Gu Ao also missed this question: "Okay, I hope that after these few months, you can follow Sony's technical team to discuss improvements and improve the product to a higher level and train the team solidly.

Now, the improvement of play-box is almost done. Erickson, I need the hardware department to draw out most of the manpower, and expand the team in the near future to enter a new product line.

We have reached an agreement with Sony to build a new after-sales channel. At the same time, we have also gained a certain understanding of the hardware of Sony's various cutting-edge storage media reading and writing equipment. I think the time is ripe.

In the future, Tiankun Entertainment will enter more personal electronic entertainment consumer products fields, but it will not just be a game console. And 2c's arcade business can be completely stopped or resold, and we must concentrate our efforts to do big things."

After listening to Gu Ao's decision, the main backbone of the R&D and product teams were all excited.

President Schulhof was also full of expectations.

Although a company should not be a one-man show of its size, and it cannot rely on the will of the superior to the thigh, Gu Ao has always had a good vision. In addition, he is young and understands the needs and preferences of young people, which can provide valuable creativity.

Those experienced professional managers just need to repair and provide management plugging.

For at least one or two years, nothing will happen if you do this.

"Boss, what new project do you want to invest in? The R&D department has really been free recently. I thought that with the complete stability of play-box, the technicians we dug from Atarido will have no work to do." President Shulhof took the lead in proclaiming.

He didn't say anything, that is, he was secretly working on a "technical department layoff plan" to cope with the trough of the R&D cycle.

This situation is hard to imagine in the later Internet era, because technology iterations were very fast at that time, and a research and development model of "first make a minimum product that can be used, and then iterate quickly" has been developed, and it is impossible for technicians to be spared.

For example, when you are using Xiaomi or Apple phones, the system is unstable when it first went public, but because the phone can be connected to the Internet in real time, it is enough to upgrade the system at any time, so there is no need to pursue one step.

In this way, programmers always have work to do, without having to hire a large number of programmers at once, and put the product on the market completely.

However, in the 1980s without the Internet, all technology companies in Silicon Valley faced the cyclical problems of technical team size and workload demand.

Whether it is a game console or a computer, you have no chance to sell it and then upgrade the software system. You will write it and burn it when you leave the factory.

At this time, large companies need to open more R&D lines so that the R&D department will also have work to do during the off-season of the main product iteration cycle in the middle of the one or two years.

So whether it is Sony or other companies, there are so many weird and niche product models - they are all the time programmers and electronic engineers are idle and they are tinkering with them.

But if there is a large company that can have a clear idea and can achieve results in off-season tinkering, then it will save at least twice the R&D labor cost compared to other technology companies in the same period in the 1980s.

Therefore, when Gu Ao wanted to start a project, Shulhoff supported it from the bottom of his heart. Even if he was foolish, he would not lose money. He was idle.

Eriksen and Yang Zihao, Lu Yunda and others were glad that they would not lay off employees and that their brothers would not do anything.

The internal thoughts are very well unified.

Gu Ao confirmed that his prestige was as always, so he went straight to the point:

"I hope everyone can change their careers a little and develop a CD player - of course, the CD standard I mentioned is the CDDA data format jointly launched by Sony and Philips the year before yesterday. Recently, with the cooperation with Sony, you should have done a good job of previewing your homework."

"CD player? No wonder two months ago, when Sony was following people to improve their floppy drive, the boss asked us to study Sony's other potential data storage format media and reading and writing equipment." Lu Yunda was so clear in his heart that he thought about it in secret.

It turns out that Gu Ao has already had a foreshadowing. Since December, Tiankun has used the excuse of optimizing the floppy drive design and integration of floppy drives, and has bet on most of the R&D team's energy.

At that time, in addition to studying Sony's floppy drive, we also used this as an excuse to study "all the reading and writing devices that Sony has taken out so far and may be used to store game data in the future."

Gu Ao also drew a cake for Akio Morita: How much storage capacity of CDs can be? In the future, it may be possible to build an optical drive game console and use CDs to replace the game cassettes.

In 1983, CD was also a relatively advanced and rare thing. The difficulty and threshold for piracy were very high, because Sony itself was just launched in 1982.

Philips, another giant that jointly formulates the international standard, is even slower than Sony. He always feels that the cost cannot be reduced, and the road to CD player is temporarily difficult.

(Note: In September 1982, when music in cdda data format was defined, there were 3 founding companies, and the other one was Polygram. But Polygram is just a record company and does not produce hardware. Therefore, the only hardware manufacturers supported are Sony and Philips.)

Of course, Akio Morita would not have thought that these expensive things nowadays would be cheaper into small plastic plates worth 5 yuan each in the future.

Of course, in fact, this future is still far away. Even if China is not as good as that of its copyright protection, it really starts to crack and pirate CD/vcd business, that is, it is before and after the emergence of the Win95 system, that is, in 1995.

Before 1994, the commercial value of these industries was safe. You should know that when the great man went south to inspect in 1992, he specially looked at "Xianke Laser" in the Special Administrative Region. At that time, he thought this was still a very remarkable high-tech industry. And Xike Laser, the company that later created the "Xianke VCD" product.

The CD business can at least make 10 years of money if the copyright is not infringed, so it is still worth investing.

Ten years later, let alone win95 appears, and even the Internet is coming, it is really unstoppable. Even if CDs are not pirated, others will find ways to download pirated resources by themselves without even needing disks. Now with Gu Ao in this time and space, the Internet may be born early, and there is no need to wait until 1994. Maybe the Soviet Union will disintegrate and the Internet will be born.

With Gu Ao's strength, he has been developing for so many years. If he has not yet had any butterfly effect that affects the world's general trend, he would have been too slow. It would have been a year and a half to two years ahead of schedule. With Gu Ao's energy at that time, it would be completely reasonable.

The scale of cd-walkman's business is definitely not as large as that of tape walkman, and the total profit in the future will not be too high.

But it was already this time when Gu Ao entered the market. It was impossible to retrace the old path Sony had taken. He could only cut into the curve and enrich the product line.

I hope that young Americans born in the 1960s and 1970s will leave the impression that "produced by Tiankun, it must be a trendy and cool black technology", and Gu Ao's purpose will be achieved.

...

After a rough analysis of the R&D engine, the idea was temporarily unified after the project was established. The next step is to discuss feasibility.

Professor Eriksen is a senior expert in the consumer electronics industry. He has a wide range of knowledge and has researched on the products of his competitors.

When Gu Ao talked about the general trend, he asked someone to bring a music CD player that Sony is currently selling for display.

"Boss, are the products you want to make, which are similar to Sony's cdp-101 model in terms of performance? I have bought this thing, but it was just from the perspective of enthusiasts in the industry. To be honest, I think this thing is too expensive and doesn't seem to last long in the United States. Others who are not too feverish would rather continue to use video tape recorders."

The cdp-101 he displayed was the first CD player in human history to play music CDs, which was officially released on October 1, 2019.

The appearance of that thing is similar to the previous video recorder and even the vcd player familiar to later Chinese people. It has a long and square black plastic shell box, and a CD tray that looks like a later optical drive can pop up with a press on the front.

And to be precise, this thing is thicker than the later VCD, and basically has the volume of two PS4pro game consoles stacked together.

President Schulhof listened to Erikson's introduction and nodded slightly, echoing: "I think the judgment of Erikson about the market is reasonable. This machine is too expensive. When Sony was released in October last year, the first launch price was 168,000 yen. According to the exchange rate of 240 at that time, it was converted into US dollars, which was exactly 700 US dollars.

President Morita did not release it in the United States in 1982, but it was sold in Japan first. When it was officially released in the United States on January 1, 1983, even if the price was lowered for Americans, it would cost $640.

However, video recorders for ordinary American families are already too popular, and the earliest video recorders appeared in 1976. Most American families have only been purchased for three or four years, and the iteration cycle of the video recorder being broken has not reached the time of the iteration of the video recorder being broken.

It is impossible for everyone to buy another machine with slightly improved performance but no life-saving growth. Not everyone is willing to throw away old music listening equipment that has not been broken just to improve the quality of music.

After Shurhof finished speaking, everyone was waiting for Gu Ao's ruling.

Gu Ao did not slam the enthusiasm of everyone's discussion, but asked kindly: "So, from the standpoint of ordinary people, think about how much price reduction can American families abandon videotapes. In other words, they will not feel that 'this is adding a large item', and the threshold can be more casual when purchasing decisions."

Erikson is a technical mate, obviously it is difficult to evaluate.

Schulhoff thought for a while and said in a discussion tone: "I think even our home game consoles are only sold for more than $150 per unit. The 640 CD player is really too dark. Even if your sound quality is good, it can only be used to play music.

I think it's up to $300, which means it's at most twice as much as a home game console. If it exceeds it, there are no large-scale home users and you can only do business with enthusiasts. Currently, video recorders are generally more than $200."
Chapter completed!