Simon spent a full week in San Francisco, only to realize that if he wanted to truly roll out his plans for the internet industry, there were far more problems to deal with than he'd expected.
Just like how America Online's founders had already dreamed up online music and online gaming back in the early eighties, ideas in the internet world were not actually that valuable. The mature internet business models Simon remembered had probably already flashed through countless minds long before the industry ever rose.
What mattered was execution.
So whether it was Ygritte or America Online, beyond Simon as the helmsman setting the overall direction, what they needed most was a management team with real, high-efficiency execution.
Come to think of it, many of the companies Simon had invested in using his advantage of foresight were, at their core, investments in management teams.
More precisely, investments in people.
Simon invested in Microsoft because Microsoft had Bill Gates. He invested in Nokia because Nokia had Jorma Ollila. He invested in America Online because America Online had Steve Case.
During that week in San Francisco, Simon also sent an invitation to John Chambers, who in another timeline would lead Cisco to its peak. Simon wanted Chambers to take the helm once Westeros achieved absolute control of Cisco.
Because of this philosophy, Simon could easily see that Tim Berners-Lee, who currently led Ygritte, was well-suited to be Ygritte's chief technology officer. But as a technical executive in the mold of Apple co-founder Wozniak, he simply wasn't the right person to handle Ygritte's overall management.
Beyond Tim Berners-Lee, Simon urgently needed a "Steve Jobs" for Ygritte.
Of course, that was just a metaphor. Simon would never invite the uncontrollable Jobs to run Ygritte. It was hard to imagine where someone with that reality-warping field would drag the company.
On the flight back from San Francisco to Los Angeles, it was Sunday, April 29.
Simon didn't go to the front cabin suite. Instead, he sat casually by a window in the middle section where the sunset could reach him, thinking about how to find the right manager for Ygritte while flipping through the week's work results.
Most of it concerned the revised development plans for Ygritte and America Online after Westeros achieved absolute control.
As for Cisco, Simon planned to leave it to John Chambers, who had already confirmed he would join. The two had discussed Cisco's future direction in detail. Chambers's business philosophy of customer first and rapid expansion through acquisitions matched what Simon remembered, so Simon didn't make any further adjustments himself.
Of course, for Cisco's expansion to be convenient, it still needed to go public as soon as possible.
As for Ygritte and America Online, once he had absolute control, Simon moved without hesitation to subdivide their businesses. He insisted that America Online strip away content operations and focus on being an internet service provider.
Ygritte would handle content.
The online games and similar content America Online originally provided to customers were value-added services layered on top of basic access. With the current user base still tiny, just over sixty thousand, it was not yet possible to cover costs through online advertising. Spinning those services off would actually save America Online money.
Of course, Steve Case didn't see it that way, especially after seeing many of the content concepts Simon had arranged for Ygritte.
But Simon didn't give Case much choice.
In another timeline, one major reason America Online declined so quickly after the internet bubble burst was that its business scope was too broad and too comprehensive, yet none of it had true core competitiveness. On the content side, it couldn't compete with the later rise of Yahoo. On the access side, it was easily surpassed by traditional carriers with infrastructure advantages. So the peak market value of over one hundred billion dollars shrank by more than ninety percent in just a few years.
This time, Simon's positioning for America Online was precise. It would be a focused internet service provider, pushing that business to the limit during the industry's early stage. Then, following the major trend of telecom networks, television networks, and the internet converging around the turn of the new century, it would choose the right moment to swallow an established traditional telecom operator and lock in its industry position for good.
Beyond the long-term plan, considering its scale, America Online would spend the next few years expanding first along the West Coast in California and along the East Coast corridor from Boston to Washington. As for the vast central regions including the Great Lakes, and the equally prosperous southern coast, those would have to be left to other companies for now.
Most of America's population was concentrated on the two coasts, and those two regions were the true core of the core. As long as America Online could plant its feet firmly there, it would be able to expand into other regions with ease.
To save money, aside from top-tier servers, America Online would rent traditional carriers' line networks for its terminal network as much as possible for now.
For now, yes.
If it didn't want to be choked by traditional carriers like AT and T, gradually building and improving its own network was a must. But that clearly meant enormous expenditures in the tens of billions, something utterly unrealistic to achieve in the short term.
In another timeline, another reason America Online declined so fast was that it trusted its content advantage too much. Even after traditional carriers began offering ISP services, America Online still rented other people's lines, sluggishly refusing to improve its own network. It even failed to keep up with the promotion of high-speed broadband. The outcome was inevitable.
Beyond these major plans, the confirmed proposal stated that over the next few months, America Online would open one hundred internet cafes in cities like Los Angeles, Boston, and New York.
Naturally, this was Simon's idea.
In his previous life, his first contact with the internet had been in an internet cafe.
But internet cafes never really took off in North America.
The main reason was differences in consumer purchasing power.
Just like VCRs, video parlors across the ocean were probably already wildly popular, but in North America there was no need for them because household VCR penetration had already exceeded seventy percent.
Similarly, since their birth in the seventies, household PC ownership in the United States had been rising rapidly. The reason it hadn't reached VCR-level penetration within just ten years was mainly because PCs in this era lacked enough entertainment value and leaned more toward office use.
The explosion in household PC ownership in the U.S. happened to coincide with the rapid spread of the internet in the nineties.
Simon's week in San Francisco made many media outlets notice that he was laying out a tech portfolio with America Online, Ygritte, Cisco, and other companies. But for now, most Americans still didn't even have a clear concept of "the internet."
Simon didn't propose internet cafes to make money. The main point was to promote Ygritte and America Online to the public. As long as people could experience the benefits of online news, email, online games, forums, personal homepages, and all the rest in an internet cafe, they would naturally consider getting connected at home.
One hundred internet cafes, even at a minimum budget of one hundred thousand dollars each, would still mean a total outlay of ten million.
If America Online paid for all of it, that single expense would equal twenty percent of Westeros's fifty-million-dollar capital injection, and that still didn't include development of the internet cafe management system or later operating costs.
A marketing expense this massive was something America Online simply could not swallow.
When Simon left San Francisco, Steve Case had already started contacting PC manufacturers to look for partners. Those one hundred internet cafes, which were not intended to profit, would be operated separately under an America Online subsidiary, and could even be packaged and sold at the right time.
Simon even called Bill Gates himself and asked if he was interested in sponsoring a batch of the latest Windows 3.0, or else Simon could go ask Apple. [TL/N: LMAAAO]
And he successfully secured one thousand copies of the operating system for free.
Since it was a project personally initiated by Simon, plenty of manufacturers would be willing to join. The most expensive part, the PC hardware, should be largely saved, and even the internet cafe operating system could be handed off to any software company that wanted the opportunity. What America Online would be expected to pay for was mainly network access fees and site rental costs.
The money saved could then be used for America Online's core business development.
As for Ygritte, Simon had devoted most of his attention to it during that week. That was also why he was so eager to find another suitable manager for Ygritte. Even Tim Berners-Lee, who had a clear sense of his own strengths, agreed with Simon's decision.
For Ygritte, the most important thing was settling the revenue model.
It came back to the same point. Any company that wanted to grow had to have a sustainable revenue and profit model.
Portal memberships, paid email, online news subscriptions, and so on, all of these had been discussed by the Ygritte team.
Simon vetoed them without hesitation.
If they wanted to attract users quickly, basic content services like the portal, email, and online news had to be free.
Even though the soon-to-open Daenerys Studios in Malibu had installed a corporate email system, Simon still rejected Ygritte's proposal to push its patented email system into the enterprise market. That could perhaps be handed off to other companies through licensing or equity participation, but Ygritte had to stick to Simon's mass-market route.
In Simon's view, Ygritte's role for the next ten years was that of an internet technology company wrapped in the skin of a network media platform.
Network media was a concept in the nineties that could strongly stimulate stock prices as "new tech."
But looking at what happened to Yahoo and America Online in another timeline, it was clear that network media was not sustainable. The internet giants that ultimately survived and grew, whether Amazon, Facebook, or Google, were all technology companies at their core.
Create a platform through technology, attract a user base of sufficient scale, and let that crowd produce "content" on its own. That was the way internet companies dominated.
By comparison, the network media model was one where the company itself produced content to satisfy users. In the early internet 1.0 era, that could work. But in the 2.0 and 3.0 eras after user numbers exploded, trying to satisfy the content needs of billions of internet users through sheer in-house production was impossible.
Since there was no way to generate revenue in the short term through services like the portal and email, attention naturally shifted back to software.
Ygritte's server software, web design tools, and other applications built on Web technology had already been confirmed for commercial operation.
Simon's initial idea was to promote the graphical interface IE browser for free. The Ygritte team never accepted that to begin with. Most employees believed the software, developed with massive investment, was outstanding, even meaningful enough to create a new era, and shouldn't be free.
After multiple rounds of discussion, even arguments, Simon had to compromise.
Or rather, Simon also admitted his idea was too aggressive.
Just like how he wanted America Online's access service to be monthly flat-rate instead of hourly billing, at least for the next few years, that wasn't realistic. Until the user base reached a certain size, America Online's access service would still have to charge by the hour.
On the other side, Ygritte's server software and web design tools had a very small market capacity in the short term, and might even be used mostly by Ygritte's own team.
So the IE browser, an end-user application with a broad audience, became crucial.
The final plan was that the IE browser would also use a paid model.
This was the most practical way for Ygritte to obtain real revenue as soon as possible.
However, compared to the Netscape browser pricing Simon remembered, as high as fifty dollars, the team ultimately set IE's retail price at fifteen dollars. For service providers like America Online, the installation fee would be even lower, ten dollars per copy.
Ten dollars per copy was actually very reasonable for America Online.
And Ygritte would not license only America Online. After all, America Online's expansion focus in the coming years would be limited to a few densely populated coastal states. It could not reach most of the U.S. anyway. Once people saw America Online's growth, other internet service providers would definitely appear.
Ygritte would open most Web technology licensing for free, but for core websites and end-user application software, for a long time to come, Simon would not allow a second vendor to exist. As long as the Web reached the same adoption speed as in his memory, software income alone would be enough to cover most of the costs Ygritte needed for development.
In the short term, it could only be like this.
Ygritte had already completed two data centers on the East and West Coasts, each capable of handling one hundred thousand users, and internal testing was done. Compared to the massive data centers Simon remembered, they were practically shabby, but they were more than enough for the internet traffic of this era.
In addition, Ygritte had compiled a complete set of Web technical materials. They would be offered as free downloads on Ygritte's portal site, www.ygritte.com, and on the official websites of several partner universities. The team also planned to publish physical books about Web technology as a supplement.
At the same time, a simplified version of the Web applications, for students only, would be distributed to major universities across North America.
Next, all that was needed was for America Online and Ygritte to work together and push the Web into full-scale adoption.
This coming May of 1990 was destined to become, in many people's memories, the beginning of a new era.