This is an update from July 12th!
“Liu Chuanye, did you hear? QQ is also launching voice chat tomorrow. Tomorrow is Saturday, so let’s try it out!” In the afternoon, a group of close friends gathered in the school classroom to discuss.
“I think oo voice chat works pretty well, there’s no need to try QQ voice chat!” Liu Chuanye said. He wasn’t particularly loyal to oo voice chat, but after a summer of diligently farming and various collaborations with He Anrong to steal crops, he had become He Anrong’s best friend online.
Truly best friends, He Anrong had even confided many personal secrets to Liu Chuanye, things that only true friends would share. Liu Chuanye even knew that He Anrong’s parents were on the verge of divorce.
And today, Liu Chuanye noticed that He Anrong’s spirits had been very low all day, his eyes never once focused on the blackboard. Connecting this with the information he had gathered in the past few days, Liu Chuanye could easily guess that something significant had happened in He Anrong’s family.
“No, Anrong definitely needs someone to keep her company and comfort her tomorrow. How can I chat on QQ!” Liu Chuanye thought, and thus he refused, “No, I’ll stick with oo!”
“Liu Chuanye, don’t be so stubborn. You know how terrible oo voice chat’s quality is!” a classmate beside him said unhappily.
“Exactly! I heard that when it opened the day before yesterday, it disconnected twice. And it wasn’t just a normal disconnection, the entire oo became unusable. Then, it got even worse in the evening, the whole night, a full 12 hours, it couldn’t be logged into. It only recovered yesterday afternoon. Why use such unstable internet?”
“I think it’s fine. I used it all day yesterday, and it was quite smooth. I didn’t experience any disconnections!” Liu Chuanye replied.
“Even if it doesn’t disconnect, the chat delay is severe. You have to wait two or three seconds to hear a reply, and if you’re unlucky, you might even have to wait tens of seconds. The experience is terrible!” a classmate complained.
“Then will QQ voice chat be better than oo voice chat?” Liu Chuanye asked dismissively.
“Definitely!” the classmate immediately replied. “You know, QQ has been operating for over two years. Whether it’s experience, technology, or any other capability, it’s bound to be much better than a new product like oo!”
“Yeah, everyone says oo is a knock-off and a copycat of QQ. Look, their icons are similar, their pages are similar, it’s definitely copied. How can a copied product defeat the original owner?”
“Exactly! I think once QQ’s voice chat is launched, oo voice chat will be completely defeated and routed. QQ voice chat will definitely be the perfect solution, filling all the flaws of oo voice chat. Just you wait, it will be like that!”
Almost everyone around Liu Chuanye said the same thing. In fact, Liu Chuanye himself thought so too. Users aren’t stupid. oo copied QQ so obviously back then, everyone knew oo was a QQ knock-off, so their instinct told them that a knock-off could never beat the original product.
How could QQ be worse than oo, the newcomer and copier?
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“Zhidong! I have only one requirement: when QQ voice chat goes live, it must perform at least as well as oo!” At this moment, in Tengda’s workroom, Brother Ma was saying to Zhang Zhidong.
“Boss, please don’t be angry. I think if we can barely make it run today, it will be considered a success!” Zhang Zhidong said with a wry smile.
“You have so little confidence?” Brother Ma said, a little displeased.
Contrary to the general public’s belief that QQ was stronger than oo, Brother Ma actually understood very well that their performance might not be as good as oo’s, not due to technology, but due to the servers.
Brother Ma wasn’t foolish and had predicted the difficulties. He knew very well that when QQ voice chat launched, their servers and network might not be able to handle it.
However, with the smooth operation of oo voice chat, Brother Ma suddenly gained a lot of confidence.
“Zhidong, I think we might have exaggerated the difficulties we are facing!” Brother Ma said. “Even a company like oo can manage to keep oo voice chat running. There’s no reason why we can’t!”
“We upgraded our servers this year and have Compaq servers worth 80 million yuan. How can we be worse than oo voice chat?” Brother Ma said.
“But boss, according to calculations, as long as more than one million people are online for voice chat simultaneously, our servers won’t be able to handle it!” Zhang Zhidong said.
“I know, but you’re just looking at surface-level data. No one knows the real situation!” Brother Ma said. “Since oo can do it, there’s no reason why our QQ can’t. I think in actual operation, the actual traffic the servers can handle will be far lower than our estimates!”
“Or, there won’t even be a million people online simultaneously. After all, according to our research, besides internet cafes, not many households have microphones. Perhaps there will only be a few hundred thousand simultaneous users!” Brother Ma said with a commanding wave. “Alright, Old Zhang, don’t be hesitant. If even oo, a copier, can achieve this, there’s no reason why we can’t! You just need to put in all the effort you can, leaving no room for error!”
“Yes!” Zhang Zhidong nodded and said no more.
Although Zhang Zhidong looked at the data and thought their servers wouldn’t be able to handle it, it was only three days from when QQ voice chat decided to launch to its official release. It was impossible to upgrade servers or anything like that. Even if they ordered on the same day, they might not receive delivery in three days!
So QQ could only rely on its original servers, which made Zhang Zhidong very worried. But as Brother Ma said, if oo, a copier, that despicable small factory, could manage it, there was no reason why QQ couldn’t!
Perhaps QQ would make it.
Well, Tengda had no detailed information about oo, so they had no way of knowing. oo originally had a server cluster worth 50 million yuan, and later Huang He added another 150 million yuan worth of servers, bringing their total server value to 200 million yuan, which was 120 million yuan more than QQ’s servers.
Not to mention that these servers were the latest Compaq servers released this year, offering much better cost-effectiveness than the older versions.
As for oo’s several service crashes, in QQ’s eyes, it was the best proof that oo’s servers were not good enough. And oo’s ability to restart and fix servers after a wait gave QQ a huge misconception.
That is, even if the servers crashed, they could be restarted and fixed. They would just crash a few times and then return to normal.
Don’t think this idea is ridiculous. It’s like telling someone before June 2021 that the US government’s rescue capabilities are terrible, less than one percent of China’s, and that they treat citizens’ lives like child’s play. After ten days of rescue on a building’s ruins, they only saved a cat, and they would absolutely not believe it.
They would just think, “How shameless is this shill, spewing nonsense with such poor quality.”
How could QQ be inferior to oo, the copier? This was something that no one at QQ believed.
Until 9 AM on September 25, 2001, QQ officially opened its QQ voice chat function.
9:00:00 AM, QQ voice chat opened.
9:00:02 AM, the number of simultaneous online users broke one million.
9:00:03 AM, all QQ server clusters crashed, and the blue screen of death appeared.
The great QQ successfully lasted for 3 seconds.