Chapter 87: The Great Q-Q Endured for Three Seconds

On the afternoon of July 12, a group of inseparable friends gathered in a classroom at school and began talking.

"Li Chuanye, have you heard? Tomorrow QQ is opening voice chat too, and since tomorrow is Saturday, why don't we go try it out?" one of them said.

"I think OO Voice is pretty good as it is. There’s no need to go and try QQ Voice," Li Chuanye replied. He was not actually especially loyal to OO Voice; it was just that after a whole summer spent diligently tending crops online and teaming up with He Anrong to steal crops, he had become He Anrong’s best friend on the internet.

Truly the best of friends: He Anrong had even confided many private secrets to him, the kind of things one would never tell anyone who was not a true friend. Li Chuanye even knew that He Anrong’s parents were on the brink of divorce.

And today, Li Chuanye noticed that He Anrong had been in a terribly poor state all day, her gaze never once settling on the blackboard. Given the information he had gathered over the past few days, it was not difficult for him to guess that something major must have happened in her family.

"No, Anrong will definitely need someone to chat with tomorrow to comfort her. How could I go chat on QQ?" Thinking this, he refused. "No, I’ll stick with OO."

"Li Chuanye, don’t be so stubborn. You know perfectly well how awful OO’s voice feature is!" a classmate said unhappily from the side.

"Exactly. I heard that when it opened the day before yesterday, it went offline twice in succession—not just a regular disconnect, but the whole OO system became unusable. And then that night it got even worse: for an entire night, a full twelve hours, nobody could log in at all. It only recovered yesterday afternoon. What’s the point of using such an unstable service?"

"I think it’s okay. I used it all day yesterday, and it was pretty smooth. It didn’t even disconnect once!" Li Chuanye said.

"Even if it doesn’t drop anymore, the lag in their chat is terrible. You have to wait two or three seconds for a reply to come through, and if you’re unlucky, you may even have to wait dozens of seconds. The experience is awful!" another classmate complained.

"And you think QQ Voice will be better than OO Voice?" Li Chuanye said unconcernedly.

"Of course it will!" the classmate answered at once. "You know QQ has been running for more than two years now. Whether it’s experience, technology, or any other ability, it has to be far better than a new product like OO!"

"Yeah, people are saying OO is just a knockoff and a copy of QQ. Look at their icons—they’re almost the same, and the pages are almost the same too. It must be copied, no question. How could something copied from someone else possibly beat the original?"

"Exactly. Once QQ Voice goes live, OO Voice will be beaten into complete rout and utter defeat. QQ Voice will definitely be the most perfect launch, fixing every flaw in OO Voice. Just you wait—it has to be that way!"

Almost everyone around Li Chuanye said the same thing. In truth, even Li Chuanye thought so himself. Players were not fools. OO had copied QQ so blatantly in the first place that everyone could tell OO was a counterfeit. Their instincts told them that a knockoff could never beat the genuine article.

How could QQ possibly be worse than OO, the latecomer and the copier?

-----

"Zhidong, I only have one request: when QQ Voice goes live, at the very least it has to be no worse than OO!" At that moment, in Tenda’s workroom, Little Ma was speaking to Zhang Zhihong.

"Boss, don’t get angry. I think if we can just get it running today, even barely, that already counts as a success," Zhang Zhihong said with a wry smile.

"You have so little confidence in us?" Little Ma asked, somewhat displeased.

At first, along with the many users outside who generally believed QQ was stronger than OO, Little Ma had actually understood very clearly that their own performance was likely to be inferior to OO’s—not because of technology, but because of servers.

Little Ma was no fool, and he had in fact made some predictions about the difficulties ahead. He knew very well that when QQ Voice launched, their own servers and network might not be able to hold up.

But with OO Voice running smoothly, Little Ma suddenly gained a fair amount of confidence.

"Zhihong, I think we may have exaggerated the difficulties we’re facing," Little Ma said. "Even a company like OO can keep OO Voice running. There’s no reason we can’t."

"And this year we even upgraded our servers. With Compaq servers worth eighty million yuan in total, how could we possibly be worse than OO Voice?" he said.

"But boss, according to the calculations, once more than a million people go online to use voice chat at the same time, our servers won’t be able to handle it," Zhang Zhihong said.

"I know. But that’s only the data on paper. No one knows what the real situation will be," Little Ma said. "If OO can do it, then there’s no reason QQ can’t. I think that when it actually runs, the real traffic our servers have to bear will be far lower than our estimates."

"Or maybe there simply won’t be a million people online at once. After all, according to our research, apart from internet cafes, not many users at home have microphones. In reality, perhaps there will only be a few hundred thousand users at the same time." With a grand sweep of his hand, Little Ma said, "All right, Lao Zhang, stop being so timid. If even a copycat like OO can pull it off, there’s no reason we can’t. You just need to do everything you possibly can and leave no loose ends."

"Yes!" Zhang Zhihong nodded and said nothing more.

Although, from the data, Zhang Zhihong kept feeling that their servers would not be able to withstand it—after all, there were only three days between the decision to launch QQ Voice and its official opening. There was no time to expand the servers or anything of the sort. Even if they placed an order that very day, who knew whether the hardware would even ship in three days?

So QQ could only rely on its existing servers, and that made Zhang Zhihong deeply worried. But just as Little Ma had said, if a copycat like OO, a shabby little company, could manage to keep going smoothly, there was no reason QQ could not.

Maybe QQ really would be fine.

The truth was, Tenda had no detailed intelligence on OO and therefore had no idea that OO already had a server cluster worth fifty million yuan, and that Huang He had later purchased an additional one hundred and fifty million yuan’ worth of servers, bringing OO’s server assets to two hundred million yuan—fully one hundred and twenty million yuan more than QQ’s.

Not to mention that all of these servers were the latest Compaq models released that year, with far better cost performance than the older versions.

As for OO’s several service outages, in QQ’s eyes they were simply the best proof that OO’s servers were inadequate. And the fact that OO’s servers could just be restarted and repaired after a wait only gave QQ a tremendous misconception:

Even if a server crashed, it could simply be restarted and fixed. At worst it might crash a few times, and then things would be normal.

Do not think such an idea was ridiculous. It was like telling someone from before June 2021 that the American government’s disaster relief capability was utterly terrible, not even one-hundredth of China’s, and that it treated human lives like a joke—such a government had once rescued for ten days amid the ruins of a building and managed to save only a cat. That person would never believe it.

They would only think: how shameless can this paid troll be, spouting nonsense with such a rotten character?

How could QQ possibly be inferior to the copycat OO? That was something no one at QQ, from top to bottom, believed.

Until the morning of September 25, 2001, when QQ officially opened its voice chat feature.

At 9:00:00 a.m., QQ Voice opened.

At 9:00:02, the number of people online simultaneously broke one million.

At 9:00:03, every QQ server cluster crashed. Blue screens everywhere.

The great QQ had held on for three whole seconds.