Don't Be Evil
Strangely enough, once a deadline is set, time always feels scarce. This time was no different. There had seemed to be plenty of time until August 1st, yet the days slipped by in the blink of an eye, and suddenly today had arrived. If even Yoo Jae-won, the man at the very top, felt this way, then for the employees of the subsidiaries preparing products for IDDC 99, every second was truly precious.
Conversely, users and partner companies who had been eagerly awaiting IDDC 99 were in a festive mood. Naturally, tickets for IDDC 99 had sold out long ago. Online reservations for all three days had been opened at once, and the site had momentarily crashed under the flood of visitors. Even though the tickets were priced quite high—forty dollars for a single day and one hundred dollars for the three-day pass—they sold out within hours. ID Group events had long been rumored to offer generous giveaways, and IDDC 98 had already proven it. People flocked regardless of the higher price tag compared to other conferences.
It wasn’t only residents near Silicon Valley in San Francisco who came. Reporters arrived from as far as New York on the East Coast, and even from Europe and Asia across the ocean. Given that ID Group conducted business worldwide, the scale of the press coverage was truly global.
The next day.
—Ladies and gentlemen, we will now have the presentation of ID Group Chairman Yoo Jae-won’s next-generation Android operating system. Please welcome him with a round of applause.
The announcer’s smooth introduction echoed across the main stage of the convention center, the same venue where the T-Touch Phone had been unveiled several months earlier. A staff member signaled to Yoo Jae-won waiting in the green room.
“I’ll be back.”
“Fighting!”
Yoo Jae-won rose from his seat with a calm voice that carried no trace of tension, waving to Tiffany seated beside him. Tiffany, on the other hand, shouted her encouragement with a visibly nervous expression. Watching the two of them, it almost seemed as though Yoo Jae-won was the one offering support while Tiffany was the one about to present. But Yoo Jae-won had stood before crowds countless times, and his preparation was flawless. His tension was zero. That composure remained unshaken even as he stepped onto the stage under the spotlight.
The audience packed into the main stage followed the announcer’s cue perfectly, erupting in thunderous applause and cheers. Yet Yoo Jae-won stood perfectly still, his mind as clear as a tranquil lake.
“Hello, I am Yoo Jae-won of ID Group. Today, I can hardly contain my excitement. Because at this very moment, we are unveiling the world’s first 64-bit operating system. I present to you Android Millennium Edition x64.”
Typical of Yoo Jae-won, he moved straight to the main point right after the greeting. The screen on the main stage, previously dark, lit up at once, displaying the Android operating system’s boot screen. While explaining that the kernel system had become 64-bit would have been appropriate for professional developers, most ordinary users cared more about what they could see. That was why Yoo Jae-won’s presentation today focused heavily on visual elements.
The Android boot screen was symbolized by a cute ivory-colored robot. But it looked different from before. The resolution had increased dramatically, making the robot’s appearance far sharper, and its running animation was as smooth as a Disney film. Most importantly, the boot speed had changed. While Android 98 took several tens of seconds, ME took only fifteen or sixteen. The demo PC connected to the main stage was naturally the highest-spec AMD Athlon 64 X2 model, with four gigabytes of memory—more than enough to be called a workstation. Even so, halving the boot time represented an extraordinary level of optimization.
Once loading finished, the desktop appeared.
“Ooh!”
Gasps rose from the audience the moment the desktop loaded. It was only natural—the screen ratio was no longer the old 4:3 but a wide 16:9 resolution. Yoo Jae-won had been saying since last year that the twenty-first century would be the age of HD. ID Group had poured resources into producing HD content in-house and had supported VGA manufacturers in developing accelerator cards capable of smooth 3D acceleration at 720p resolution. They had spared no effort in providing technology for the shift to shader architecture, higher GPU clock speeds, and faster graphics memory transfer rates.
That was not all. Hardware decoding technology for smooth playback of HD-resolution video had also been generously released. Thanks to this, new products that could truly be called GPUs rather than mere VGA cards were pouring out in tandem with the launch of Android ME. The PC Yoo Jae-won was demonstrating now was equipped with NVIDIA’s latest GPU, the GeForce 256, and its powerful acceleration capability was evident the moment the system booted. The reason was simple: 3D acceleration was already running on the desktop itself.
The desktop of Android ME was completely different from that of 98. In 98, a designated video played in an endless loop. Power users skilled in video editing had created high-quality desktop videos to match and shared them, building a massive database. ME took it one step further. In addition to the existing endless video loops, it also offered interactive desktops using 3D modeling. When a user moved the mouse, the large Android robot on the desktop would follow the movement with its gaze. When music played through the media player, flashy effects would appear on the robot’s plump body in sync with the beat. It was a scene that showcased Android ME’s powerful graphics processing capability. Even better, it did not consume much electricity. Although GPU resources were continuously used for 3D acceleration, the system was designed to run in power-saving mode, so the burden was minimal.
Furthermore, an option had been added for power users who wanted to turn off all effects that looked good but offered no practical benefit and devote one hundred percent of the computer’s performance to their actual work. Disabling both interactive and animation effects allowed users to conserve system resources. Just the desktop, which was on a completely different level from 98, caused public favorability toward Android ME to skyrocket.
Subsequent explanations about the 64-bit kernel system, the overhaul of the file system, the inclusion of task manager and resource monitoring programs, and the enhanced personal security zone were met with applause each time a new feature was introduced.
“Lastly, I would like to introduce our completely revamped advertising policy.”
What had allowed the Android operating system to dominate the PC OS market was its unique advertising policy. Back when Microsoft was still dominant, operating systems were expensive software. After Yoo Jae-won appeared, everything changed. Users could use the OS for free by watching an advertisement once per hour. Of course, some users who disliked the ads installed cracked versions, but the majority used the adware edition. Thanks to this, the price of the twenty-four advertising slots rose steadily over time. In the most recent auction, a single slot had sold for 9.1 million dollars—nearly ten million. Yet because it had been proven to deliver greater advertising impact than even the Super Bowl, companies opened their wallets without hesitation.
Android Adware had established itself as a successful advertising medium, but Yoo Jae-won did not stop there.
“From now on, Android Adware advertisements will be reborn as user-customized ads. In other words, ads with sense.”
AdSense. That was the name of the advertising system that had been overhauled for the ME generation. The advertising slots, previously limited to twenty-four in 98, were now unlimited. That did not mean free Android users would be drowned in a flood of ads, however. Instead, the system analyzed users’ gender, preferences, and interests to deliver personalized advertisements in real time. While this technique would become commonplace in the twenty-first century, in 1999 it was truly cutting-edge.
Handling personal information was a concern, but this was resolved through the personal information protection zone. Collected personal data was encrypted and stored in the personal information protection area of the PC rather than on servers, and the advertising system received and displayed ads based on organized statistical data rather than raw data. Although the implementation differed slightly, providing personalized ads was a clear advancement over fixed advertising slots. For example, if an Android ME user searched for cars on the internet, AdSense would show advertisements from car companies among the registered ads. If the user searched for car insurance, it would connect them to insurance company websites.
AdSense was another feature completed under Yoo Jae-won’s touch, and it was by no means limited to Android ME. It was scheduled to be implemented across various internet services including Nextcom, which ID Group operated, as well as the T-Touch Phone. While the per-slot price that had approached ten million dollars would drop significantly, hundreds or thousands of ads could now be accepted simultaneously, and the one-hundred-day limit had been lifted. Therefore, overall advertising revenue was expected to increase dramatically.
In fact, the new advertising policy that would accompany the launch of Android ME had already been announced to companies in advance, and many had shown interest. Quite a few companies that had found the previous twenty-four-slot limit too expensive to participate in auctions could now join without burden, as the ad prices had become attractive.
“This concludes the introduction of Android ME. For those of you who have taken the time to attend today, we have prepared a small gift pack. Please be sure to receive one on your way out.”
The gift pack was a random box containing various ID Group products. It ranged from limited-edition emoticons usable in ID Talk to graphic editing tools, video editing programs, and even the expensive Android Enterprise Edition. Of course, it was not pure charity. The production cost of each prepared gift pack had been set at around ten dollars. Moreover, since other conferences offered no gifts at all, attendees were happy even with limited-edition emoticons, and landing the Android Enterprise Edition jackpot was cause for genuine celebration.
After the presentation ended, the faces of those leaving with a gift pack in hand were filled with smiles. Additionally, a long line had formed at the Android ME sales counter set up on one side of the convention center. Not only that, but flagship ID centers worldwide had also begun selling Android ME, and complete PC manufacturers had released new products timed with ME’s launch. Purchases followed one after another, as expected. It was a truly successful debut.
The next day.
As promised, Yoo Jae-won unveiled the next-generation NewEgg and the second generation of iWorks and iWorks Notebook.
—NewEgg 3: A cutting-edge reinterpretation of nostalgia!
Articles about the revealed NewEgg 3 repeatedly mentioned nostalgia and cutting-edge technology. It was understandable. The moment one saw NewEgg 3, it naturally evoked memories of classic science fiction films—specifically, the debut work of Hollywood’s greatest star director, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Yet it had not lost the egg-shaped identity that defined the Egg series.
The main body was shaped like an egg cut horizontally. From the front, it looked like a sphere sliced in half, but from above, it extended slightly longer toward the back. The body material was ivory-colored, high-grade matte plastic with slight transparency, allowing a faint view inside. This body was fitted with a chrome-plated, gleaming aluminum alloy frame, and a 16:9 ratio 21-inch LCD monitor was integrated as a single unit. The cables between the monitor and the main body were hidden inside the frame, giving the entire unit an impeccably clean appearance.
The overall look of NewEgg 3 closely resembled the alien from the movie E.T. Yet it carried none of the old-fashioned feel. It was so stylish that it immediately sparked the desire to own one. Furthermore, its performance was not far behind that of big-tower computers. It adopted Intel’s high-performance CPU and came with 512 megabytes of memory. The only shortcoming was the VGA card. Cards worthy of being called GPUs all had high heat output and large size, making it impossible to install high-performance models. As a result, NewEgg 3 was equipped with a mid-range model that had moderate noise and heat management rather than a top-tier one. In exchange, the optical drive installed was a DVD-ROM, which was seeing rapid adoption at the time.
CDs had become mainstream since the mid-1990s, but their limited capacity of 650 megabytes soon reached its limit. Most games released these days exceeded three or four CDs because they were packed with CG videos. The medium for storing movies was also rapidly shifting from CD to DVD. Even next-generation video game consoles would use DVD as standard media. Therefore, despite the cost, DVD was chosen as the default drive for NewEgg 3.
The second-generation iWorks series also received favorable reviews. It was equipped with AMD’s dual-core CPU and adopted NVIDIA’s professional Quadro GPU, pushing productivity to the extreme. The water-cooling system introduced in the first generation had been further developed, and great care had been taken with the internal lighting using green LEDs. The finishing touch was the wireless input devices.
Among computer input devices, the keyboard and mouse were used most frequently. Yet both were connected to the main body by cables, causing inconvenience during work. ID Technology’s hardware research team used wireless communication technology to eliminate those cumbersome cables. The secret behind the wireless technology was Bluetooth. Surprisingly, Ericsson had been developing Bluetooth since 1994, and it had only recently been completed. However, its adoption had been slow. ID High-Tech boldly integrated the technology with computer interfaces. While operating time had been a concern, Sanyo, an ID Group subsidiary, led the industry in lithium-ion battery technology. In normal environments, a single charge could easily last seven days. After sufficient testing and obtaining radio wave certification, they confidently included Bluetooth in the bundled keyboard and mouse for iWorks.
While it did not capture attention as dramatically as NewEgg 3 with its bold design, the second-generation iWorks still generated considerable response. IDDC 99, which had proceeded smoothly, finally reached its highly anticipated third and final day. The first two days had been heated, but nothing compared to the last day. The biggest hot topic these days was mobile, and the SNS Yoo Jae-won had introduced earlier in the year was also a burning subject. Since then, various attempts had emerged in Silicon Valley, but none had yet seemed particularly promising. It was only natural that expectations were high for what ID Group and Yoo Jae-won would reveal.
When people in Silicon Valley first heard the concept of SNS, they had felt a thrill. But when they tried to turn it into a concrete service or platform, they hit a major wall. No matter how much they thought about it, no plausible form emerged. In such a situation, many people were extremely curious about what Yoo Jae-won would show. All eyes converged on the main stage on the third day.