposed to the acquisition of Weibo, but we need to understand the causes and consequences before making a decision. "

At this time, many Indian executives have appeared in Silicon Valley, but unlike later generations of Indian executives who were CEOs, most Indian executives now are vice presidents.

And because of Zhou Xin, there are also a lot of Chinese-American executives, especially in the product field. People subconsciously think that Chinese-Americans or Chinese have unique talents in product design.

The unanimous attitude of the executives present was that if Tencent really wants to sell Weibo, and there are no risks that they are not aware of in this matter, it must acquire Weibo.

Robin looked at Larry Page: "Larry, what's your opinion?"

As the former founder of Google, Larry Page is far more enthusiastic about power than Sergey Brin. Therefore, he is also the most powerful vice president in the merged Baidu, second only to Robin in Baidu's internal system.

Robin's desire for power is no less than that of Larry Page. He has been looking for opportunities to drive Larry Page away, but he has no chance. Most of Baidu's directors support Larry Page.

Robin even had a hunch that if he couldn't get Zhou Xin's support, Larry Page would get a higher vote weight than him.

Therefore, although the two dislike each other, they can still maintain a superficial harmony.

Larry Page said: “We have to acquire Weibo.

Baidu is facing an unprecedented crisis.

I don’t know if you have felt that the presence of search engines is weakening on the mobile Internet.

Take Weibo and WeChat as examples. These two mobile applications do not want search engines to obtain their content. Even if we search their content on Baidu, we cannot open it through the web page.

They set a bad benchmark, and most subsequent mobile applications refuse to be searched by search engines.

With the rapid rise of mobile Internet, we will lose a huge market. When the content quality of mobile Internet exceeds that of computers, the content quality may not exceed that of computers. Even if it is just catching up, Baidu's upper limit will become extremely limited.

Mobile Baidu is actually a redundant application. Users can open Baidu's mobile site through the mobile browser. Why should it download the application?

But if we don’t adapt to the mobile terminal and force users to download mobile Baidu, then can’t users turn to Bing, Yahoo, and Quora?

Therefore, the dilemma facing Baidu is that it is difficult to expand our own business types in the mobile Internet era, and the content of mobile Internet naturally excludes search engines. We are facing a considerable dilemma. "

After Time Warner acquired Quora, it has been trying to find new profit growth points. As the technical threshold of search engines has been lowered, Quora has also begun to launch its own search engine. With the help of Quora's massive content, they have grown rapidly in the search engine field.

Larry Page continued: “I don’t think we acquired Weibo for Weibo itself.

Well, Weibo itself is also important.

What's more important is that we should set a standard for the mobile Internet field, that is, applications on the mobile Internet should not exclude search engines, and their content should also be searchable by search engines.

The current situation is that the mobile Internet is naturally separated from the traditional Internet. Users without smartphones cannot browse content created by mobile Internet users.

Traditional Internet users see what a certain celebrity has said on Weibo through the portal website. When they see similar screenshots, mobile Internet users can directly comment below and even get a reply from the celebrity. This kind of interactivity creates Natural barriers will make Baidu's market share less and less.

Of course, it’s still too late. The mobile Internet is still in its infancy. I hope we can use Weibo to make all mobile Internet application developers realize that if they open their content to traditional Internet users, they can gain more users, which will be beneficial to them. It is also more beneficial.

Not all users have smartphones these days.

At the same time, Baidu can become a bridge between the mobile Internet and the traditional Internet. "

I have to say that Larry Page's vision is indeed vicious, and he can see at a glance the difficulties Baidu will face if the mobile Internet continues to develop in its current form.

This is also the dilemma faced by Baidu in later generations. It was left far behind in the mobile Internet era. However, Google is much better than Baidu. At least it has stepped on the Android trend and almost opened up the entire chain.

After Robin quietly listened to everyone's opinions, he secretly lamented that he was indeed his biggest opponent. Even if he was the chairman, Larry Page could put great pressure on him. The other party's perspective on this matter was obviously better than Other executives are more than a step above.

There were even some points that Robin himself had not thought of.

Robin is aware of the squeeze that the mobile Internet has on search engines, but through Weibo, the mobile Internet will not only not become an obstacle to search engines, but will instead become a help to search engines. This is something he did not expect.

Robin finally concluded: "What Larry just said is very good. I will go to Newman to have a good chat. Then the business department needs to investigate the inside information about the sale of Weibo. We will do both at the same time.

In addition, Shirley, you will make a detailed report on Baidu’s acquisition of Weibo. Larry, you will be responsible for the entire business negotiation process after the business negotiations are launched. "

Robin assigned the work, but he was unsure. To be honest, he felt that he knew Zhou Xin, but sometimes he felt that he didn't know Zhou Xin that well.

There were many things that Robin thought Zhou Xin could not do, but it turned out that Zhou Xin could do them all, such as Xinxin Technology.

Robin studied at Americen for his master's degree and worked at Americen for several years. Later, he founded Baidu here and stayed at Americen for a long time.

Robin thinks he still knows Amerikan very well. When he was working in New York, he worked for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal respectively. Dow Jones is the Dow Jones Index that is well-known to the outside world.

These two jobs gave him a full understanding of the globalized economic and trade system. Robin realized that in the modern business system built by Amerikan, Huaguo's position was not in the technical parts such as semiconductors. It is the basic processing party and the provider of large amounts of labor.

As for the division of labor such as semiconductors, Amerikan first assigned it to Neon. Later, Neon disobeyed and used financial means and technical assistance to assign this division of labor to Gao Li and Wanwan.

Therefore, Robin believed that returning to China to engage in new core technology would be a waste of effort and a thankless effort. He complained to Xu Yong in private.

Since Baidu executives still have people from Google, Robin did not drive Xu Yong away, and Xu Yong still works at Baidu.

Including Zhou Xin only getting a green card but not naturalization, Robin didn't quite understand these.

Robin believes that Zhou Xin is too idealistic in many things. If he goes back to work on semiconductors, it will be okay if he doesn't get results. If he does, it's not a good thing if he does get results.

But now, Robin is enjoying the benefits of Zhou Xin's idealism, which is selling Weibo.

As an in-depth user of Weibo, Robin also guessed why Zhou Xin wanted to sell Weibo. To put it bluntly, his identity determines that he cannot control this public opinion position. If Zhou Xin is naturalized, it is not certain whether he will sell Weibo.

Robin was grateful for Zhou Xin's idealism.

Baidu got the news, and Microsoft also got the news. Since formulating a strategy to shift to the mobile Internet, Microsoft's resources have been mobilized. The acquisition is just the beginning, and the tilt of various internal resources is more critical.

When Ballmer was chatting with Bill Gates, he asked: "Why does Newman want to sell Weibo?"

Bill Gates has been operating in Washington for many years, so he naturally knows what's going on. After a brief explanation, he said: "We want to acquire Weibo.

Weibo is a good product, especially in the field of mobile Internet. Its value is not only reflected in money, but also has a lot of potential value.

This is also in line with Microsoft's mobile Internet strategy. "

After Bill Gates finished speaking, Ballmer nodded: "If it is for this reason, then the sale of Weibo should be a high probability event, and I know its importance.

We have mentioned it in previous discussions with our internal executives, not to mention that Weibo is one of the most important mobile Internet applications and can be well integrated into the Microsoft product system. Even if it is incompatible with the Microsoft system, it is just a commercial act. We also want to acquire Weibo.

Just because Tencent released the news like this, I'm worried that we will have many competitors. "

Bill Gates smiled and said: "Microsoft doesn't have much else, it just makes a lot of money.

And I talked with Newman. This time he accepted the equity swap transaction. Microsoft is definitely the most powerful competitor.

The only disadvantage of good things is that they are expensive. "

For Bill Gates, it is inevitable to win Weibo, which is related to his influence in Washington and even America.

Bill Gates wants to acquire Weibo through a joint acquisition by Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Foundation.