As an important part of American daily life, Los Angeles never lacked all kinds of parties, nor did it lack "party creatures" who attended one or two hundred gatherings every year.
Simon Westeros's twenty-third birthday party was both special and not particularly special among all those events.
Inside the mansion halfway up the Palisades, the carefully prepared evening birthday party on February 22 allowed some people to expand their networks, others to gain bragging rights, and Simon himself to receive gifts that would keep him occupied for the entire following weekend. Both guests and host enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
After the birthday party, the Hollywood awards season publicity entered its final sprint.
Because of the Gulf War, this year's 61st Academy Awards ceremony had been scheduled later, on March 25.
Daenerys Entertainment's main awards contender, Dances with Wolves, had been unstoppable throughout the awards season since its November 2 release the previous year. After sweeping several major awards at the Golden Globes in January, it had also dominated recent guild awards and critics' association prizes.
In the already fully announced Oscar nomination list, Dances with Wolves led with a total of twelve nominations, becoming the film with the most nominations at the 61st Academy Awards.
However, the most eye-catching aspect was still the film's box office.
From November 2 to February 21 before Simon's birthday, after sixteen weeks of release, Dances with Wolves, which had shown no signs of being a potential box-office dark horse at the start, had quietly accumulated 113 million dollars in North American box office through word-of-mouth and the constant boost from awards season buzz, becoming the third Daenerys Entertainment film from last year's year-end window to cross the 100-million-dollar domestic mark.
Looking back at the entire 1990, Daenerys Entertainment had produced seven films that reached 100 million domestically: Pretty Woman, Ghost, Sleeping with the Enemy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dances with Wolves, A League of Their Own, and Home Alone.
All seven had squeezed into the top ten of the 1990 North American box-office chart. Among them, the four released solely by Daenerys Entertainment, Home Alone, Ghost, Pretty Woman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, had firmly occupied the top four positions on the annual chart.
With Dances with Wolves maintaining strong momentum, its final North American total was almost certain to push Paramount's The Hunt for Red October out of fifth place, allowing Daenerys Entertainment films to completely dominate the top five spots on the 1990 box-office list.
In addition, as of December 31, 1990, the combined domestic box office of these seven 100-million-dollar films alone had reached 910 million dollars, equivalent to 17 percent of the full-year North American box office of 5.26 billion dollars.
The other dozen or so films related to Daenerys Entertainment, including Children of the Corn II, Hellraiser III, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Pacific Heights, had added another 350 million dollars domestically, accounting for another 6 percent of the year's North American box-office share.
Taken together, Daenerys Entertainment's 1990 releases had captured 23 percent of the total North American box office.
And this figure did not yet include the 1991 earnings from films such as Home Alone, so it was not even the full picture.
By the proper calculation method, the 1990 portions of late-1989 releases like Driving Miss Daisy, Batman: The Dark Knight, and The NeverEnding Story should also be included.
If they were, Daenerys Entertainment's controlled share would easily exceed 30 percent.
Once the equity transfer with MCA shareholders was formally completed at the end of February, Daenerys Entertainment's 1991 output, as long as it maintained the previous two years' momentum, would almost certainly control more than 40 percent of the North American box-office share.
That possibility was actually very high.
While other studios were still warming up their 1991 releases, Daenerys Entertainment's first box-office dark horse of the year had already appeared.
Wayne's World, which opened on February 8, had reached 49.69 million dollars domestically by February 28 after only three weeks. Moreover, its third-week drop from the second week was just 16 percent, showing a very clear long-run trend.
With nearly 50 million dollars in three weeks and such obvious legs, Wayne's World crossing 100 million domestically was practically a foregone conclusion.
Also on February 28, as the multinational forces officially ceased offensive operations against Iraqi troops, the forty-two-day Gulf War formally ended.
The war had shown many countries the major shift in modern warfare from mechanized to information-based conflict. Human-wave tactics would clearly play little role in future wars. The almost negligible role the Soviet Union had played in this key regional conflict further signaled that the red empire's collapse was drawing closer.
The day after the Gulf War officially ended, March 1, the North American stock market surged across the board. Both the Dow Jones and S&P 500 posted intraday gains exceeding 5 percent.
The war everyone had expected to drag on for a long time had ended so quickly. America, which had collected massive war funds from Europe and Middle Eastern countries beforehand, had undoubtedly become the biggest winner.
It was not only the swift victory that had driven the U.S. stock market to rebound steadily for more than a month. The direct war revenue of 19 billion dollars from allied contributions had also greatly eased America's growing fiscal deficit.
The Bush administration had gained both political capital and tangible benefits from the war, and its domestic approval rating had climbed steadily.
Simon, however, knew that the stock market's recovery did not mean the U.S. economy had recovered. The federal recession would continue throughout 1991, planting the seeds for the Bush administration's defeat in the 1992 presidential election.
The Westeros system's expansion had been completely unaffected by the domestic economic slowdown.
On the America Online side, the free-trial periods for January internet subscribers had all ended by the close of February.
Of the 810,000 free-trial users who had signed up in January, more than 430,000 had converted to paid accounts, a conversion rate of 53 percent, far exceeding America Online's original expectation of 20 to 30 percent.
In February, although the number of free-trial sign-ups had fallen sharply from January's 2.3 million to 1.6 million, the number of successfully connected trial users had risen to 970,000, basically achieving the monthly target of one million connections.
The queue of users still waiting for free trials had already exceeded two million.
Among America's major telecom operators, aside from the still-giant AT&T that had survived breakup, companies such as the seven Baby Bells each had user bases of roughly ten million or fewer.
Faced with the internet industry's obvious explosive trend, none of the carriers dared to remain complacent.
Besides the three regional telecom operators, including Bell Atlantic, that had signed exclusive agreements with America Online, the other giants, including AT&T, had begun rapid internet deployments in the past two months. Some had acquired web-access providers in their territories that held Ygritte licenses, while others had obtained licenses from Ygritte and established their own internet service departments.
The advantage Simon had gained by buying Bell Atlantic early was becoming increasingly obvious.
If the Westeros system had not already secured the strongest of the three regional operators, Bell Atlantic, the enormous profits of the exploding internet industry would have forced even the exclusive-agreement carriers to pressure America Online heavily. America Online would have had no choice but to make major concessions.
Now, with Bell Atlantic firmly on America Online's side and the other two companies conveniently located on opposite coasts, making coordination difficult, America Online could continue to maintain its advantage in the exclusive agreements.
By comparison, most internet service providers in other regions had been forced to accept the "recruitment" offers of the giant carriers and had quickly been acquired. Otherwise they would have been squeezed out when the carriers cut off their network resources.
As the internet industry exploded, Ygritte's high degree of monopoly over web technology had gradually drawn the attention of the major players.
For the time being, however, it remained only attention.
Because Ygritte maintained a very open licensing stance and because the company had posted a loss of more than 50 million dollars in January alone, its commercial prospects still looked far inferior to the ISP business. As a result, neither Ygritte's graphical browser monopoly nor its portal services had yet provoked any real envy from the telecom giants.
That was right. In its all-out expansion mode, Ygritte had achieved 15 million dollars in revenue for January 1991, yet its overall loss had still exceeded 50 million dollars.
To quickly raise the portal's profile among the general public, Ygritte had poured 20 million dollars into marketing in the past month alone.
The portal's various content sections had recruited large numbers of journalists and columnists from traditional print media to build its editorial team, another huge expense. Adding email services, social networking, online games, plus Ygritte's own growing R&D and infrastructure costs, the company had managed the "achievement" of losing 50 million dollars in a single month.
Of course, in Simon's eyes this burn rate was still small. Internet companies that burned several billion dollars a year existed. The funds Ygritte was spending now would absolutely bring far greater returns than the money burned by those companies in the original timeline's red-ocean internet market.
As the entire new-technology sector began paying attention to the internet industry, Ygritte, which had already accumulated a large number of technical patents and software products, would see its 1991 revenue growth accelerate as operators rapidly increased demand for IE browser software, web tools, and portal advertising.
As long as the current performance growth rate could be maintained, Ygritte's full-year 1991 loss would hopefully be kept within 500 million dollars, well inside Simon's tolerance limit.
With two straight months of rapid user growth and America Online constantly floating IPO rumors, Wall Street investment banks had valued the new tech company at more than one billion dollars across the board. Morgan Stanley's analysts had even given it a two-billion-dollar valuation.
It was easy to imagine that once the three-month free-trial program was fully completed, America Online's IPO valuation would rise again.
Beyond the big picture, Westeros Company continued to make moves in certain seemingly minor new-tech sectors.
After showing Simon her business plan, Claire had quickly formed a card-camera company with the senior engineer who had left Kodak.
At the same time, Claire had contacted a graphics-processing software company that had been founded just over a year earlier.
The software's developer was Thomas Knoll. In 1987 he had first used an Apple computer to create a black-and-white image-editing program called Display. After two years of continuous development and improvement, the software had been renamed Photoshop and was now being used in scanner and digital typesetting fields.
When Simon received the news, he had directly instructed James Rebould to buy the software outright.
The Knoll brothers had not agreed to sell but had expressed hope of cooperating with the Westeros group.
After several rounds of negotiation, Westeros Company had invested 800,000 dollars to acquire 50 percent of the new company formed by the Knoll brothers. The brothers would continue to control Photoshop development.
Simon had no desire for the professional-grade image-editing software in his memory to become something like [?], so he had instructed the Knoll brothers to develop two versions at once: one that would deepen Photoshop's professional functions and be sold through Ygritte's online software store in the future, and a simplified free version specifically as companion software for Claire's card-camera company.
San Francisco.
Inside the mountain villa in Woodside.
It was March 5. Simon had flown back to Silicon Valley the day before to attend the monthly meetings of several Ygritte companies.
His assistant had not drained him again last night, so Simon had risen early and gone for his usual morning run in the Woodside hills.
At eight o'clock he returned to the villa. Jennifer had already prepared breakfast.
The two of them sat down in the dining room. While eating, Jennifer casually brought up work matters. "I think if Ygritte keeps developing like this, it will run into antitrust problems sooner or later. And now you want to build a hardware ecosystem. That would directly touch the interests of traditional tech giants like Intel and IBM."
Simon glanced at the newspaper beside him, picked up his utensils, and smiled. "Think carefully about my personnel layout at Ygritte."
Jennifer tilted her head in slight confusion for a moment, then quickly caught on. "Bartz handles software, Bezos handles the network side. And next, Ferguson will probably take charge of e-commerce. So from the very beginning you planned to split Ygritte?"
"If we can avoid splitting it, of course that would be best," Simon nodded. "But the chances are very low. The major North American carriers have all started entering the ISP business now. That means the internet industry's expansion speed will accelerate even further. Ygritte is only avoiding major obstacles right now because it is still deeply in the red, many people cannot yet see its commercial potential, and because the company operates in a completely new tech sector that does not yet threaten traditional giants. Once the industry reaches a large enough scale, we cannot expect that situation to last."
Splitting Ygritte had indeed been Simon's intention from the start, because the industrial value contained in the fields Ygritte touched was simply too great.
Moreover, he was doing it mainly for Ygritte's own development. He did not want the company to develop severe big-company disease too early simply because it controlled too many resources. The internet era had only just begun. It would face far too many challenges ahead. If it stopped innovating and became complacent, even with abundant resources it would eventually be eliminated.
They were still chatting when Simon's private portable phone suddenly rang.
He answered casually. Before he could speak, a string of high-pitched squeals came from the other end. "Aaaahhh…"
It was Janet's voice.
Simon showed a helpless expression. Here we go again.
He was about to soothe her when Janet continued excitedly on the other end. "Darling, it happened, it happened! I'm pregnant! Come back quickly."
Simon froze for a second, confirmed he had heard correctly, and stood up without thinking.
Jennifer looked over in confusion.
Simon stood across the dining table and spoke gently with Janet for a while, promising to head back to Los Angeles immediately, then hung up.
From the conversation, Jennifer had understood as well.
She knew how badly Janet had been tormenting Simon lately over the child issue. Now that Janet had finally gotten her wish before turning thirty-one, Jennifer inevitably felt a little jealous. Still, the assistant set down her utensils and said, "In that case, let's go back right now."