Simon saw Martin Davis off, then had dinner with Robert Iger, who had specially flown to the West Coast for the afternoon meeting, and took the opportunity to give him some personal guidance.
After the merger with MCA, Robert Iger's position remained unchanged. He was still president of Daenerys Entertainment Group, but the authority in his hands had increased significantly.
Over the next few years, while maintaining Daenerys Entertainment's advantage in television program production, Robert Iger's focus would shift to the cable television business, with the USA Network as the absolute priority.
Although MCA had ultimately fallen into Daenerys Entertainment's hands this time, of the previous seven major Hollywood studios, Columbia and MGM had already been bought by overseas investors. Right now Canadian Seagram Group, French Vivendi Group, and other overseas giants were eyeing the remaining Hollywood studios with clear ambition.
The U.S. government and media had therefore realized one thing: to prevent more Hollywood studios from falling into foreign hands, lifting the ban on mergers between domestic television networks and studios was now inevitable.
Simon remembered that this legal restriction would be lifted around 1994.
Soon afterward came Disney's acquisition of ABC, followed by CBS and NBC changing owners and merging with Hollywood studio giants. News Corporation's FOX network also completely broke free of many legal constraints after that and gradually grew to rival the traditional three major networks.
Come to think of it, if Simon mobilized the Motion Picture Association of America and his own connections to lobby right now, lifting the ban one or two years early would not be impossible.
Doing so, however, did not fit his plan for Daenerys Entertainment's development pace.
The company's next step would definitely be to acquire a national television network to complete its horizontal layout in media and entertainment. But that could only happen after MCA had been fully digested and integrated and after Daenerys Entertainment completed its IPO.
For the next round of mergers and expansion, Simon still preferred cash acquisitions. In fact, in many corporate deals the acquired party also hoped to cash out directly. With the debt burden already heavy enough, however, Daenerys Entertainment could not afford another massive round of borrowing and would have to use a cash-plus-equity structure.
If Daenerys Entertainment's market value became substantial enough by then, a full equity merger would actually be very worthwhile.
As for the equity given away, once the company had enough cash it could simply buy the shares back.
After dinner Simon returned to the Dume Point estate. It was already past eight in the evening.
Today was Tuesday. Janet had flown to the East Coast a few days earlier to handle matters at Cersei Capital.
The Gulf War situation was basically settled and entering the final cleanup phase. Cersei Capital's Cersei Fund Management Company's hedging operations around the war were also beginning to wrap up.
Since he had decided to skip opportunities like the upcoming pound crisis, this operation could be considered the last major market the Cersei Fund team could run without any constraints.
According to preliminary figures from New York, from the start of the war on February 17 until now, roughly one month, Cersei Capital had already booked more than 1.6 billion dollars in profit, mainly from S&P 500 index futures that had surged twenty-five percent in that short time.
After this operation Cersei Capital would shift more energy to Apollo Management Company and BlackRock Asset Management Company.
The overall improvement in the U.S. economic situation was exactly what businesses like corporate mergers and asset management needed. Of course Cersei Fund Management Company would still be kept, but it would focus more on micro-hedging of specific stock and securities portfolios.
After a full day of work, Simon showered, changed into a sweatshirt and casual pants, and checked the time. It was already past eleven in New York, so Janet must have gone to bed. He decided not to call. Women never liked receiving calls, especially when they were asleep.
Simon, however, was a night owl. It was only just past eight in Los Angeles and he had no desire to sleep, so he went to the PC room on the first floor of the villa.
The room was like a miniature personal-computer museum, though of course not as complete as a real one.
Simon had set up the room mainly so he could easily test the compatibility of every version of the IE browser Ygritte developed across different operating systems and hardware configurations.
Come to think of it, he really disliked the current situation of multiple operating systems coexisting and was quite resistant to low-spec PCs. But personal computers in this era were still expensive and far from easy to replace. If Ygritte wanted the largest possible user base in the short term, it had to support as many platforms as possible.
Even so, in IE development Ygritte had clearly begun leaning toward Microsoft's Windows system. That platform's feature updates were far more timely than any other.
In the spacious two-hundred-plus-square-meter room, rows of various PCs stood ready. Simon randomly chose three IBM-compatible machines with different specs lined up side by side, turned them on, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Once the machines booted he connected to the network and logged into his email.
He opened a message from Carol Bartz.
As expected, the executive in charge of Ygritte's software business was once again discussing raising the price of the IE browser.
Based on the explosive growth of internet users in recent months, Ygritte estimated that 1991 user growth would definitely exceed five million. With America Online and other providers launching free-trial programs, IE installations would be even higher, possibly reaching ten million units.
At the current ISP price of ten dollars per copy, ten million installations meant over one hundred million dollars in revenue.
From the day Simon brought Tim Berners-Lee to America until now, only two short years had passed and they had already built a software company capable of breaking one hundred million in sales. That was already impressive. Yet Carol Bartz believed the commercial potential of IE was far greater.
Simon of course knew exactly how big that potential was.
Still, apart from him, most Ygritte executives felt the ten-dollar price was too low. For that amount users received richer content and functions than most existing operating systems. It was practically being given away.
Especially now, when Ygritte held a complete monopoly on web-platform graphical browser patents.
In the original timeline Netscape had been only one of several companies licensing web-browser technology, yet its market value had easily exceeded one billion dollars in its listing year.
Simon had no intention of licensing the web-browser patents to anyone else. On the web platform, therefore, there would be only one browser.
In fact, even browsers that tried to bypass the Ygritte kernel were impossible, because the underlying web technology patents were also controlled by Ygritte. Any other company wanting to develop a browser would have to choose an entirely different network standard.
With web technology already holding such a lead, however, other network standards had almost no room to grow.
In the end, this was monopoly.
Simon had already rejected Carol Bartz's price-increase suggestion before. The low-price strategy had been set from the beginning. If a sudden hike made industry players feel threatened by Ygritte's web monopoly, there was no guarantee others would not rush to support alternative network standards.
Although those alternatives would struggle to compete, they would still create unnecessary trouble.
He sent a short reply telling Carol not to mention the topic again, then moved on to the rest of his unread mail.
While he was working, the click of high heels approached. Simon looked up from the screen. C-girl Claire set a glass of water beside him. She was also holding a folder.
Simon smiled and patted the seat next to him. "Browse the internet with me."
Claire placed the folder on the desk and sat down. A pleasant fragrance drifted over, refreshing.
Simon took a sip of water, gestured at the folder, and asked, "What's this?"
Claire handed it to him. "A business plan I put together recently. Boss, could you take a look first?"
Simon nodded, opened the folder, and began reading.
Claire explained beside him, "The idea came from some documents you showed us. One was a rejected Ygritte blog activity plan, a picture-sharing event. It was turned down because uploading images to the network was too difficult and the steps were too complicated. At the same time, mainstream digital cameras that can use floppy disks to transfer pictures to PCs are far too expensive. So I wondered if we could develop an affordable card camera specifically for sharing photos online. With the growth rate of internet users and most people's natural desire to show off, I believe this plan has real potential."
When Sandra first joined the Ygritte personal homepage platform, Simon had given her a digital camera for exactly that purpose.
He vaguely remembered that Panasonic model had only about seven hundred thousand pixels yet cost six thousand dollars, more expensive than most mainstream PCs today. Ordinary people could not afford it.
Moreover, most current PCs had poor image-display support. Only the newest machines from the past two or three years, paired with Ygritte's IE browser, could show decent pictures, and even then the quality was barely newspaper-pixel level, nothing like the 1080 monitors in Simon's memory.
To accommodate lower-spec computers, IE had even developed a no-image mode.
That idea had come from Simon's previous-life experience with mobile phones.
The first semi-smartphone he remembered had a 2.5-inch touch screen and used 2G. The built-in browser supported a no-image mode for faster loading.
After getting used to high-end smartphones, browsing on a bar phone felt unbearably slow. But back when he first touched a mobile, reading news, novels, and forum posts on that tiny screen, even with images turned off to save data, had felt like discovering another world.
The steadily enriching Ygritte portal felt the same to users today.
Even without pictures, the news, blogs, email, and games were rich enough.
After all, newspapers in this era did not fill every page with photos either.
Yet image display was clearly the future.
In the coming years PCs would support richer and richer multimedia. Before the internet reached the streaming era, pictures would remain one of the most important content categories online.
With Ygritte already moving into social networking, users' desire to share photos online would only grow. Claire's plan therefore had strong feasibility.
While flipping through the business proposal, Simon's thoughts drifted further.
The problem was not only picture uploads. Current PCs suffered from scarcity in both operating-system software and surrounding hardware.
The online software store Ygritte had already begun developing would greatly enrich the software ecosystem in the coming years.
Hardware, however, was another story.
Just look at motherboard interfaces.
Mainstream PCs today offered only two: serial and parallel. Monitors, printers, keyboards, and mice all connected through those. The network RJ45 jack, USB, PS/2, and even audio ports in Simon's memory did not exist yet.
The lack of interfaces meant a lack of peripheral hardware ecosystem.
America Online currently provided users with internet access by supplying not only modems but also a hardware network card with an RJ45 port that plugged directly into the motherboard, precisely because of this scarcity.
In Claire's plan the digital card camera would use 3.5-inch floppy disks as the picture carrier. That was probably the only practical way to make the device popular.
After all, besides the floppy drive, which was as common as serial and parallel ports on today's PCs, there were few convenient ways to transfer images from a camera to a computer and then upload them online.
Flash memory? USB? What were those?
Since they did not exist now yet the market demand was clearly enormous, this obviously meant a business with incalculable potential value.
Moreover, they did not need to develop many interfaces. One USB would be enough.
If they developed a USB or similar interface standard ahead of time, they could build an entire hardware ecosystem around it. Digital cameras would be only the beginning. Keyboards, mice, MP3 players, phones, speakers, everything could use the same port.
Do not underestimate a small interface. If annual installations reached hundreds of millions, the peripheral hardware ecosystem alone would generate huge profits, not to mention the patent licensing fees, which would be enough to make the developing company extremely wealthy.
In Simon's memory, WiFi technology patents were held by an Australian university.
Just the licensing fees on various WiFi chips allowed that university to earn over one billion dollars in net profit every year with almost no effort.
Compared with that, the breadth of USB applications would far exceed WiFi.