Chapter 136: Little Pony Also Uses OO

"Huh, Danrou, why are you using QQ?" Leng Zhiruo suddenly asked in a loud voice.

"Ah!" Wang Danrou let out a gasp of surprise, then hurriedly rushed over, stammering somewhat incoherently, "President Ruo, it's not like that... No, I mean it's all my fault. I used QQ back at school and just got used to it, so I forgot to switch when I came to the company. This is entirely my mistake. You simply must forgive me!"

"Sigh!" Leng Zhiruo sighed and said, "Never mind. It's because you've been following me for so long and I know what kind of person you are that I'm going to forgive you. But don't forget, you're no longer in school. You've entered society, you're a regular employee of our company, and moreover, my secretary. If others find out you're still using QQ within our company, do you have any idea what a huge joke that would become? Do you understand?"

"Yes, it's my fault. I'll never use QQ again!" Wang Danrou said hastily.

"Mhm, hurry up and uninstall the QQ on your computer. I'll send someone to inspect your computer in a little while. If I find that you haven't uninstalled QQ, I'll have no choice but to ask you to leave!"

"Having said that, there are bound to be quite a few people in your situation, not just you alone. How about this: go notify the Administration Department that tomorrow I will hold a company-wide cleanup. Everyone's computer in the company will be inspected. Once QQ is found, a month's salary will be deducted from anyone who has it."

"However, we can give them one day to clear it out themselves, otherwise it would be executing them without prior education."

"Also, go notify the Technical Department and tell them to put together a monitoring system to watch all internal and external networks throughout the company. Once any network connection to QQ is detected, don't blame me for being ruthless!" Leng Zhiruo finished speaking fiercely, clutched her stomach, and walked away.

"Yes," Wang Danrou breathed a long sigh of relief. Fortunately, Leng Zhiruo hadn't looked at her QQ chat history; otherwise, once she saw the materials she and Tenda's Technical Department had passed back and forth via QQ, she would have been in serious trouble.

The reason Wang Danrou had QQ on her computer was, of course, for the convenience of receiving materials sent over by her brother-in-law's side. Naturally, QQ didn't have a file transfer function at this time, so QQ technicians simply copied the text from the documents and transmitted it to Wang Danrou via QQ.

Since Wang Danrou needed to re-edit them anyway, having the text version of the materials was quite enough.

Wang Danrou first quickly deleted QQ, and at the same time wiped out all local QQ files and data to avoid leaving any traces behind.

Of course, if professionals wanted to investigate, as long as the hard drive remained intact, they could definitely recover a lot of information. The only real solution was probably to replace the hard drive.

However, Wang Danrou didn't dare do anything that conspicuous, and Leng Zhiruo naturally wouldn't be that harsh—she was merely trying to scare Wang Danrou, to make her rein it in and avoid leaking company intelligence on a whim.

After finishing all of this, Wang Danrou called her brother-in-law, Brother Ma, to explain the situation she had encountered.

"This is all my fault. I didn't think things through thoroughly. I really shouldn't have let you use QQ to communicate with us!" Brother Ma said, full of self-blame.

"It's fine, brother-in-law. It was my carelessness; I forgot to turn off my computer before going to sleep. But brother-in-law, can you download an OO and create an OO ID?" Wang Danrou asked.

"What! You want me to create an OO ID?!" Brother Ma couldn't help shouting.

"Brother-in-law, there's no other way. Since I can't use QQ anymore, I naturally have no choice but to use OO to contact you guys. Otherwise, many things cannot be explained clearly over the phone!" Wang Danrou said.

"I understand..." Brother Ma also knew that Wang Danrou's request was correct. In the end, he had to pinch his nose, nod in agreement, and reluctantly create an OO ID for himself.

OO Registered Users: +1

However, these matters were trivial to Brother Ma. The truly important issue was the acquisition of Lianzhong.

Last night, after receiving intelligence from his sister-in-law, Brother Ma hurriedly called a meeting of relevant personnel while dispatching people connected to Lianzhong to gather information. Over at Lianzhong, they made no attempt to hide the news at all, very straightforwardly telling Brother Ma's people that someone from Jiangnan was indeed in communication with their chairman, Bao Yueqiao, regarding the acquisition of Lianzhong.

"Please tell President Bao that our OO is also extremely sincere about initiating an acquisition of Lianzhong Games. We can offer a more reasonable and advantageous price. Please ask him not to sign with the Jiangnan people just yet and give us three days!"

Upon receiving this news, Bao Yueqiao readily agreed. This had been his goal all along; when a single enterprise made an acquisition, they could easily drive the price down, but if two enterprises competed, he, Bao Yueqiao, could make a fortune.

Meanwhile, the QQ meeting was underway, with a single topic under discussion: how much money Tenda could pull together to acquire Lianzhong Games.

"Boss, out of the previous 50-million-dollar investment, around 30 million has already been spent just on purchasing servers. We currently have 20 million dollars left in capital reserves, worth about 160 million RMB!" said the head of the finance department.

"Very well. I think we can mobilize a maximum of 150 million to acquire Lianzhong. What do you all think?" Brother Ma asked.

"That's too much!" someone immediately objected.

"That's right. We only have 160 million in total funds, and now you want to take out 150 million to acquire Lianzhong? Isn't this driving us back into the desperate plight of having no money?"

"Indeed, Lianzhong's current user count is far inferior to ours. Their figure of 40 million registered users is heavily padded with water; otherwise, it would be impossible for them to have a maximum of only 200,000 concurrent online users at any one time, because the former can be faked, but the latter is completely impossible to fake. Based on my experience, Lianzhong's registered user count is currently at most around 4 million, with the remaining 90% being pure water!" Zeng Qing said.

"I feel the same way. Actually, Bao Yueqiao and I were classmates; we knew each other back when we were in university, and he has always been someone who loves to grandstand. Back then, in order to get into the student union, he went to a lot of trouble to rig votes."

"Later on, he wanted to run for student union president, but his prestige was far below another classmate's. Since we were in the computer science department, all the votes were cast using computers. So he secretly altered some of the students' voting information, turning them into his own votes, and thus managed to get himself elected!"

"Therefore, Bao Yueqiao is entirely capable of cooking up any kind of data just to make the numbers look good!" Zhang Zhidong chimed in.

"Zhidong is right. A price tag exceeding 50 million for Lianzhong is a waste; we shouldn't spend that much money to acquire it!" Li Dan also spoke up.

Seeing so many people oppose the acquisition of Lianzhong Games, Brother Ma felt a sudden constriction in his chest. He cast a cold glance at the senior executives present, then calmly said, "Everyone, you've been working at Tenda for so long. Have you ever considered what our method for achieving profitability at Tenda should be?"

"This..." The crowd fell silent. This question had constantly plagued Tenda. Tenda's senior executives had thought about this almost every day, and the conclusion they finally reached was simple: make games, leverage Tenda's massive user base to operate online games, and thereby achieve profitability through online games.

Countless proposals regarding games had already been drawn up by Tenda, so everyone was well aware of the answer to Brother Ma's question.

"That's right. I believe you all know that the single point of the problem is games. The only way for Tenda to turn a profit and reverse losses—given our maintenance costs of millions of yuan per month—is to make games, and then use games to make money."

"Therefore, establishing our very own Tenda game center platform is the best choice. We've always planned it this way, but unfortunately, this was once again beaten to the punch by OO."

"I don't suspect there was any espionage involved in this regard. Huang He is an extremely smart person; naturally, he could also figure out what the only path to profitability for instant messaging software is. It's just that his speed was much faster than I anticipated!"

"Fellow colleagues, we have fallen behind. We are no longer the industry leaders; instead, we've been left trailing in the dust by OO."

"But the problem now is that if we were to build our own QQ Game Center, it would take at least another three months to develop the program. In that amount of time, OO will probably be able to experience another surge of rapid growth, so we cannot afford to wait. The only viable strategy now is to acquire an existing gaming platform."

"Thus, acquiring Lianzhong Games is our only choice. I have already sent you the relevant data and intelligence on Lianzhong Games, and you've all looked it over. This is already a very mature, well-established, and even profitable platform. If we take it over, and inject our QQ's true user traffic—numbering in the tens of millions—into the Lianzhong platform, can you imagine what kind of colossal energy we could unleash?"

"Right now, Lianzhong Games' monthly membership fees are around 1 million. But if our traffic is channeled into it, that 1 million will turn into 3 million, 5 million, or perhaps even a monthly revenue of tens of millions in the future. When that happens, what does the 150 million RMB spent on acquiring Lianzhong even matter?"

"My opinion is clear: these 150 million can be utilized if necessary, and we could even throw in the entire 160 million. Even if we have to go back to Mr. Sun to borrow more money and spend upwards of 200 million, it would still be worth it for us!"

"This is my attitude and opinion. What do you think?" Brother Ma's gaze swept across the room. The executives were all deep in thought, and not a single person spoke, until Zhang Zhidong broke the silence first: "I listen to the boss!"

"Me too!"

"If it can really make money, then spending any amount is truly worth it!"

Consequently, under Brother Ma's passionate speech, the executives present finally reached a consensus once again, resolving to support Brother Ma's decision to go all out in acquiring Lianzhong Games.

[Two additional chapters will be released tonight]