When Zhou Xin was discussing the content editing mechanism of the online encyclopedia with Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wells, the small city in the northwest of America—Redmond, where Microsoft’s headquarters is located, Bill Gates Cecilia and Brian King are discussing Quora.
Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, 20 kilometers away from downtown Seattle. They also had a large number of offices and Microsoft expansion centers in Seattle at the time.
"Mr. Gates, I think we can definitely do Quora. With Microsoft's connections and the number of MSN users, we have a natural advantage in doing Quora.
At the same time, Quora is a good content supplement for MSN. Users can browse news and web pages through MSN, and then answer their own questions or answer questions for others through knowledge communities like Quora. "
Blair Kim was the vice president of Microsoft and the head of MSN at this time. From the surname Kim, it can be seen that he is of Korean descent. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at Intel and Apple.
Since Brian King has only joined Microsoft not long ago, Bill Gates has a higher tolerance for him.
If it were other executives who came to talk to him about this matter, Bill Gates would definitely ask him, in this case, why IE browser is completely inferior to Netscape. MSN cannot even compare with Yahoo.
Bill Gates asked directly: “You need to answer me, is it more promising for us to build a knowledge question and answer community ourselves or to acquire Quora?
We are now starting to invest in people to do it. Quora only looks simple, but its like mechanism, question classification mechanism, and user attention mechanism are not that simple for us to do from the underlying logic.
It involves some complex algorithms, and it will take us at least one month to make the product, and then add testing, and it will take us at least one and a half months.
I mean, in this month and a half, Quora will continue to accumulate users and content. We are almost two months behind them. Can we really occupy a piece of this market?
Based on my understanding of the Internet model of Quora, this is different from other services. The knowledge question and answer community is a zero-sum game in an absolute sense, and there will only be one winner in the end.
The richer and better the content, the better the Q&A community will automatically attract users and gather users, so that another one is equally good, but without the best products of the best Q&A community, it will automatically lose users.
To put it simply, in this field, only a product with 100 points can win. Other products, even with 99 points, will face elimination sooner or later.
So what is Quora’s score in your opinion? "
Bill Gates has a very keen sense of smell. Although he was born in operating systems, he also has a keen insight into Internet services.
Yes, the quiz community business is a pure zero-sum game, and there can only be one winner in the market.
In the original time and space, as early as 2005, Yahoo launched their knowledge question and answer community, Yahoo Answers, which allows users to ask questions, answer questions, vote and comment on answers, and provides a like and adopt the best answer.
In the early 2000s, Yahoo Answers was extremely popular and was the most popular Q&A community on the Internet at the time. Later, after Quora appeared, Yahoo Answers fell on the beach, and the number of users and activity declined year by year until it was shut down in 2021.
Brian King fell silent. This question is very difficult to answer, because the boss now asks you to rate Quora. After you build a knowledge question and answer community, your score can only be higher than Quora, not lower than Quora.
"Mr. Gates, I think Quora can score at least 95 points, or even 99 points." Brian King replied. To give a higher evaluation to competitors at this time is to leave a way out for yourself.
Bill Gates continued to ask: "You are in charge of Microsoft's knowledge question and answer community. Can you achieve a higher score than Quora?"
Brian paused for a moment and replied loudly: "My product rating will not be lower than Quora."
The Korean guy is just a thief. Quora is already ahead of him. If he copies it, he can get a product that is no worse than Quora.
Bill Gates waved his hand: "This is also meaningless. Quora has a first-mover advantage. If we want to become the final winner of this track by making a product, we must be better than Quora in order to attract their users. It doesn't make any sense if you just copy a product.
And based on my understanding of Newman, he has never shied away from competition. He must have a series of means waiting for other competitors.
The reason why I ask this question is because if we choose to build Quora ourselves, we will have to wait until our product fails before acquiring Quora, and its price will be much higher than it is now.
Now I go to Newman to talk, he will choose 100 million US dollars, well he will not accept this price, sell it to me for 500 million US dollars.
But if we negotiate two months later, the price may become US$5 billion. Newman has such magic power.
Therefore, the trial and error cost we give you internally is not just the two months' salary of program developers, product managers, testers, etc., but the lost opportunity cost.
Okay, I'd better go talk to Newman first. "
To be honest, Bill Gates is not that interested in MSN becoming a quiz community, because he and Zhou Xin have a happy cooperation, and Microsoft is not short of money, so it is better to buy it than to build it.
Another very important point is that most of Microsoft's energy is now focused on the Xbox project and the MSN project. Bill Gates believes that there is no need to open another front.
This is also the reason why they do not make electronic payment software.
But Yahoo is different. Internet services are a lifeline for Yahoo. They only acquired GEOCities for US$3.57 billion in January this year, hoping that users will think Yahoo is cool enough.
As a result, half a year has not passed. The coolest product in the entire Silicon Valley is Quora. Since the emergence of Quora, the number of views of GEOCities has been declining.
Yahoo has to build a knowledge question and answer community, regardless of whether Quora accepts the acquisition.
Bill Gates was very active. After chatting with Brian King, he flew to San Francisco on his private jet Gulfstream GIV and asked his secretary to meet Zhou Xin in the evening.
"Newman, congratulations on your another success. Quora is an amazing product. Although Melinda is my wife, she is not interested in many Internet products. Only Quora, once she got started, she now does it every day The first thing I do is look at Quora.
I regret that when you were still an intern at Microsoft, I didn't let you directly serve as the person in charge of product development, or even the vice president.
If I had known today, I would have made you the vice president directly without hesitation.
The thing I heard the most during this time is whether we should start Quora.
It seems that everyone just follows the trend. After a new Internet model comes out on the market, everyone is wondering if we can do this together. "
