After obtaining the blueprints, Li Mu went to look for Lin Qingya and asked her to arrange for people to help him find some MP3 manufacturers. It would be best if they were big manufacturers. It would be even better if they were in China.
Lin Ching-ah immediately arranged for three people to be in charge of this matter. They will be looking for suitable manufacturers for the MP3 players.
Li Mu is very concerned about this matter. He also asked Lin Ching-ah to send people to Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea to understand the MP3 industry's OEM suppliers. Li Mu is not very confident about China's electronics industry in 2002. Currently, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are the most powerful countries in the electronics industry. It is very meaningful for him to send people to inspect the industry. After all, Li Mu knows that he cannot only focus on MP3.
Li Mu's target is to order and sell 500,000 units of MP3 players this year. He will order 100,000 to 200,000 units for the first batch, and he will try to market it after Taobao goes online.
Li Mu's e-commerce business is more mature than Ali's Taobao. It is not only because he had turned Alipay into a payment channel with tens of millions of users, but he had also gathered a large number of users through Tieba, Happy Farm, and the rapidly rising YY.
To Li Mu, it was as if he had Teng Xun and Ali in his hands. These two giant internet companies each had assets of more than 200 billion USD in his previous life. They had been in love with each other for many years, but they could not do anything to each other. Teng Xun had a huge number of loyal users, but it did not have the e-commerce gene. It could not do anything in the e-commerce field even after throwing money and resources. In the end, it could only invest in Jingdong. Ali, on the other hand, was full of e-commerce genes. It wanted to use its huge online shopping user base to socialize, but it also lacked the genes for socializing.
Now, he had a firm foothold in the social networking industry. The number of registered users of YY kept increasing, and it was approaching the 80 million mark. In terms of registered users, there was only a small gap between YY and QQ. Soon, he would catch up. In terms of user stickiness, YY had long surpassed QQ with its powerful product features, Tieba, Qzone, and Happy Farm's cooperation.
Now, QQ has begun to decline. Although they have removed all commercial advertisements, it is still incomparable to YY. This is because YY has no advertisements, and the product UI design is a generation better than QQ. Everyone is making pure and ad-free chat software. YY's user experience is dozens of times better than QQ.
As for the QQ membership discount, the results after so many days have shown that this move is not very effective. For those users who have completely given up on QQ and switched to YY, they have gotten everything they want on YY. Moreover, their connections have been completely migrated over. They have even integrated with Tieba and Happy Farm. Even if the QQ membership service is given to them for free, they will not use it again. The reason is simple. Users are very dependent on social software. Once they focus on one, they will not use other similar products.
The only thing that slightly worried Li Mu is whether Teng Xun will have a stroke of genius in the future product development. If there is, then Teng Xun can make a comeback for the time being. If not, YY will soon eat up its market share.
In Li Mu's opinion, YY will crush QQ, and even drive QQ off the stage of history. Now, what he needs to consider is not how to compete with QQ, but how to effectively transfer the huge number of YY product group users to the future Taobao. Therefore, there are two things that are most important now. One is to customize the MP3 player, and the other is to get Taobao online as soon as possible.
Fortunately, Fang Xudong came back in time.
When Fang Xudong came back, Liu Xiaodong had already rented an office in Zhongguancun and started to set up a basic operation team. The development of the front-end and front-end programs for Taobao was already in progress at Makino Technology's R&D Center. Fang Xudong did not disappoint. The core framework for Taobao was more than half completed.
Fang Dongxu's return at this time gave Li Mu a signal. The e-commerce section can be fully activated!
Therefore, as soon as Fang Xudong came back, Li Mu invited him and Liu Shixiong out for dinner and introduced him to Fang Xudong.
Be it Liu Xiaodong or Fang Xudong, both of them had reached the pinnacle of their fields in their previous lives. Therefore, although it was their first time meeting, they recognized each other very much. It could be said that they felt like old friends at first sight.
The three of them chatted for a while. After Liu Xiaodong and Fang Xudong became familiar with each other, Li Mu told them about his plans for the next stage of Taobao.
Everything about the future of Taobao was based on the three people at the dinner table, including Li Mu himself. He was responsible for all the general direction, framework, and resource integration of the future of Taobao. As the general manager, Liu Xiaodong was directly responsible for the operation of the entire Taobao, except for the operation of the technical department. Fang Xudong was the CTO of Taobao, leading the technical team and responsible for all technical work.
The two "Brother Dong", Liu Xiaodong and Fang Xudong, were equal in position and could not interfere with each other. They could cooperate with each other if there was a need. If there was a disagreement, it would be decided by Li Mu, and they had to follow Li Mu's decision unconditionally without any objection.
The two of them had no objection to Li Mu's request. When Liu Xiaodong decided to work with Li Mu, he was ready to build a career under Li Mu's leadership. Fang Xudong was doing well at Google. He decided to return to China to join this team because he was attracted by the development space that Li Mu had given him. Naturally, his position was to be a good subordinate of Li Mu.
Before Fang Xudong returned to China, he wrote the core framework of Taobao while waiting for his resignation at Google. At that time, YY happened to be launched. Fang Xudong immediately downloaded YY for an in-depth experience. After the in-depth experience, not only did he feel more grateful for his decision to join Makino Technology, but he also admired Li Mu even more.
When the two met for the first time, Fang Xudong told Li Mu about his views on Makino Technology. At that time, he did not know that Makino Technology was secretly developing a killer weapon, YY. He even told Li Mu that Makino Technology was like a very sharp bayonet. It was strong enough in the field of cold weapons, but it should be matched with a gun. However, he did not expect that Li Mu had already realized this problem at that time. He bypassed the gun and developed a huge cannon, and that cannon was YY.
At the dinner table, Liu Yidong asked Fang Xudong how he got to know Li Mu and how he was persuaded by Li Mu to join. Fang Xudong sighed and said, "To be honest, I have always been more self-reliant, but before I met Li Zong, I had never met a person like him. He understood what I knew, and he understood what I didn't understand. He thought of what I thought of, and he thought of what I didn't. He even thought of what I couldn't think of. At that time, I felt that I had no choice but to join. Otherwise, I would regret it for the rest of my life."
Liu Yidong also sighed and said, "That's right. Before I knew him, I was a small-scale vendor in Zhongguancun. To be honest, I was very satisfied with my annual income of tens of millions. I even felt that I was an outstanding alumnus of the National People's Congress, so I would occasionally sponsor my juniors to do extracurricular activities at school. But when I heard about him, I realized that I was not outstanding at all. With such a benchmark standing here, I could not even touch the edge of being outstanding."
Li Mu touched his nose and asked with a smile, "Is it really okay for you two to flatter me like this?"
Liu Xiaodong waved his hand and seriously said, "I'm not trying to flatter you. Little Jing isn't here today. If she were here, she would tell you what kind of state I was in when I first learned that you are the founder of Muye Technology."
Fang Xudong said with a smile, "I feel the same way as you. When I finished talking with Li Zong, I felt quite strange. I think we should have the same feeling."
Li Mu smiled helplessly and said, "Well, I'll believe you for now. Let's talk about the project. The target of Taobao is to go online at the end of May or the beginning of June. All the remaining technical progress has to be made according to this time node. But whether it will go online at the end of May or the beginning of June depends on when the first batch of MP3 players can be produced."
Liu Yidong said, "I have already begun to ask the members of the operation team to make preparations. They are trying to establish contact with eBay sellers every day. When our platform goes online, we can directly put information to these sellers and try our best to attract them to our Taobao website."
Li Mu nodded. "Senior Fellow Apprentice Liu is really meticulous about the links and processes, big and small. This is really unusual."
Speaking of eBay, Li Mu couldn't remember when he was acquired by eBay. So he asked Liu Yidong, "Liu Shixiong, what's going on with eBay now?"
Liu Shixiong said, "We just received 30 million USD from eBay in March, and we are now promoting it on a large scale."
Li Mu nodded thoughtfully. The 30 million USD should be an exaggeration, and the amount of money that actually went into eBay's hands should not be that much. Furthermore, he is not worried that eBay will become his competitor. In fact, eBay's current business model is like incubating eggs for China's C2C industry. They had been working on C2C since the end of the last century. They let the sellers and buyers come into contact with e-commerce and online trading. They were the first to develop this industry, and then they fell into their own trap. They always wanted to make profits from the sellers, and this caused the sellers to be resentful. Then Boss Ma came up with Taobao website and gave out the slogan "Lifetime free", and he snatched away everything that eBay and eBay had worked so hard for.
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