Industrial Soul

Time flew by when things were busy. With Lin Baijie, Huang Weichang, and the others keeping an eye on things, Huang Xiuyuan no longer needed to handle the company's and factory's miscellaneous affairs himself.

Now that he was free, Huang Xiuyuan hadn't been idle these past few days. He and Lu Xuedong had been discussing technical matters.

Although the laboratory he needed wasn't finished yet, that didn't mean he couldn't get things done.

As for the Software Laboratory, engineers from Inspur had already come all the way from Pengcheng and begun setting up a server cluster.

Lu Xuedong and Huang Xiuyuan were now busy building the company's official website and developing practical little programs for the computers used internally.

To bring in more staff, Huang Xiuyuan had also instructed Lin Baijie to recruit recent graduates this year to work as company interns, particularly those specializing in computer programming, materials science, chemistry, and polymer materials.

As he worked on writing software, Huang Xiuyuan consulted a number of foreign industrial design programs.

For example, Autodesk Moldflow Adviser, part of Autodesk's digital prototyping solutions, could simulate and evaluate designs before manufacturing, then optimize them. This reduced potential design errors, shortened product development cycles, and lowered development costs.

AutoCAD, also produced by Autodesk, was a computer-aided design program used for drafting, 2D drawing, and basic 3D design. It could automatically generate drawings, so users didn't need to know how to program.

As a result, it was widely used around the world in fields such as civil engineering, architecture, interior decoration, industrial drafting, engineering drafting, electronics, and garment manufacturing.

Pro/ENGINEER, developed by PTC, was an integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE program.

Pro/ENGINEER was renowned for its parametric modeling. As one of the earliest applications of parametric technology, it held an important position in the field of 3D modeling software.

It had earned industry recognition and adoption as the new standard in mechanical CAD/CAE/CAM, and was one of the mainstream CAD/CAM/CAE programs. It held a particularly important position in product design in China.

Along with SolidWorks, developed by a subsidiary of Dassault Systemes; Unigraphics NX, from Siemens; Cimatron; Mastercam, from CNC Software; CATIA, from Dassault Systemes; Delcam; and Edgecam, from Vero Software, these made up a series of industrial design programs.

Using these programs as references, and drawing on his own experience working on industrial software in his previous life, Huang Xiuyuan had rewritten them into a new industrial software platform.

This new platform was essentially a library of industrial software. Writing it all by himself was quite a struggle.

For now, he could only "borrow" foreign software, using foreign industrial programs as a base for further development. He added many industrial software programs from the future, along with various improvements and optimizations.

In fact, many of the optimization plans were ones those foreign companies would implement in the future. Unwilling to let them hold him at their mercy, Huang Xiuyuan simply adopted them for himself.

Since the other companies hadn't developed them yet, he could release them first and register the patents ahead of time. This might give him some leverage over foreign companies.

Still, there was a long way to go before the industrial software platform was ready. It worked fine for his own use, but if he wanted to promote it, the patent barriers set up by foreign companies were no joke. He could be hit with a court summons at any moment.

As for ignoring patents, unless he had the power to turn the table on everyone, it was better to proceed with caution.

The cobbled-together industrial software platform currently had eight subprograms.

He was fairly familiar with two of them and had participated in their design in his previous life. Their current degree of localization stood at 27% and 22%, respectively.

The other subprograms were barely localized at all, with no more than 1% to 3% of their content adapted. They had only received an initial translation from English into Chinese.

Huang Xiuyuan wasn't disappointed. Once he had hired enough programmers and engineers, fully localizing the software would be an essential part of his strategy.

Fortunately, software patents weren't difficult to work around. Hardware patents were different: many hardware products were covered by a slew of patents, and some fundamental patents simply couldn't be circumvented.

Although industrial software was different from ordinary commercial software, Huang Xiuyuan was still confident he could compete with foreign companies on equal footing.

Generally speaking, if a company owned patents covering around 30% of the patents for its software, it could basically achieve mutual patent immunity.

In other words, companies in the same field might use each other's patents, bringing them to a relative balance. Each side could then grant the other immunity from claims over the use of its patents.

Huawei and Qualcomm were a similar example. This could curb the other party's patent barriers while also reducing the cost of using patents.

That was Huang Xiuyuan's plan: register patents in large numbers and build a patent moat. Maybe he could even turn the tables and charge the other side royalties.

It was a matter of taking the road others had built and leaving them nowhere to go.

In fact, as long as there were enough people and money, there was nothing impossible about localizing and replacing software technology.

A look at commercial software revealed one basic truth: "borrowing" was rampant in the industry.

That was because software patents were difficult to make imitation-proof. It was also hard to sue someone for patent infringement simply because they had copied your work.

Take this example: suppose Company A developed software that used the programming method AB+BB to create an app with a particular function. Company B saw that the software worked well, so it had its programmers use the method B+B+A+B to create an app with roughly the same function.

Had Company B violated patent law in the process?

The answer was no.

That was because functions couldn't be patented. What could be patented was the method used to achieve a function—in other words, the technological innovation.

And unlike chemical materials, software could be designed to work around patents without much difficulty.

Industrial software patents might present some challenges, but they were only a little troublesome. They weren't an insurmountable obstacle.

The real problem holding back China's domestic industrial software wasn't technology. It was the software market and ecosystem.

Industrial software was different from commercial software. It was highly closed off, and developing it required substantial experience in industrial design.

In this regard, Western countries had a clear first-mover advantage. By capturing the market and establishing a firmly entrenched ecosystem, they made it difficult for newcomers to get a foothold.

From the very beginning, Huang Xiuyuan had intended to build his own system from scratch. Naturally, he hadn't overlooked the challenges of industrial software.

If they didn't start using their own industrial software from the outset and relied too heavily on foreign programs, switching over later would be a painful blow.

Just as he was about to say something to Lu Xuedong, the phone in his pocket began to vibrate.

It was his father calling. Huang Xiuyuan looked up at the wall clock, which showed around 4:42.

"Dad, I'll be right there."

"You brat, I knew you'd forget. Drive carefully."

After hanging up, he hurriedly gave a few instructions, then had his two bodyguards drive him to the Urban Passenger Station.