Super Rich from Winning a Lottery-Chapter 382 - 258: The Mad Spending War

Of course there was no way Ou Xiaolong was going to take over all the group companies under Yi Anguo’s name; he didn’t have the guts, and he didn’t have the ability.

And Ou Xiaolong was also very clear about one thing: Yi Anguo was just saying it for the sake of saying it, there was no way he would actually let him take over all the companies under his name.

To be honest, what Ou Xiaolong was thinking wasn’t any different; he was just talking, too.

He could hand the company over to his daughter Chen Xuejiao, but he would absolutely never hand it over to Yi Anguo; he could trust his daughter one hundred percent, but he would not trust Yi Anguo one hundred percent.

Because around Yi Anguo, it wasn’t just his daughter as the only woman; there were many women.

Likewise, Yi Anhui didn’t just have a child with Chen Xuejiao; he also had children with other women.

And his Tenglong Real Estate, in the future, could only belong to the children of Yi Anguo and his daughter Chen Xuejiao; as for the children of Yi Anguo and other women, they obviously wouldn’t get a share.

At this time, the 3Q War had already escalated further and further; with the arrival of the mobile internet era, all the internet giants were fighting over traffic.

Whoever controlled the traffic controlled the right to speak; everyone understood this very well.

The trigger of the war was that Penguin first launched Penguin Doctor 1.0, then launched Penguin Doctor 3.2, with an interface and functions that looked strikingly like 360, and at the same time announced a free six‑month trial of Norton AntiVirus. Afterwards, Penguin Doctor used the 2010 Spring Festival period to force‑push its promotion.

The sensitive 360 quickly realized the threat of Penguin Doctor; some employees who were on vacation were urgently called back to respond to this sudden incident. With 360’s rapid response, plus Penguin Doctor itself being an immature product that was rushed to the front line, many users gradually uninstalled Penguin Doctor, and its market share quickly fell to below 10%. 360 became the winner in this round of confrontation.

On May 31, 2010, Penguin quietly upgraded Penguin Doctor to version 4.0 and renamed it "Penguin PC Manager."

The new version merged Penguin Doctor and Penguin Software Management into one, adding cloud trojan detection, plug‑in cleaning, and other functions, covering all the mainstream features of 360 Safe Guard, with a user experience extremely similar to 360. This move from Penguin caught 360 and Kingsoft Internet Security totally off guard.

However, Yi Anguo knew that this 3Q War had only just begun; there was absolutely no way 360 would just let it go and admit defeat.

Meanwhile, the Thousand‑Group War was also raging in full swing; with the birth of the first domestic group‑buying site, at its peak there were more than 6,000 group‑buying websites in the country.

The fuse for this war came from across the ocean.

In 2010, something not too big but not too small happened in the US internet world: Google made an acquisition offer to Groupon, hoping to buy this group‑buying website for around 6 billion US Dollar.

Strictly speaking, Groupon was just a startup that had been around for a little over a year, but its value lay in its fresh idea: online group buying. "Group" means a group, "coupon" means discount coupon. Put simply, the more you buy, the cheaper it gets.

The first group buy they launched was a "buy one get one free" deal negotiated with the pizza place next to their office. The pizza shop boosted its sales, consumers got discounts, everybody won.

This online group‑buying model, if you look at it ten years later, is something everyone is familiar with, but at that time no company had ever tried it before. It was new, and the key was that everyone benefited, so once launched it was hugely popular, quickly expanding across the US and attracting millions of users. Many people thought this was a market with huge room for imagination.

But faced with 6 billion gleaming US Dollar, Groupon turned it down. The reason was simple: they felt they were being undervalued.

In the management’s view, the valuation of their company should be at least between 20 and 30 billion.

Soon, this story spread back to China, and countless entrepreneurs got excited, fired up, all rubbing their hands, itching to give it a try.

Right in front of their eyes stood a massive gold mine, right on a track called "group buying"; how could they not go dig a couple of shovelfuls.

The first to come out and eat the crab was called Feng Xiaohai. In January 2010, Feng Xiaohai launched China’s first group‑buying site—Manzuo.com.

This wasn’t Feng Xiaohai’s first startup; before this, he had built a site called Xcar.com.

Five years after it was founded, it was bought for 10 million US Dollar; two years later, he started again and created Manzuo.com.

He told the media that online group buying was not invented by Americans; in our country, online group buying can be traced back as early as 2001.

Like his earlier startup project Xcar.com, it was actually a group buy for auto services. Back then, this project was even covered by Wired magazine in the US, in a report titled "China‑Style Auto Group Buying."

In other words, ten years earlier he had already reverse‑exported this group‑buying model to the US. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Manzuo.com—just hearing the name, you can tell it comes from the idiom "gaopeng manzuo" (a house full of distinguished guests). Interestingly, a few months later, that American Groupon charged into the China market and picked a very matching name: "Gaopeng.com."

Fate works in mysterious ways.

As the pioneer of group buying in the US, Gaopeng.com had originally planned to enter the China market early and seize the first‑mover advantage.

But after everything was ready, the Americans were stunned to find that the domain Groupon.cn had already been registered in China!

This "another me in the world" was called Tuangoubao.com. With no choice, Groupon could only negotiate with this Tuangoubao.com that had jumped in halfway, hoping to buy the domain. But who knew, this Tuangoubao.com wouldn’t budge no matter what—hard or soft approaches didn’t work, and no matter what terms were offered, they just wouldn’t sell the domain.