Chapter 47 Section 1 Ford
The answer to the question of who invented the modern internal combustion engine automobile is still debated.Because Daimler and Mercedes-Benz in Germany took the lead in inventing cars with internal combustion engines, but with three wheels.Ten years later, Ford in the United States invented the Model T car, which is the prototype of today's car, so some people think that Ford is the ancestor of the car.Both Americans and Germans tend to defend their ancestry on this issue.To be fair, Mercedes-Benz invented the car before Ford, but Ford was the one who really started the world's auto industry and made it into millions of homes.Mercedes-Benz and Daimler, along with Maybach, another German automotive pioneer, made cars for the rich.The Mayback, now owned by Daimler-Benz, is even more expensive than Rolls-Royce.Rolls and Royce (Rolls and Royce, the two founders of Rolls-Royce), the pioneers of the British automobile industry, even made cars a luxury.Even in the 1930s, when a $500 Ford car had entered millions of households, Dr. Porsche, a famous German car designer, still aspired to create the most perfect car instead of a popular one.If it hadn't been for Ford's ability to make cars affordable to ordinary people, the development of the auto industry might have lagged behind a lot.Therefore, it is not too much to regard Ford as the first person in the automobile industry.
The business model chosen by the early leaders of an industry is almost decisive for the industry.Yahoo is not the first portal site engaged in Internet services. AOL's network business existed before Yahoo started. Excite, which is similar to Yahoo, was slightly earlier than it, and Lycos and Infoseek were at the same time as it.However, Yahoo is the company that defines the business model of the Internet industry and is a true representative of the mainstream free portals.If it weren't for Yahoo, the Internet would probably be a luxury for the rich for quite a long time, like cars.
The Internet, which existed for a decade before Yahoo, was originally a privilege provided to professors and students at American universities, paid for by the National Science Foundation.Free content on the Internet is poor and disorganized.The cost of accessing some online databases is astonishingly high, and it is charged per search.In China, before inquiring foreign papers, professors and postgraduates have to learn how to choose keywords, author names, and field names so as to find what they want with the shortest time spent on the Internet and the fewest number of searches.With the development of the communication industry, the development of the Internet to the public has become an irresistible trend.Although former students and professors are free to use the Internet, it is impossible for the US National Science Foundation and the governments of various countries to pay for all users.Moreover, the rapid development of a business cannot rely solely on government investment, but depends on the strength of the whole society.Therefore, when the Internet starts to face the public, what business model is used to maintain the cost of Internet operations determines the direction of the Internet.
When Yahoo was still in the Stanford University laboratory, America Online (AOL) had already begun to develop its pay-dial users. It was like charging a phone bill, twenty dollars a month plus some inexplicable fees, such as calling from the phone without saying hello. Charge fifty dollars to your credit card and give you a useless book.Even so, America Online developed rapidly in the early stages of the Internet, and it still has tens of millions of users.In China, my classmate Gong Haifeng and others set up a Chinese version of America Online—East Netscape.If this model continues to develop, it will be difficult for the Internet to gain rapid popularity.Cable TV developed decades earlier than the Internet, but so far there are only 300 million users in the world, less than one-third of Internet users. (Refer to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) Even after many years, the Internet adopts the business model of America Online to develop, it is at best a second phone for the family, and it is difficult to bring about a future business revolution .The business model of AOL is not isolated. So far, AT&T and Verizon still want to control the Internet like they control the telephone network.Fortunately, with the later Yahoo, there is no market for AOL's approach to developing the Internet like cable television.Yahoo and its followers not only made the Internet open, free and profitable, but also stimulated the birth of e-commerce.
Why is Yahoo able to make the Internet open and free?Because its founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, did not engage in the Internet for profit at the beginning, and AOL clearly wanted to make money when it entered the Internet.Yang Zhiyuan and Filo didn't study the Internet originally, but they and another classmate started Yahoo out of their extraordinary interest in the Internet. In 1994, the three of them took advantage of the professor's one-year sabbatical, quietly put down their research work, and began to make a software for sorting and querying websites for the Internet, which later became Yahoo.This tool is available for free on the Stanford University campus network, and Internet users find that they can find the website they want or useful information through Yahoo.In this way, when everyone surfs the Internet, they first go to Yahoo, and then enter other websites from Yahoo.In this way, the concept of the portal website was born, and Yahoo's traffic went up like a rocket.After Netscape discovered this phenomenon, it came to cooperate with Yahoo. Netscape added an icon connected to Yahoo on its browser, so that Yahoo's traffic grew faster.Soon, Stanford's servers and network couldn't handle the growing traffic.We had to ask Jerry Yang, Ferro and others to move Yahoo away. At this time, Netscape gave Yahoo a server, and Yahoo was officially established. This was in 2005.In addition, as a digression, I was working as the third person of Yahoo together with Jerry Yang and Ferro at the time. At this time, I couldn’t make up my mind. He felt that it was a bit inappropriate for the three of them to start Yahoo without the boss, and then dropped out of school to start a company. It was even more inappropriate, so I chose to stay in school.If you were to rank the most depressed people in the world, he must be at the top.As we said in the preface, it is enough for a person to catch up with the big tide once in his life, but he missed it.
With an independent company, funding is an issue.Jerry Yang found Sequoia Ventures, the venture capital firm that invested in Cisco, and successfully raised two million dollars.A few years later, Sequoia Ventures successfully invested in Google.Unlike AOL, all of Yahoo's services are free. Before the dot-com bubble burst, it even provided free dial-up services in major U.S. cities.Yahoo provides free email services to people all over the world, although its later CEO Terry Semual tried to charge for mailboxes.Yahoo's search engine (using Inktomi's technology) and website directory are open to the world, unconditionally indexing web pages around the world.At this time, America Online used the method of telephone companies to register AOL index words to find companies. (Some readers may not be familiar with the method of phone number registration in the United States. In order to facilitate consumers to remember their own phone numbers, a company often uses the name of the company as the phone number. For example, AT&T's service phone number is 1-800-CALL-ATT. The letters on the phone keypad can correspond to numbers, that is, 1-800-2255-288. If a company wants to obtain this number with the same name as its own company, it must buy it from the phone company.) Users who used AOL in the past not only had to Memorize the company's Web site, and have to remember their registered terms in America Online, until AOL adopted Google's search engine in 2002.If we compare the Internet industry with the microcomputer industry, then AOL is equivalent to the closed Apple, Yahoo is equivalent to Microsoft, and the telephone companies are equivalent to microcomputer hardware manufacturers.America Online plays both the role of a microcomputer manufacturer and an operating system manufacturer, because in its view, portal websites must charge Internet access fees if they want to make money, just as software must make money through hardware.But Yahoo just made the Internet portal well, and the money for Internet access fees was handed over to telephone and broadband companies to earn.Long before Google became a mainstream search engine, a large number of users accessed the Internet through the portal of Yahoo, so the portal played the role of an operating system to some extent.Facts have proved that Yahoo is right. Due to the effect of anti-Moore's theorem and the influence of competition, the money for Internet access fees is getting less and less, just like the profits of microcomputer manufacturers are getting thinner, and portal websites (later transitioned to search engines) ) earn more and more money.
Due to Yahoo's open and free business model, Yahoo's traffic grew exponentially, and the two million yuan was quickly spent.Yahoo once again raised money from Japan’s largest venture capital Softbank (Softbank). Softbank only accounted for 5% of Yahoo at first, but later when Yahoo was about to go public, it found that the company had a bright future, so it forcibly took nearly 30% of its shares. After Yahoo's listing, it did not sell Yahoo's stock but increased its holdings of Yahoo's stock, making it once accounted for nearly 40% of Yahoo's shares and became Yahoo's largest shareholder. In 1996, Yahoo, which had been established for only one year, was listed on Nasdaq, and its stock price soared from $13 to $33 that day.The major media rushed to report the grand occasion of Yahoo's listing, and Yahoo suddenly became the number one brand on the Internet.Jerry Yang and Ferro both entered the ranks of billionaires.
Yahoo's approach has set an example for Internet companies around the world. Companies such as Excite, Lycos and Infoseek followed Yahoo's example one after another. During the year, various portal websites appeared one after another. Two years later, China's three major portal websites were also established.At the same time, Eastern Netscape, which adopted the business model of America Online, began to lose money and was sold.From 1994 to 2000, it can be said to be the sailing age of the Internet.All kinds of websites have also appeared one after another. Every government department, school, company, and everyone is setting up their own webpages. The information that was originally transmitted through various newspapers is disseminated through the webpages at a faster speed.The content on the Internet has increased exponentially, and mankind has truly entered the era of information explosion.Yahoo, which was the first to discover the New World in the era of great voyages, played an important role in this revolution.First of all, the rules of the game for the Internet industry were laid down—openness, free, and profit (we will talk about this in detail below), and the attempts of America Online and similar companies to turn the Internet into a new telephone network were stopped. This model stimulated e-commerce.Secondly, as we mentioned when we introduced Microsoft, it successfully thwarted Microsoft's attempt to monopolize the Internet, enabling Internet companies of all sizes to survive and develop independently without relying on other IT industries.