While Larry and Sergey were still marveling at Mavi's actions with admiration, a bespectacled network engineer hesitantly approached them, as if he had something to say.
"Is something wrong, Martin?" Larry asked, noticing the man's hesitation.
Hearing the president's question, Martin adjusted his glasses and quietly said, "Well, President Larry, Chairman Mavi, President Sergey… I just checked the server room, and… there aren't any servers in there."
"No servers?" Larry and Sergey's faces both showed shock and a hint of panic.
They weren't any less knowledgeable about servers than Martin, the network engineer. After all, a company's website operates 24/7, requiring fast response times for users, massive databases, file storage, and computational power—all of which depend on servers.
Simply put, if a company's servers were too outdated, no matter how much the business grew, it wouldn't be able to function efficiently. The servers' capacity would always be a limiting factor.
Hearing that the server room was empty, the 23 key employees who had been touring the office gathered around the four executives, eager to hear how the leadership planned to resolve this. Had the servers been stolen?
Standing at the center of the group, Mavi was already aware of the missing servers. Without hesitation, he said to everyone, "The x86-architecture servers from Excite were auctioned off by the court to another internet company."
"What?! That's so unlucky…"
"Yeah, what terrible luck!"
The employees sighed in disappointment. If they had those x86 servers, the Google search engine's performance would have increased significantly, making responses much faster.
Just as the employees were lamenting their misfortune, Mavi, still standing in the middle, suddenly spoke again. "Actually, there's no need to feel unlucky because…"
But he stopped midway, leaving Larry, Sergey, and the surrounding employees confused.
At that moment, a white enclosed cargo truck pulled up in front of the company building. Several large Russian men in black suits stepped out and skillfully set up a loading ramp. Then, right in front of everyone, they carefully unloaded a massive black machine from the truck.
The machine was so large that it required four burly Russian men to lift it onto a dolly.
As the black machine was wheeled into the company, Martin—the network engineer who recognized it instantly—suddenly gasped, clutching his head in shock. "That's… that's… an IBM mainframe! My God!"
His outburst made Larry, Sergey, and the rest finally take a good look at the machine. Sure enough, it was one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world—the IBM Mainframe!
Each IBM mainframe cost over $3 million! Compared to this beast, x86 servers and even UNIX servers were like toys. Even an entire x86 server cluster couldn't match a single mainframe in terms of performance and maintenance efficiency.
After all, an IBM mainframe required only one system to maintain, whereas an x86 server cluster consisted of multiple machines, making maintenance a nightmare.
Larry, Sergey, and the employees were left speechless as the security team carefully moved the towering machine into the office. The massive black chassis was taller than some of the employees, standing nearly three meters high.
"Oh my God… The boss actually spent this much to get us a mainframe!" a fair-skinned female employee whispered to her colleague. "This thing alone is worth more than six times our entire company's market value!"
"No kidding! This is insane! Our new boss is incredible—his boldness is on another level!" her colleague whispered back.
The murmuring in the room echoed the thoughts running through Larry and Sergey's minds. Mavi's move was unbelievably bold. The acquisition of the company, combined with the investment in an IBM mainframe, easily amounted to tens of millions of dollars!
Back when Larry and Sergey had founded the company, they had struggled for a year and a half just to grow its market value to $600,000. Yet here was Mavi, making a casual investment in the millions without hesitation. They couldn't help but feel awed and intimidated.
Almost everyone in the room was utterly stunned by Mavi's bold decision.
Meanwhile, Mavi remained calm and composed as he addressed the group. "The hardware and office environment are now set up. As you can see, this office once belonged to Excite. Before the dot-com bubble burst, Excite's market value was inflated to $7.2 billion. And where does Google stand? A mere $600,000."
"The difference is staggering—$7.2 billion versus $600,000. Can anyone tell me how many times larger that is?"
Mavi could spend money to acquire hardware, but software—like the company's vision and employee morale—was something he had to shape himself. This was where leadership came in, or as some might call it, "inspiration"—or even "brainwashing" in a business sense.
"Chairman Mavi, the difference is about 12,000 times," Martin quickly calculated and answered.
"Exactly. Nearly 12,000 times. A once-thriving internet giant has now fallen to this state. So where does our future lie?"
That was the critical question. Most of the employees—including even Larry and Sergey—had never really thought deeply about the future. They had jumped on the internet bandwagon without fully considering what lay ahead.
Seeing their hesitation, Mavi, armed with knowledge of the future, patiently continued, "Let me tell you all this—Google's future is just one or two years away! As personal computers become widespread and internet access expands across developed countries, millions, even billions of users will be using our search engine!"
"That will be the era of digitalization and information…"
Mavi's speech seemed to light a fire in Larry, Sergey, and the others. It was as if their previously hazy understanding of the industry was suddenly becoming clear.
"When the true internet era arrives, technology will be so advanced and convenient that hundreds of millions of households will own desktops and laptops," Mavi declared.
And that was only the beginning.
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