San Francisco at the end of September did not give people the feeling of autumn at all, and it was still sunny and green with green trees.

Mountain villa in Woodside.

It is Saturday, September 25th.

These days, Simon basically spends weekdays in Los Angeles and two days on weekends with his female assistant in San Francisco.

In fact, it was caused by Janet to come to San Francisco.

Because Veronica flies over from New York every weekend to see the kids.

Most of the time I take a vacation seems very leisurely, because it is maternity leave, it is inevitable that it is monotonous.

After playing guitar with the female assistant for a while, reading a few pages of books, the afternoon sun was exhausting, so she curled up next to Simon and fell asleep. The outdoor environment was somewhat unsuitable for pregnant women to sleep. Simon carried the sleeping female assistant into the bedroom, returned to the eaves of the backyard corridor, sat at a round table and drank coffee to read some information that A had compiled today.

No longer entangled by various meticulous work every day, Simon can finally carefully sort out the entire Westeros system.

Recently, I have been paying attention to the impact of the Westeros system on the release of Daenerys Entertainment movies due to the launch of the 58list website, which has led to an opposition to traditional print media.

Daenerys Entertainment's three brands, including the winner of this year's Venice Golden Lion Awards released by Gaomen Pictures yesterday, has released four movies in total this September.

Among them, the more important one is Brian de Palma's new film "Dawn of the Love Owl", which was released on September 10. This old gangster film Palma is good at is starring Al Pacino. The production cost is 30 million US dollars and the number of screens to be opened is 1,679 yuan.

The other two films, one is the Cold War drama "Peach Crime" starring Anthony Hopkins, released by New World Pictures. The other is "Golden Family" launched by Gaomen Pictures, which is an adaptation of the novel starring Meryl Streep, telling the ups and downs of a Chilean girl with prophecy ability throughout her life.

In fact, only one of the four movies, "Dawn of Love" is entirely produced by Daenerys Entertainment, and the other three are sold by agents either bought out or divided.

According to the reputation and box office data of the four movies, Daenerys Entertainment Propaganda and Distribution Department judged that the opposition between Westeros and the print media was obviously still had an impact on the company's film distribution.

Taking "The Dawn of the Love Owl" as an example, after the film was released on September 10, the media's comprehensive score was 7.1, which was slightly better than the passing score, and it was not considered excellent. Many critics gave the evaluations that Brian de Palma and Al Pacino repeated the former "Scarface Star", so the plot was old-fashioned and lacked breakthroughs.

In comparison, the comprehensive statistical reputation of emerging Internet platforms can reach about 8 points.

The gap is very obvious.

However, in terms of box office, "The Dawn of Love" was $11.39 million in the first week, a drop of 26% the next week, and another $8.36 million, with a cumulative box office of $19.75 million in two weeks, and is expected to be around $35 million in North America.

Such business performance basically met Daenerys Entertainment's expectations.

The production cost of $30 million, the publicity and development expenses of $10 million, and the box office of North America is 35 million. Of course, the project is not successful. However, relying on overseas issuance and subsequent channels, it is not a big problem to recover costs and achieve a certain profit.

Simon had already expected this result when he approved the project.

Daenerys Entertainment cannot be successful forever, and occasionally it still needs such a tepid project to support the "facade".

After comprehensive evaluation, traditional paper media has significantly affected the reputation of the movie "Dawn of Love Owl", but it did not cause much impact on the box office, which is actually not surprising.

The promotional expenditure of Hollywood movies is currently only about 25% of the current market placement. The more important platform is TV channels, accounting for 50%. Other theater posters, street advertising, radio advertising and other channels account for the remaining 25%.

The proportion of newspaper media's publicity and distribution expenditures means the weight of this publicity and distribution channel on the commercial performance of a movie.

25%.

Not decisive.

Of course, this ratio is actually for standard commercial films. Art films such as Gaomen Pictures cannot provide too high publicity and distribution expenses. In many cases, it mainly depends on the reputation of paper media for dissemination.

"The Golden Wealthy Family" released on September 17 has a very high reputation among the media, with a comprehensive score of only 2.6 points.

The quality of the film is indeed unsatisfactory, but the Gaomen Film Team also stated that mainstream print media is obviously too harsh on the film.

As a film with 513 screens, the box office was only 1.71 million US dollars in the first week, and it is expected that the total box office in North America will be only about 5 million US dollars at most. However, the budget for the film is as high as 25 million US dollars.

It's simply lost all his money.

Fortunately, the film was not produced by Daenerys Entertainment, and the budget mainly comes from Europe.

A project that is doomed to fail, with a box office of $5 million or $7 million, is actually not a big gap. The change in traditional paper media's attitude towards Daenerys Entertainment is visible to the naked eye.

Daenerys Entertainment has been experiencing good-for-communication critics in recent years. It is obvious that Simon has overestimated the independence of critics.

It's also easy to understand.

Daenerys Entertainment can give film critics some small favors, but this group has to rely on the royalties of the paper media platform to make a living, and it is impossible for it to be completely alone.

This is actually not a bad thing.

Lack of independence actually means that it can be affected by external forces.

Simon thought for a moment, put down the information, opened the laptop on the round table in front of him and began to write emails to several executives at Daenerys Entertainment.

The key to Daenerys Entertainment's next film promotion is to ensure key projects, such as films in several important periods. For other films, you only need to do your best.

If some print media are too much, you can also kill the chicken to scare the monkey when necessary.

In addition, we must strengthen the cooperation between Daenerys Entertainment and the Igrit portal, and guide more users to log in to the Internet platform to view the reputation of the movie and participate in the film discussion. As long as users can be introduced to the Internet, this will be the main battlefield of the Westeros system.

The number of netizens in North America has reached one-third of the total population, and they are all the best consumer users.

As long as the operation is done properly and relying on the home-field advantages of the Westeros system on the Internet platform can offset the negative impact of traditional paper media on Daenerys entertainment film promotion to the greatest extent.

I finished writing an email and it was already past four o'clock in the afternoon.

Girl A quietly appeared, helped Simon sort out the scattered information on the desktop, and said, "Mr. Gates is here."

"Let him come here."

Alison nodded and turned away.

After a while, the classmate from the gate came over under the guidance of Girl A. Only then did Simon get up and shake hands with the other party. The two of them sat down at the round table together.

When the girl A left again, the classmate pretended to pick up the coffee and sipped her at the door without any trace of the girl's body wrapped in Alison in the OL suit.

He was a little dissatisfied with Simon's behavior that he hadn't even appeared to greet him, so Gates did not greet him too much and went straight to the point: "Simon, what's going on with Linux?"

Just this Wednesday, Igrit suddenly released a version of the fully open source Linux 1.0 operating system source code, which is the work result of the Igrit Linux team over the past six months. Compared with the rough kernel of founder Linus Torvaz, this version of the operating system kernel has 200,000 lines of code. Although it is not perfect, it can basically implement actual applications.

There is never a mainstream operating system in the computer industry that can achieve complete open source and free.

Therefore, you can imagine what impact this completely free and open operating system will have on the industry.

For public reasons, Egret released this product to further demonstrate the openness of the company.

Of course, in private, this kind of openness is actually for long-term planning considerations.

For the computer industry, a software, whether it is a large operating system application or a simple program that only implements one or two instructions, can only form an industry and even ultimately achieve monopoly if there are enough users.

In the plan of Igrit, it will not directly operate the Linux operating system for commercial operations, but intends to rely on the Linux platform to provide further application software and solutions and other services.

This is the operating model of Red Hat in my memory.

In order to strengthen its own layout in open source applications, IBM later acquired Red Hat for more than US$30 billion, which is enough to prove the feasibility of this business model.

However, the premise of all this is that the Linux system must be popular enough.

Igrit released the Linux operating system source code that he invested a lot of money and manpower to develop, which is promoting this process in advance.

At this time, facing the problem of the student from the gate, Simon just said plainly: "Bill, you must have known that this is a public open source operating system project. Moreover, Egret's goal is the field of server operating systems and will not have much impact on Microsoft. I know what you are concerned about. Bill, I can assure you that Egret will not further develop a desktop operating system based on Linux."

The expression of the classmate from the gate did not relieve it. Instead, he was a little excited and raised his voice unconsciously and said, "But you should also know that Simon, Microsoft has just launched Windows NT, you are disrupting the situation!"

"Unix is ​​open enough, and there are still many people who are concerned about this product. Bill, do you think everyone can accept a completely closed-source server operating system?"

"Why not, as long as we can provide more stable services?"

"Without absolutely stable services, any operating system will inevitably encounter various problems. What everyone needs is that once you encounter a problem, you can find the source of the problem very conveniently and quickly, and then solve it. A closed-source operating system is like a car with a completely welded hood. Even if you say that this operating system is reliable, users will have many concerns."

The classmate from Damen seemed to lose patience: "How to sell a solder-solder car is our business. Simon, you must stop the development of Linux. Don't forget that you are also the major shareholder of Microsoft and the second largest shareholder."

"Sorry, Bill, I can't promise you."

The classmate from the gate stared at the young man opposite him for a moment. After a while, he realized that he didn't seem to have many ways to deal with the other party, which made him even more angry: "Okay, then, promise me that Igret will not continue to release Linux source code in the future."

Although the initial version of this 1.0 core has made great progress, it still needs to be improved to compare with other widely used operating systems.

Simon was very straightforward: "Okay, I can promise you this."

Bill Gates was speechless for a moment.

Simon did not explain to the other party that Igrit had supported Linus Torvac to establish the Linux Foundation to coordinate free software development volunteers around the world to continue to improve the operating system.

Even if Igrit Company no longer releases the latest Linux source code, the Linux Foundation will gradually launch operating system versions of 2.0 or above.

Of course, there is still participation from Igrit's Linux development team in order to guide the operating system to develop in the direction Igrit hoped.

Bill Gates also knew that Simon had concealed something from him, but for a while he couldn't continue to get to the bottom of it, so he could only change the topic: "I think we can talk about the preinstalled IE browser."

Simon smiled and said, "Bill, you can discuss this with Jeff and the others."

When Simon wanted to preinstall IE browser on the Windows operating system, he was rejected by his classmates. He had no choice but to settle for the second best and instead cooperated with OEM manufacturers such as Compaq, HP, and Dell.

With the further popularization of the Internet, whether to preinstall IE browser software has become one of the factors that affect consumers when purchasing personal computers.

Therefore, even if each computer has to increase the expense of $10 when preinstalling IE browser, major mainstream OEM manufacturers have successively launched cooperation with Igret, even Apple has no exception.

Since the mainstream OEM manufacturers have been basically settled, there is no need to directly cooperate with Microsoft.

After all, doing so requires greater monopoly risks.

Simon also knew why the students at the gate suddenly changed too much.

Microsoft's MSN portal is launched recently.

Igrit Company has basically given Microsoft the conditions to give American Online.
To be continued...