Apart from the banking issues, the housekeeper's two business proposals faced various challenges to succeed.
Simon's stance remained unchanged; ideas were not valuable in themselves—it was the execution that turned ideas into reality.
However, after nearly a day of meetings, the two business proposals were quickly finalized.
These proposals would still be linked to Ygritte Company, utilizing Ygritte's IE browser platform and email user base as the promotional carriers.
Additionally, the housekeeper would serve as the head of the online software store team, temporarily holding the title of project manager at Ygritte Company, but her level would be such that she reported directly to Simon personally, and she would also continue managing Simon's private properties. Due to her experience working in Wall Street banks, Jeff Bezos would personally take charge of developing the online payment system.
America Online and Bell Atlantic would provide all necessary support for these two business proposals.
Not to mention, just the online payment system alone could save a substantial amount of operating costs for both America Online and Bell Atlantic in the future by shifting users to online payments.
When the meeting ended, the names for the online payment tool and the online software store were also decided.
Everyone did not dwell much on this issue; they were named Ypay and Ystore respectively. The 'Y' naturally stood for Ygritte (Ygritte).
Staying in San Francisco for the night, after work, Simon sent the housekeeper back to the Woodside mountain villa to prepare dinner, while he went with his usual female assistant who came to San Francisco, along with Jeff Bezos, Tim Berners-Lee, Carol Bartz, and others to another office building near Ygritte headquarters.
Ygritte's size had been steadily increasing, but unless the company became profitable or went public, Simon had no intention of constructing a corporate headquarters.
Lacking sufficient headquarters office space, Ygritte's various teams were scattered across Silicon Valley.
The cloud computing development team, set up and started last year, was located in the nondescript white two-story office building that Simon and others arrived at.
Upon entering, Simon's first impression was that the building's temperature was noticeably higher than outside, giving the feeling that the heating was on. After listening closely, Simon quickly understood that this was likely due to the dozens of large and small computers operating continuously inside.
After signaling the employees in the ground-floor office cubicles to continue their work, Simon and the others made their way upstairs.
On the second floor, the hum of computers was even more pronounced, with simple office cubicles and a row of servers blinking with indicator lights at the end of the room against the wall.
The cloud computing team's chief engineer, Ralph Goodell's office cubicle, was right next to that row of servers.
Ralph Goodell, a top software engineer poached by Jeff Bezos from IBM, had graduated from MIT and was the vice president of R&D at IBM before leaving, mainly responsible for Unix server system development.
Though a behemoth like IBM had at least several dozen vice presidents, Bezos still went through some trouble to secure Goodell's release, including negotiating legal agreements to allow IBM to let him go and offering him a hefty annual salary of $2.5 million.
The $2.5 million salary was several times higher than the base salaries of Jeff Bezos, Carol Bartz, and Tim Berners-Lee.
Of course, unlike Bezos and others, Ralph Goodell did not receive a generous equity reward agreement.
Upon joining, Ralph Goodell quickly threw himself into the work.
Within just two months, while personally writing the foundational code for the cloud computing system, he also picked and built the cloud computing development team. The thirty-plus employees now in this two-story office building were mostly personally interviewed and selected by Ralph Goodell and Jeff Bezos from across the United States.
At this time, Ygritte's cloud computing project had a special codename: Housewife.
This originated from a conversation Ralph Goodell had with Simon before confirming his employment, asking what exactly Simon wanted from a so-called 'cloud computing' system—a concept not previously conceptualized.
Simon, not deeply versed in technical principles, only made a comparison.
The computational processing method at Ygritte's existing data center was like a newly married clumsy housewife, mechanically spending an hour washing clothes, an hour cooking, and an hour cleaning, etc.
In this process, the waiting times between washing clothes, making an apple pie, and waiting for the floor to dry after mopping were wasted.
The existing data center's server operation mode was just like this, mechanically handling user logins, data storage, text processing, and other specific functions in a confirmed sequence. When there were no data computation requests, the processing capacity would idle.
This situation could easily lead to some servers idling while others were overloaded.
Simon needed to train this clumsy housewife into an efficient one who could use time and energy to simultaneously do laundry, cook, and clean.
Specific
ally, this meant linking all of Ygritte Data Center's servers into one entity to create an efficient computational command distribution system to fully utilize each server's processing resources.
Because of that conversation, the cloud computing plan was thus named.
Seeing the huge potential for development in this plan, Ralph Goodell soon chose to leave IBM.
Everyone moved forward to see a middle-aged Caucasian with a disheveled beard and high-prescription glasses intently staring at a computer screen. The other two engineers around the middle-aged man noticed Simon and others' arrival and were about to greet them, but Simon gestured them to continue.
The group silently watched the screen displaying flowing data for about five or six minutes until a statistic finally appeared: 73%.
"Fuck!"
Before Simon could understand what happened, Ralph Goodell at the computer blurted out an American swear word spontaneously.
Tim Berners-Lee noticed Simon's puzzled look and explained in a low voice, "Ralph is testing the fault-tolerance software."
Simon nodded, recalling some of the project progress reports he had seen before.
Once the cloud computing architecture was completed and all data centers were linked into one entity, the thousands of processors and even more numerous components would inevitably experience faults at any time. The cloud computing team's fault-tolerance software was developed to detect faults and automatically reroute computational tasks from failed nodes.
Strong fault tolerance was indeed one of cloud computing's significant advantages.
In traditional data centers, a single server failure could directly cause some functions to cease. Even with robust backup measures and prompt engineering responses, there was still a need for time, which could lead to very serious consequences.
The cloud computing system could effectively solve this problem.
A few servers failing would not significantly impact the entire system's operation.
In the office cubicle, after Ralph Goodell's American curse, he became aware of Simon and others' presence and quickly got up to greet them.
After a brief chat, they moved to the neighboring conference room.
Ralph Goodell personally briefed Simon on the progress of the cloud computing plan, mentioning that if Simon wanted a perfect cloud computing system, it might take until next year since he had recently come up with many promising ideas that required further development time.
Simon neither agreed nor urged but simply encouraged Ralph Goodell to do his best.
Cloud computing needed sufficient scale to be cost-effective, so Ygritte, with only a few million users, did not urgently need the cloud computing system. Once the portal website's business fully developed and the number of web users in America reached tens of millions, that would be the time for cloud computing to truly demonstrate its efficiency and low-cost characteristics.
This timeline would likely need another year or two.
Therefore, Simon was not in a hurry.
Over the next two years, Ygritte would continue to expand its data centers according to demand. This computational power would not be wasted. Moreover, once the cloud computing plan was completed, the excess computational resources released could support more of Ygritte's development plans.
Caught up in their discussions, they left the office building only after it had completely darkened outside.
Since it was dinner time, Simon simply invited everyone to a nearby restaurant for a meal.
Around nine o'clock, Simon finally returned with his assistant to the mountain villa in Woodside.
Upon entering the living room of the villa, the housekeeper was sitting on the couch, flipping through a document. Seeing Simon and his companion appear, she stood up and asked, "Boss, should I make dinner again?"
Simon remembered instructing the housekeeper to prepare dinner when leaving Ygritte headquarters.
"No need, have you eaten?"
The housekeeper nodded, her expression unchanged.
Simon felt no embarrassment, removed his coat, and both the assistant and the housekeeper instinctively stepped forward. Smiling, Simon handed his coat to the housekeeper, and asked his assistant, Jennifer, "Would you like to take a bath?"
"Sure."
The assistant nodded and headed upstairs.
Simon sat down on the living room sofa, picking up the document the housekeeper had been reading. It was a paper on data encryption.
Alice Ferguson helped Simon hang up his coat and then sat down on the adjacent armchair.
Simon patiently read through the paper, only half-understanding it, and not really intending to delve deeply. He casually asked, "Where are Zoe and the others?"
"They've already gone to bed," the housekeeper replied, noticing the document in her boss's hand. "I think user account security will be a big challenge for us in the future."
Simon laughed, "How do you plan to solve it?"
"I think Ygritte should establish a dedicated team for network data security as soon as possible."
"There's already a department for that."
"Only eleven people, and I've checked their credentials; none of them are experts in computer security. It's far from enough."
"Talk to Jeff about it when you can. You understand, Ygritte currently has too many projects to focus on, which inevitably leads to some oversight," Simon remarked, then added, "
Besides, when it comes to network security, just doing our best is enough because it's been proven that even the most secure systems can be breached. The key isn't in the technology."
The housekeeper curiously asked, "Then what is it?"
Simon looked up from the document, glanced at the housekeeper, and smiled, patting the seat beside him. "Come, sit next to me."
The housekeeper hesitated but then got up and sat next to Simon, her posture noticeably stiff.
Simon, enjoying the pleasant scent of the woman next to him, was quite content. Without making any inappropriate moves, he leaned back on the sofa and answered the earlier question: "The key is in people."
The housekeeper, now accustomed to her boss's occasional teasing, relaxed as he showed no sign of doing anything further and asked, "What do you mean?"
"As I said, even the most secure systems can be breached. The key is how we handle it. For instance, if a hacker steals $100 from one of our user's accounts, what should we do?"
"Call the police."
"Of course, call the police," Simon chuckled. "But do you think the police will make a big deal over $100?"
The housekeeper didn't respond, just watched Simon, waiting for him to continue.
"Even if the police wanted to, they couldn't do much about it. Such things are inevitable, so we need to handle it ourselves," Simon explained, his eyes narrowing slightly. "Forget $100, even if someone dares to steal just $1 from a Ygritte user's account, as long as we spare no expense to catch them and put them in jail, then with such a case as a precedent, the number of hackers daring to attack Ygritte user accounts would drop significantly because they know even for stealing just $1, they will be caught."
The housekeeper could imagine how a thief who stole just $1 could be sent to jail—not for the dollar, but probably for theft of software or system damage, among other possible charges.
But how would they catch such a person?
Simon noticed the puzzled expression on Alice's face, couldn't resist reaching out, and playfully lifted her delicate chin with his finger, chuckling, "It seems you are a very serious good girl, so don't worry about this. Just focus on doing your job well."
To ordinary people, if the police don't handle it, there's nothing they can do.
For Simon, however, things were quite simple.
There was a profession called private detectives in the world. Even bounty hunters were not lacking. Just as there are bounty hunters in the real world, there are also 'bounty hunters' online who would do certain things for money.
Moreover, Simon suddenly realized that he could use this as an excuse and opportunity to build a private intelligence network exclusive to the Westeros system, including both real-world and online components.
Thinking this, Simon already began to plan in his mind.
Poaching a group of people from the FBI, CIA, or even foreign intelligence agencies like MI6 to establish a detective agency seemed like a good idea.
Well, it should be several scattered mini detective agencies, so the target would not be too conspicuous. If managed properly, these detective agencies could form a complete intelligence network.
Perhaps, they could also hire some top hackers.
The hacker community does indeed have a segment that pursues technology and freedom, but there is also a segment that seeks tangible money, which is precisely what Simon could offer.
As the Westeros system continued to expand, such a private intelligence network, if established, could help Simon solve many issues.
Why was J. Edgar Hoover, the first Director of the FBI, so powerful? It was key that he created and controlled the FBI's intelligence network for decades.
During his tenure, Hoover served under eight presidents, and no one in power dared to suggest his dismissal until his death, which marked the end of an era.
Afterward, although the U.S. government immediately imposed various restrictions on the heads of intelligence agencies like the FBI, once the potential power of intelligence networks was discovered, those in power tried every means to extend their reach into these networks, seeking power akin to Hoover's.
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