The Giants' Midnight Vigil
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer began frantically examining the functions of ID Office. Hours slipped by in the blink of an eye. By the time they checked the clock, their overtime had stretched into an all-nighter. Going home was no longer an option. Even if they returned, they would only manage a few dozen minutes of rest at best. Sleeping on a field cot in the office would actually give them more rest. Yet neither man had any intention of stopping.
"My God. This actually works?"
Every time they tested another feature with ID Office, nothing but admiration escaped their lips.
"We never even released the file structure, yet it reads them perfectly."
"Exactly. Do you think we have a spy in the company?"
What impressed them most was how seamlessly ID Office loaded the very MS Office files they themselves had released. Microsoft had only launched its Office suite earlier that year. It was not a DOS program. Even they had recognized that DOS offered no future, so they had released it as an Office suite for Mac PCs. On DOS, they had launched the programs individually as MS Word and MS Excel rather than bundling them under the Office name. Still, MS Word was a veteran program whose first version had appeared in 1983. By 1989, it had already reached version 5. This year they had also released Excel as a spreadsheet for the Windows 2.0 environment, and they had bundled Word and Excel together with a graphical interface for Mac PCs. The most recent product Microsoft had announced that year was MS Office for Mac 1.0.
The DOC files from MS Word and the XLS files from MS Excel contained new formats that could only be read by MS Office. Yet ID Office loaded them flawlessly. The surprise, however, had only just begun.
When they tested the interoperability between programs using the loaded files, ID Office proved far more powerful. Importing massive Excel files, running various functions to organize the data, and then inserting the results into ID Word happened without a single hitch.
"How is it this smooth?"
The two men could not understand it. The very idea of copying data from Excel and pasting it into Word was astonishing enough, but the level of polish with which the program executed the task was downright terrifying. Even after pasting images and tables, scrolling up and down remained as fluid as ice.
"The program's own performance is incredible."
They returned to the ID Spreadsheet and loaded an Excel file containing ten thousand lines of random numbers created for performance testing. When they clicked the button to sort in ascending order, the cursor turned into an hourglass on the right side of the screen. A mere ten seconds later, the result appeared. The same task took nearly a minute in Excel, during which the program became completely unresponsive. ID Office, by contrast, kept the spreadsheet minimally functional while allowing full use of Word and other applications at the same time. It was true multitasking.
"Even the simultaneous task feature feels premium."
Steve's voice carried a deep sense of defeat.
"This is insane. Even if I try to be biased, our MS Office doesn't stand a chance against ID Office."
Bill Gates felt the same. Working with identical data made the performance gap painfully obvious.
"Who did they say made this again?"
"ID Technology. They appeared in Computer Chronicle during that game special a while back."
"Ah, that kid? Yoo… Jae-something, was it? But can we really believe that story? At his age, all I did was hack school report cards and rig seating charts so I could sit next to the pretty girls. Even creating BASIC was something you did in college. A middle-school kid making a game like Keyboard Warrior: Zombie Crush is impossible. He's probably just a mascot they trotted out to sell the 'young genius' angle."
"That could be. I heard ID Tech's actual development team is based in Silicon Valley."
Bill Gates measured genius by his own standard and viewed the world through that same self-favoring lens. His first business had been writing BASIC for the primitive Altair PC. When IBM later commissioned Microsoft to create an operating system for their new PC, he had used that opportunity to dominate the PC OS market with MS-DOS. He had been older than Yoo Jae-won was now. No matter how he looked at it, the notion of a child releasing a game like Keyboard Warrior: Zombie Crush remained inconceivable.
"You're right. By the way, that disk came from our Silicon Valley office, didn't it? Tell me more about that."
Microsoft understood perfectly well that Silicon Valley was the heart of the IT world. They had opened an office there early on to recruit talent quickly. As the company grew, so did the number of employees, and now over a hundred people were working on development projects from that location.
"It wasn't some dramatic story. ID Tech recently recruited paid beta testers, and one of our employees signed up. After checking the quality, he reported it to us."
"Unbelievable. We're working through the night here while the Silicon Valley office apparently has time to spare doing favors for other companies."
"Haha, give them a break. They were just earning some pocket money after hours."
"Pocket money?"
"Apparently the paid beta tester program gives out fifty-dollar gift certificates in exchange for reviews or critiques."
"What? The company is paying? Shouldn't users be the ones buying the program?"
Bill Gates had misunderstood "paid beta tester" to mean they were selling beta versions at a discount. Since beta software might contain unknown issues, he had assumed it would naturally be cheaper than the final product.
"It's not cash, it's a gift certificate. Usable at places like Best Buy. Anyway, thanks to that employee we caught wind of the danger early, so instead of scolding him we should give him a bonus."
The two men thought in fundamentally different ways. That was precisely why Bill Gates had brought Steve Ballmer into the executive ranks.
"Handle that however you see fit. But we're not just going to sit back and watch this happen, are we?"
"What do you think?"
"Of course not. Even though it's a beta, it never crashed once during all our testing. It's basically finished. Even though the system is different, it could deal a serious blow to our Office suite, which hasn't even been out that long. We need to act before it's too late."
"How?"
"First we make contact. See if they're the type of people we can talk to. If they are, we bring them on board. If not, we'll have to handle it our way…"
"Agreed. If they're not cooperative, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to show them how bitter things can get."
"Yes. Extremely bitter."
Bill Gates and Steve exchanged knowing smiles. There was not a trace of concern about failure in their expressions.
At the same moment, Yoo Jae-won was on a rare late-night call with Vice President Remington.
"Boss, the response has been explosive."
"It's the same here."
Remington was reporting on the ongoing paid beta tester event. Unlike the Keyboard Warrior campaign, hundreds of thousands of people had not flooded in. However, they had managed to gather a far more substantial group of participants. By directly supplying ID Office to prestigious universities on the West Coast such as Stanford, Caltech, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, as well as East Coast institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Brown, they had elicited strong user feedback. Remington had executed Yoo Jae-won's idea brilliantly. Jae-won had publicly declared that he would supply Office at a low price to universities, and Remington had contacted the schools directly, offering to provide ID Office to their computer labs. For free. As the saying went, people would drink lye if it was free, so the universities responded positively. They did not accept it blindly, however. Even free software would draw student complaints if the quality was poor, so they decided to test it first. Naturally, the test passed instantly. ID Office's quality was the best of its generation. It lacked nothing in speed, stability, or features. Stanford and Harvard were the first to accept ID Technology's proposal. Once those two flagship institutions from the East and West agreed, the other schools followed without difficulty. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign also accepted. Schools that prided themselves on their prestige but had not been included on ID Technology's list began subtly requesting to join, as if partnering with ID Technology had become a mark of elite status. Remington, however, refused to add more universities under the pretext of budget constraints.
After finishing with the elite universities, Remington turned his attention to Silicon Valley. Because the work itself involved computers, the people there stood to benefit greatly from ID Office. In exchange for reviews and critiques, they offered Best Buy gift certificates. Every participant received a fifty-dollar certificate. Those whose reviews or critiques posted on CompuServe or university networks proved especially high-quality received an additional fifty dollars. If someone managed to publish their review in a weekly or monthly magazine, they earned a five-hundred-dollar bonus. The better the writing, the higher the reward. It was not cash, however, but gift certificates usable at Best Buy, an electronics and software specialty retailer. Buying the certificates in bulk earned a discount, which benefited ID Technology, and Silicon Valley workers had a strong preference for electronics, making the reward highly satisfying.
"Just as you predicted, Boss, several Microsoft employees participated in the paid beta test."
"You know how they operate. Stay on your guard."
Microsoft had not yet grown into the dominating giant of the IT industry. It was a company steadily expanding its territory by leveraging its control over the PC operating system through MS-DOS. It also possessed considerable competitiveness in office software. MS Word was already widely popular, and MS Excel had surpassed Lotus 1-2-3 in market share that year. Based on that confidence, they had bundled their office programs into a suite for Mac PCs. Even so, Mac PCs still occupied only a tiny fraction of the overall PC market, both then and now. An Office suite for the vast majority of IBM-compatible PCs did not yet exist. Microsoft's strategy was likely to release Windows 3.0 next year and launch a Windows version of Office alongside it.
"Of course. Their reputation is well known even here."
Microsoft was expanding at a frightening pace, yet Silicon Valley did not speak kindly of them. The reason was simple: their methods of victory did not earn the valley's support. Copying competitors' programs was routine. Windows copying Xerox's GUI was a famous case. When lawsuits poured in, they used their massive capital to hire numerous high-profile lawyers and dragged the cases out for years, exhausting their opponents. If the other party was a small company, it would collapse under the legal burden. If it was a giant like Apple, they would simply pay them off behind the scenes. Many of the features built into MS-DOS had absorbed technology from competitors. It was common knowledge in the industry that the only utility in MS-DOS that Bill Gates had personally created was BASIC.
"I've already started with Mario Rogers and made sure the development team stays united."
"Well done."
Microsoft was also skilled at poaching talent. They would undoubtedly approach ID Technology's Silicon Valley team and try to recruit them. Yet Vice President Remington could state with certainty that not a single employee would accept. The most difficult and grueling phase of development was already behind the team. Their current work consisted entirely of incorporating feedback and making minor adjustments. Remington had shifted the now-idle development team to a flexible work system, openly allowing them to spend part of their working hours on whatever they wanted. They could create their own programs, analyze other companies' software, or even play games without interference. Because the Silicon Valley team consisted of proven talent and passion, they used that time productively. In addition, incentives had been promised upon the official launch of ID Office. On the day of release, a substantial bonus would be paid immediately, followed by running guarantees based on sales volume. A fixed percentage of ID Office's net profit was allocated to bonuses. It was not stock or equity. To continue receiving the incentives, employees had to remain at ID Technology. No one on the Silicon Valley team was foolish enough to abandon that and join Microsoft, a company notorious in the industry.
"They could use other methods besides that, though."
"Other methods?"
"They could simply copy it outright. Even if reverse-engineering the ribbon interface and the latest technologies in ID Office proves difficult, Microsoft has the capability to succeed and replicate it. That's how they've grown in the past. Even if lawsuits come, they'll drag the trials out indefinitely to wear down the other side."
"Allen's workload is about to increase. I'll prepare so we can respond immediately if any illegal activity is discovered."
"But the real heavy attacks will probably come in secret."
Poaching employees and blatant copying were visible enough to be defended against if one stayed alert. Yet Yoo Jae-won knew that if it was the Microsoft he remembered, they would attack ID Office and ID Technology through far more insidious means.
"Secret attacks…"
Yoo Jae-won knew Microsoft's patterns all too well. Bundling was famous, and they had even inserted code into the operating system kernel to degrade competitors' performance. He had not mentioned these tactics yet because they had never been publicly exposed. Many individuals and companies had suffered, but they had only endured in silence without revealing anything. Only later, once community technologies like PC communications and the internet became more advanced, would people begin sharing stories and realizing they were not alone. Defending against attacks on the program itself was something he could handle. Furthermore, while Yoo Jae-won could not completely prevent reverse engineering, he had already devised countermeasures and incorporated them into ID Office.
"Anyway, if you notice anything strange around us, contact me immediately."
"Understood."
"Then let's end the call here for today. Have a pleasant date. And when you go out, try proper restaurants instead of only looking for hamburger places."
"Huh? How did you know about my dinner plans? Ah, Shannon must have been telling everyone. Is there any other food that combines nutrition and taste as well as hamburgers? Still, since it's the boss's advice, I'll take it into consideration. Enjoy your school day, Boss."
"Heh, school's always a fun place."
After exchanging their odd parting words, the two ended the call.