National Day holiday, Hujiang, Apple China headquarters.

A group of people from Greater China have just held a regular meeting. For these executives, it is a normal working attitude to not have to rest on National Day.

Apple's subsidiary in China has a very strange branch structure.

There is a wholly-owned subsidiary under its name called "Apple Trading (Hujiang) Co., Ltd.", but this company only carries on the sales and after-sales work of Apple's physical hardware goods such as ipod/iphone/ipad.

But as we all know, you don’t use Apple’s products just by buying them (if you don’t break the jailbreak). If you want to get the system’s software services, you have to rely on the paid services of itunes and app-store.

Just like buying a PC computer, if you want to play some uncracked stand-alone games, you must go to Steam to buy a digital version; or if you buy a Hong Kong version of the P4 game console, you have to go to the P-store of the SIPG server. This is a truth.

G Fat Steam does not have a wholly-owned subsidiary that directly operates in China, let alone the Hong Kong server ps-store.

Similarly, Apple's itunes and app-store paid services are also supported by an Apple subsidiary registered in Luxembourg, called itunes-s.a.r.l, to implement cross-border services.

To translate it, it is a Chinese consumer who bought an iPhone mobile phone. When he bought it, the money he spent was taken out through Apple and Hujiang channels, while the money he spent on the app-store after buying the phone was taken out through the account of the Luxembourg company.

Therefore, Apple needs to have a "Greater China" xxx with a unique architecture than other companies. Because this illegal institution, on the one hand, it must manage the hardware sales and after-sales service of a local subsidiary. On the other hand, it must manage the sales of service products of an overseas company.

And if something happens in any aspect, the legal subjects that need to respond to lawsuits and come forward are different.

Apple's Greater China management agency is not a legal entity that can respond to lawsuits. It is only responsible for transferring it to a younger brother with legal personality under his command.

Therefore, this place often becomes a quarrel when a company has legal problems.

...

"Mr. Lamond, please wait."

Lamond, Apple's Greater China brand operation director, just as he left the conference room casually with a refreshing cup of Starbucks, when he was shouted by a young man in his thirties behind him.

Perhaps it is because Qiao Gou likes to wear polo shirts and jeans to show unruly, so under the influence of his tyrant dictatorship, today's executives at Apple want to be more casual. It has become the norm to wear casual clothes at work and take down the price of Starbucks paper cups and coffee.

Senior business personnel like Lamond also wear this kind of clothing when they return to the company for meetings. They only need to appear when they meet customers and suppliers.

He looked at the guy who called him and immediately recognized: the young man was a local employee named Luca, a Hujiang native, and a brand operation representative of the Itunes business unit - that is, this man was directly employed by Apple Corporation and worked in Apple Greater China. But what he wanted to maintain and represent was the interests of Itunes Luxembourg Company.

By the way, Luca's true surname is Lu, but his real name is not Luca. Later, when I was in college, I decided to go to a foreign company to find a job, so I specially changed a name that uses Chinese characters but sounds more foreign.

This name has been secretly complained by many colleagues: Why are you more shameless? Just change your name to Lucas? Then everyone knows that you are determined to be a second Japanese devil?

Moreover, in the past two years, a Japanese electronic entertainment company has launched some virtual singer idol software, which has the role of Hatsune Miku/Speed ​​Tour/Sweeping Sound, so the names of miku/luka have become terrible. Therefore, this Luka has been secretly ridiculed by competitors in the company.

"Oh, it's Luca, is there anything wrong?" Mr. Ramond scratched his nose with his index finger of his hand holding a paper cup of coffee.

"That's right, Mr. Lamond, it may take you a few minutes to coordinate something." Luca said humbly, taking out a briefing,

"You see, this is a new product launched by a local Chinese Internet company called Sina. It is called Sina Weibo, which has just been online for two or three months. You can roughly understand it as Twitter in the United States.

These are the recent promotional evidence of Weibo's blog posts on some famous real-name registered users, which can be seen which celebrities they are promoting..."

"Tell me the point!" Lamond felt his nose twitching even more itchy, but he was embarrassed to pick his nose in public in front of his subordinates, and he was humming and impatient.

"Okay, I'll tell you a long story." Luca quickly apologized for a while and accelerated the progress. "Then we found that there was a real-name certified celebrity named "Ma Hesha". She is a native of the third-tier entertainment industry in China. However, she operated her Weibo successfully and obtained a lot of resources. The latest data is that the number of fans has reached 630,000.

What we care most about is that every blog post she shared has obvious official software watermarks, and the general meaning is 'a certain year, month, and day, released on the iPhone-3gs platform'..."

Lamond didn't react and asked in a daze, "Is there any problem with this?"

"Mr. Lamond!" Luca was anxious, "You may have forgotten that Sina Weibo is not an application that has passed the app-store review! Although currently, in theory, iPhone-3gs phones can be sold privately on a small scale in China, mainland consumers should only use the Hong Kong version or other traditional Chinese applications! This Miss Ma Hesha obviously cracked the phone and installed this software privately!"

Lamond only then did he get back to the taste.

However, he is a busy man and is not just a spokesperson for Luxembourg like Luca. For him, he has to take into account the interests of hardware sales subsidiaries and cross-border app-store companies. The interests of localized hardware companies are much greater.

Therefore, he obviously didn't have much interest in spending much money to stand out for Luca, and he had to take into account the overall situation.

Unless, it does not require any resources to stand out for Luka.

So, after a brief thought, Lamond refused: "You don't want to say that we, Apple, personally sue an ordinary consumer who broke the jailbreak and bought her own iPhone? Will this kind of lawsuit make sense?

What can a large company with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars, and suing an ordinary consumer, make the other party lose? How much legal costs are we? Even if we win, how much social attention and reputation can the other party gain? How much hype benefits can it get?

Mr. Lu, I think you have a problem with your brain and can’t tell the difference between priorities. If we really sue today, I can guarantee that countless quasi-celebrities who want to ask for hype tomorrow, and even use various scandals to hype, will flock to the trend, go out of prison and use cracked version of iPhone, and then look forward to our Apple company to sue! And become famous by this!"

After Lamond finished speaking, he drank the coffee in one sip and threw the cup into the trash can next to him, and wanted to stay out of the matter.

"Mr. Lamond! This is not as simple as you imagined!" Luca ignored the rudeness and grabbed the other party's sleeve. "Please consider that the company's iPhone 4 will be launched in half a year. According to the strategy of 'that gentleman', the iPhone 4 generation will be the first batch of products to fully attack the Chinese market and open up the situation. You will not know how much expectations have been poured into it."

Ramond suffocated slightly, of course he knew this.

In fact, the first priority of the entire Greater China region is to ensure that next year's iPhone 4 can open up the market. The "sir" mentioned by Luka is of course Jobs.

In Greater China, if anyone's job causes trouble for the promotion of iPhone 4 next year, then the tyrant Jobs will definitely not let him go. Even if he goes beyond the level, it is very likely to be named.

Anyone who has been with Apple knows that Jobs himself does not take any system seriously at all, and it is a typical personal will that determines everything. If Cook was not responsible for occasionally stepping on the brakes for him, the old thief Qiao would probably be more than ten times more slapping his forehead.

"Of course I know, but does this have anything to do with the problem you just mentioned?" Ramond changed into a patient tone and asked Luca.

Luca quickly persuaded: "Of course it's related - Mr. Lamond, you have participated in the negotiations with China Unicom's wcdma-3g contract machine plan, that is, the 'Wo' plan. The reason why China Unicom is willing to provide subsidies in exchange for low prices and sales of iPhone 4 through channels is that it is the closure of the iOS system, and the mandatory bundling of pre-installed system applications is the uninstallability-

Although we have not actually promised them to preinstall certain junk applications that damage the iPhone's quality, it is very important to prove that we have this ability and authority. This is also the reason why the Android system has been used in the United States for more than half a year, but domestic operators are temporarily uninterested in the HTC contract machine plan.

Now, if there are some celebrities with public influence, openly showing off their ability to use cracked versions of iPhones, how much impact will this have on the closed authority of the iOS system? Will this not affect the judgment of the senior management of China Unicom on us? If we ignore it, it will eventually lead to China Unicom using this reason to make the case. Even if the cooperation can still be reached, but bargaining with us in terms of subsidies, the company's profit loss is not comparable to this legal fee!"

Lamond thought about it and it turned out that's true.

This is like the reason why Sony's Ps game platform can sign in so many exclusive masterpieces, making 3a game production companies look down on the topic. The greatest credibility is not based on "Everyone knows that Sony's Ps4 game console cannot be cracked at present, so as long as it is exclusive to Ps4, no one in the world can play the pirated version of this game."

The major 3A game manufacturers often take this into consideration and give Sony's sales platform a large amount of sales share as protection fees, which is much higher than the protection fees that PC games give to Steam.

But if one day Sony cannot prove that it has the authority to "absolutely kill cracking and can ban the machine for flashing", then their right to collect protection fees will be reduced.

In the mobile phone market in mainland China, in 2009, it was a frenzy of operator contract machines pre-installed with garbage applications. For example, the so-called "mobile reading" bonus in later generations was that many of them relied on the contract machines of China Mobile. A bunch of mobile reading application apps were forced to be installed when they left the factory, and they could not be removed.

The profits earned by state-owned enterprises such as Mobile and China Unicom are also handed over to the state. However, the profits of these bundled pre-installed garbage software are entirely possible from the private relationship owners of these state-owned enterprises. Therefore, if you think about it, you can also know that the most unbearable thing for those state-owned enterprises executives is that the private goods of their pre-installed relationship owners are uninstalled.

If Apple's "absolute ban on killing" golden body was slapped in the face, how big a blow would this be to their negotiations with the operators?
Chapter completed!