Chapter 1413 The pros and cons of memory
The first time was the cooperation with the UNICODE organization to complete the globally unified Chinese, Japanese and Korean ideographic encoding.
The second time was because of the first opportunity, it won the favor of Microsoft and built the Hanwen font into the Windows operating system.
Because of these cooperative relationships, Microsoft also gained some understanding of Clover's technical strength, so it opened the multimedia interface protocol to Clover and introduced object-oriented programming software, VC The development business is outsourced to Clover Company.
Based on these two businesses, Clover has obtained excellent growth opportunities, and has developed multi-format audio decoding chips and the MiniCos universal platform and underlying instruction set with independent intellectual property rights.
During the research and development process, the instruction chip and the decoding chip were further separated, and the technology of combining each other in the bus products expanded the application of the MiniCos instruction set to the MPEG-1 and MPEG-3 protocols respectively. This Only then VCD and WinClover were developed.
What Clover and Sony want to cooperate now is to jointly develop application products for the MPEG-2 protocol. Judging from the early exchanges on the agreement, both parties have their own advantages, but Sony’s focus on DVD It is mostly used in data storage and output of game consoles and information equipment, but Clover's current focus is on home audio-visual appliances.
If Sony gives up cooperation with Clover, then Clover will simply adjust its development path, first independently complete the research and development of the full range of MPEG audio-visual products, make up for the shortcomings of the MPEG-2 protocol, and then Then catch up and participate in the research and development of basic information equipment such as optical drives.
Promotion will have several functions. First of all, of course, it is to demonstrate one's own strength and let more Sony people who know nothing about Clover's technical power know that cooperating with Clover, at least in the short term, will It's not that Clover is taking advantage of Sony, but the opposite.
The second thing is to pull the flag and pull the skin of the tiger. Even giants like Microsoft are cooperating with us, Clover, and we are working on our own things while cooperating with them, and we have not been suppressed by Microsoft.
So when it comes to Sony, why can't it be done? Can your Sony brand be bigger than Microsoft?
The third is the implicit threat. If Sony does not agree to cooperate, now that the MMCD agreement has been finalized, Clover can immediately start full-scale research and development, and is fully confident in producing the world's first DVD player. Put on the market.
The reason is very simple. Products equipped with MPEG-1 and MPEG-3 protocols on common platforms have successfully used this modular design idea. The development of MPEG-2-equipped products will be better than your design ideas. How many times faster?
If it abandons the DVD chip and host market, wouldn't Sony become a "broker" between content providers and equipment manufacturers? Didn’t all the benefits of the previous agreements and forums belong to others?
It really corresponds to the poem - pitifully pressing gold thread every year to make wedding clothes for others!
It should be said that the islanders do still have a strong character. After hearing that Clover itself is still a partner of Microsoft, the resistance from Sony suddenly became much smaller.
This is not the first time that Sony has bowed its head. Previously, it had been fighting VHS alone against Toshiba and other competing companies for fourteen years, and it only changed course in the past few years.
From that day on, the best thing is not necessarily the most popular thing in the market. This has become a fact that Sony people have to recognize.
What's more, Clover's architecture is not bad. On the contrary, the model of underlying universal operating system + upper-layer applications is a quite advanced model that can buy Sony a lot of time to launch products before its competitors.
In the end, Norio Ohga strongly endorsed Kutaragi Ken's game console development plan, introduced strategic partners, accepted Clover's technology investment, and adopted Clover's underlying system in the PS-X game console. architecture, and upgrade the PS-X optical drive from CD to DVD.
As a co-creator of the MMCD agreement, the cooperation between Clover and Sony on DVD is almost certain to be successful and iron-clad, and the pressure is immediately on Nintendo.
At the same time, Sony also began internal reforms. Ohga Norio’s think tank, the now unknown Nobuyuki Dei, suggested introducing the American board of directors model, drastically reducing the number of members of the original internal board of directors, and increasing the number of external Director, and positioned the company's positioning and business philosophy as "digitals, dreams, children".
It can be said that the right time, place and people are right. This proposal also gave Clover the opportunity to invest in technology and become an external director of Sony. On this basis, the two parties signed a series of cooperation agreements and intellectual property exchange agreements.
Sony got what it hoped for, and Clover also got Sony's DiskMan control system, a digital-to-analog conversion chip process file that was more advanced than itself.
The two parties also signed a memorandum that the new generation of WinClover will use high-quality headphones produced by Sony. The negotiations between the two parties have almost come to an end. Sony then opened the relevant departments to the Chinese delegation based on this series of agreements.
Competition in the island country's electrical appliance industry is much more complex than in South Korea. From skilled workers to reserve forces in schools and research institutes, competition for talents is also very fierce.
Zhou Zhi only now knows that people like Matsui Zuo also have their own employers, and that is Sony.
So when Zhou Zhi proposed that he wanted to visit a mid-level and high-level technician from Toshiba to try to recruit him to Clover, Matsui Zuo also became a very enthusiastic middleman.
This man is called Jieoka Fujio.
In the island country in the 1980s, the semiconductor industry was developing rapidly, but people did not have much hope for independent innovation. Because the people of the island country at that time were just like the Chinese people now. It was difficult enough just to catch up with semiconductor companies such as Intel.
Toshiba, where Fujio Kazuoka works, like Samsung, is betting on the mainstream semiconductor memory DRAM - after all, DRAM products can make Toshiba earn 200 million yen a day.
In 1984, Fujio Sugaoka's team published a paper on NOR flash memory at the IEEE International Electronic Components Conference.
In order to store information, human beings have never stopped developing since they began to tie ropes to record events.
After tapes and disks, humans mainly use two types of memory after entering the information age.
One is the superimposed form of a magnetic disk, that is, a hard disk; the other is a form of a semiconductor chip, that is, DRAM.
The advantage of the hard disk is that the information will not be lost after power failure, but the reading speed is extremely slow, and programs cannot be run on it.
The advantage of semiconductor chips is that they respond quickly and can perform logical operations on them. The disadvantage is that once the power is turned off, the information on them will also be lost.
Developing a storage device that combines the advantages of both has always been the goal of mankind.
It continued to develop until the 1970s, and finally a product was released, which was ultraviolet read-write memory.
This kind of memory is actually a storage device that cannot perform logical operations, but it at least uses semiconductor integrated circuits, and at the same time, for the first time, it meets the requirement that data will not be lost after power failure, but every time it is written, Once the data is lost, it cannot be changed and needs to be erased with UV light.
It was not until Fujio Masuoka invented the NOR chip that this problem was finally solved.
(End of this chapter)