After dinner, we talked with Janet's parents about some recent events. At around nine o'clock, neither Simon nor his wife went back to their villa nearby and stayed in the mansion.

In the bedroom upstairs, Simon came out of the bathroom after taking a shower and saw Janet, who had already changed into pajamas, holding a pillow in his arms, standing beside the bed and staring at him intently, saying, "I'll sleep with my aunt tonight."

Simon paused a little, and soon continued to wipe his wet hair with a towel, and nodded with a smile: "Okay, I've been squeezed by you for so long, and I've just had a rest for the night."

Janet did not move, and still looked at Simon in a steady state.

As if nothing had happened, Simon pulled the towel on his head slightly forward, blocking his eyes and continuing to wipe it.

Janet wrinkled his nose, and saw the man coming to her and hugging her body, subconsciously cater to her. Because he was separated by a pillow, he even looked forward and kissed her in cooperation.

"Good night."

"Yeah, good night."

I agreed so, but my heart was even more distressed.

Little bastard.

I really want to accompany my aunt.

Even if you cheat me, it's fine.

Or, just mess around and press someone on the bed, and I just think I don’t know anything.

After saying good night, Simon let go of Janet and hung the towel. Seeing that she had not moved, she stopped saying anything. She just reached out and took the pillow in the woman's arms and threw it on the big bed. She casually held Janet's waist, continued to throw the woman on the big bed, and then pounced on it.

However, more than an hour later, Janet took off the arms of the man who had already fallen asleep and quietly left the two of them.

The next day is February 3rd, Sunday.

The couple has been on vacation for two weeks since they left Los Angeles on January 20.

In the cabin of Boeing 767, after the plane took off, Simon sat in the front study and looked through the documents accumulated during this period. Janet sat opposite her with her chin on her back, and all kinds of small emotions floated around in her bright eyes.

Simon actually knew about Janet leaving quietly last night.

I just don't know what Veronica and Janet said.

Now that women don’t speak, Simon doesn’t take the initiative to pick up a certain topic.

I really don't know how to deal with it.

Opposite the desk, Janet looked at her man for a long time, and finally sighed softly, not understanding what was going on.

My aunt was obviously bullied, but she was still looking at him.

It's the same as myself.

Is it just because of last time?

Janet couldn't help but touch his wrist.

Little bastard.

You are such a devil.

I made up my mind silently and came to Melbourne as little as possible in the future. At least, I can't let him come alone.

With a helpless sigh, Janet picked up a folder on the desktop and looked down.

This is the incremental statistics report for the US Online free trial in January.

Janet also knew about the free trial plan carried out by the United States Online. However, looking at the 2.3 million user appointments in the folder and the actual number of formal installations of only 810,000, Janet couldn't help but be surprised and looked at Simon Yang's folder opposite and asked: "Why are there so many differences?"

Simon looked up and glanced at the document. He had just read it and said: "It was mainly a human resource problem. For this trial, AOL had prepared a total of 5,000 formal and temporary installers on the east and west coasts in the early stage. According to the initial expectations, it could roughly complete the monthly installation volume of 1 million users. However, in fact, things were more difficult than expected, and there were many problems encountered. You can look at the more specific numbers. Among the 810,000 installed users, 390,000 were from the area operated by Bell Atlantic. Mainly, Bell Atlantic actively cooperated with us to solve problems such as line equipment, and also seconded some employees for this."

Simon said, feeling moved.

The move to acquire Bell Atlantic in advance has now proved to be completely correct.

American Online just signed a 10-year exclusive agreement with three regional operators last year, so Bell Atlantic is unable to get involved in Internet access services.

A few months later, I saw the sudden outbreak of Internet access users, and the number of users who made reservations in a month exceeded 2.3 million. The three major operators obviously began to regret signing the original agreement.

You should know that major telecom operators are actually involved in the free trial of users, but no one has experienced such a crazy number of user appointments. The number of appointments in a month is just one-tenth of the total number of users if all transfer to official users, it is equivalent to one-tenth of the total number of users of the three major operators.

Users of the three major operators have been realized after decades of accumulation.

Over the past month, the three major operators have even discovered that in order to get free trial opportunities, some users have specially transferred their accounts from other small telecom operators in the region to their own subsidiaries, which is even more surprising.

The US telecom industry has a very open competitive environment, and a city may have several telecom operators.

Of course, the main thing is to rent the line networks of giants like AT-T and then carry out their own telephone business. Regional telecom operator giants such as Bell Atlantic, Bell Pacific and NYNEX have always wanted to squeeze these small operators out of the market, just because the other party often has lower charging costs than themselves, and it is usually difficult to achieve this goal.

Now, American Online, which is also attached to them, unexpectedly promoted this matter.

The senior executives of the three major operators probably understand that trying to cooperate with the expansion of American Online will also be very conducive to the increase in the number of their own users.

However, the truth is to understand, but it is not that easy to push it.

No one wants outsiders to build a villa that is more beautiful than their own house in their yard. Even if it cannot be stopped, even if the other party pays, even if such a villa in their yard may attract many tourists to pay for visits, it may be difficult for the owner of the household to convince himself to cooperate without any grudges.

Of course, after the official takeover of the Bell Atlantic in January, the company has become a member of the Westeros system, but management such as Raymond Smith can do this.

The other two, Bell Pacific and NYNEX, are not so willing.

The agreement stated that in addition to developing a line network, American Online would have to pay more fees if it wants other additional support.

Due to huge investment in funds, the management of the United States Online even implemented the free trial plan with a mentality of not being successful, so it is naturally impossible to invest more budgets to these operators.

In the end, 390,000 installation users in the first month were from the active cooperation of the Bell Atlantic operating area.

After listening to Simon's explanation, Janet continued to look through the information in her hand and quickly asked again: "The budget of $100 per household is too low, can it be achieved?"

Simon said: "$100, $20 is labor costs, $30 is network costs, and the last $50 is equipment and software costs, but this is data that is expected to be converted to a formal user."

In this free trial program, AOL mainly hired and trained 3,000 part-time temporary installation employees from some university campuses. According to the piece-based fee standard, the installation fee is US$20.

The penetration rate of home phones in the United States exceeds 90%. This trial plan is also selected. It must be a user under the three major operators. There is no need to set up additional lines. You can only install equipment at the user's home phone terminal to connect to the computer.

In terms of equipment and software, the main ones are modems, interface network cards, network card drivers and browser software that plug into the motherboard.

This set of equipment and software is actually very expensive, with a total cost of approximately $200. Once the trial user does not become a regular, American Online will reclaim these devices. Even users who are cancelled after the regularization will be the same in the future.

Because the reclaimed equipment can be reused, A. Online gave an average budget of $50 at a conversion rate of 25%.

To put it carefully, this actually has a bit of a book game.

In the final analysis, it is because the financial pressure faces of the United States Online is too great.

This is also because of this, although there are 2.3 million terrifying appointment users, the management of the United States Online does not mean to increase the number of workers. On the one hand, it is not easy to achieve, even those temporary employees have been trained, but on the other hand, it is naturally due to the cost.

Moreover, we must consider whether this popularity is just a temporary one.

If you rashly increase the worker team, once the user's free trial is cooled down, it will be a problem.

Next, the United States Online plans to achieve the expected monthly installation volume of 1 million households by screening and allocating more reasonably to the users who have made reservations. Then, after three months of IPO, the market will give American Online a very outstanding valuation.

On the other hand, feeling the difficulty of queuing up to get a trial opportunity can also promote trial users to become regular to a lot of ways.

After all, people are always not very willing to cherish things that are too easy to obtain.

If you wait in line for more than a month and finally become a trial user, after the month expires, you may see that some people around you are still waiting hard, and your desire to give up will definitely fade a lot.

To put it carefully, this is actually an alternative hunger marketing.

After 17 hours of flight, when I arrived in Los Angeles, due to the time difference, it was still Sunday morning, February 3rd.

Continuing to rest until the next day, Simon flew to San Francisco again early Monday morning.

This time it's for work.

After the female housekeeper Alice Ferguson continued to squeeze Simon in various small quantities during this period, she finally came up with two business plans, two that Egrett, American Online, and even Bell Atlantic attached great importance to.

There are two commercial plans, one is an online payment system and the other is an online software store.

The former is actually similar to the later PayPal, while the latter is equivalent to the APP Store of Apple phones in Simon's memory.

Moreover, the two business plans are actually complementary.

Igrit Company has been exploring reliable business profit models. On the one hand, the World Wide Web software has begun to show results in the past year under the management of Carol Butz.

In terms of portal websites, in addition to advertising business, Jeff Bezos has also been considering other ways of making profits.

Although the cooperation between the software department and the network department is very smooth under Simon's forced revision and suppression, it is not realistic to rely on the software department to feed back the network department in the short term. If dependencies really form, the portal website is doomed to be unable to last.

The female housekeeper got inspired by Simon's continuous improvement of online payment systems and online software stores, which allowed Jeff Bezos to see hope, and even Raymond Smith of AOL and Bell Atlantic Ocean saw the huge commercial potential contained in it.

Egret headquarters near Stanford University.

In the conference room, Simon, Jeff Bezos, Carol Butts, Steve Keith, John Chambers and Raymond Smith and other senior executives sat on both sides of the conference table, listening to the butler personally introduced his business plan in front of the projector and answered everyone's various doubts.

"...If you want to build an online payment system, it is not possible to do without corresponding products. Therefore, we must build a complete online consumption ecosystem. Online software stores are the most important link. The market potential of computer application software can only be seen from the development of Microsoft and Oracle in the past few years..."

"... Moreover, there is never a shortage of excellent commercial software in the market, especially some small application software with relatively strong professional properties. The main constraints on their development is sales channels. PC games with increasingly larger market sizes are the same. Many professional software designers can create a product with a quality of no less than that of professional game companies in private, but because commercialization is too difficult, they cannot distribute and sell the game..."

"...Igrit has an unparalleled channel advantage. Using the World Wide Web platform, we can transcend mainstream Apple's Macintosh system, Microsoft's Windows system, traditional DOS system and other operating system platforms. With this online advantage, we can easily distribute and sell application software, PC games and other products to users of these platforms at a very low cost, and the company can extract and divide it from it..."

“…In addition, after the online payment system is completed, using this system, we can further promote online payment, online retail and other businesses…”

The female housekeeper kept switching PPT, and told the story for twenty minutes in a row, and finally stopped.

Everyone patiently waited for the delicately-faced short-haired girl to pick up the water cup on the desktop and drank a few sips of water. Raymond Smith was the first to ask: "Alice, you just said that the user accounts of the online payment system are bound to physical credit cards. Have you ever thought about the difficulty of achieving this goal? Over the years, commercial banks have racked their brains to enter the American Express card payment system, but have not succeeded. Similarly, how do you make sure that commercial banks will open payment interfaces to us?"

Alice Ferguson heard this problem and swept around the conference room, and finally fell on Simon for a moment, saying: "The entire Westeros system, including the Bell Atlantic and MCA, which have just completed the acquisition, has a cash flow of tens of billions of dollars every year, and the demand for commercial loans is also very considerable. I believe this is a customer that any commercial bank needs to strive for. If such a customer is asked to open an online payment interface, I don't think it is too difficult."

When everyone heard this answer, they were stunned and then smiled.

I didn't expect the answer to be so simple and direct.

Even a bit rough.

Indeed, if a small company with no bottom wants to build such an online payment system, it is enough for the banking side to make the business plans of these small companies still die.

Igret is different.

Relying on the entire Westeros system as a backing, it is indeed very easy to make banks relax.
Chapter completed!