乔布斯访谈遗珠精品阅读

2022-06-13 01:30:02

  字幕:七印部落

  Steve Jobs: The lost interview

  史蒂夫 乔布斯:遗失的访谈

  I'm Bob Cringley, 16 years ago when I was making my television series Triumph of the Nerds, I interviewed Steve Jobs. That was in 1995, 10 years earlier Steve had left Apple, following a bruising struggle with John Sculley, the CEO he had brought into the company. At the time of our interview, Steve was running NeXT, the niche computer company he founded after leaving Apple. Little bit we know was within 18 months he would sell NeXT to Apple, and 6 month later he'd be running the place.

  我是Bob Cringley,16年前(1995)我制作《书呆子的胜利》时采访了乔布斯。1985年,乔布斯被他自己引荐的CEO John Sculley排挤出苹果。接受釆访时,乔布斯正在经营他创办的NeXT公司,18个月后苹果收购NeXT,半年后乔布斯重新掌管苹果。

  The way things work in television we use only a part of that interview in the series. And for years we thought the interview was lost for forever because the master tape were missing while being shipped from London to US in the 1990s. Then just a few days ago, series director Paul Sen found a VHS copy of that interview in his garage.

  当年的节目只用了一小段采访,九十年代末采访母带从伦敦运往美国途中遗失,多年来我们一直以为再也看不到完整的采访,然而几天前导演Paul Sen在车库里发现了一份VHS拷贝。

  There are very few TV interviews with Steve Jobs and almost no good ones. They rarely show the charisma, candor and vision that this interview does. And so to honor an amazing man, here's that interview in its entirety. Most of these has never been seen before.

  乔布斯生前很少接受电视采访,如此精彩的访谈更是罕见。它记录了乔布斯的坦率,非凡的魅力和独特的视野。为了向这位奇人致敬,我们几乎一刀未剪,大部分内容是首次公布于众。

  So, how did you get involved, uh, with personal computers?

  你是怎么与个人计算机结缘的?

  Well, I ran into my first computer when I was about 10 or 11. And it’s hard to remember back then but I’m, I’m no fossile now, I’m no fossile …So when I was 10 or 11, that was about 30 years ago and no one had ever seen a computer. To the extent they’d seen them, they’d seen them in the movies.

  我第一次见到计算机是10或11岁。很难回忆当年的情景,我可不是故作老成……大约30多年前,见过电脑的人不多,即使见到,也是在电影里。

  And they were really big boxes with...For some reason they fixated it on the tape drives, as being the icon of what the computer was, or flashing light somehow. And, so nobody had ever seen mysterious, very powerful things that did something in the background. And so to see one and actually get to use one was a real privilege back.

  那时电影里的计算机都是装有开盘机的大柜子,闪闪发光。真正了解计算机功能和原理的人不多,有机会接触计算机的人更是寥寥无几。

  And I got into NASA Ames Research Center and I got to use a time sharing terminal. And so I didn’t actually see a computer but I saw a time sharing terminal. And in those days it’s hard to remember how primitive it was. There were no such things as a computer with a graphics video display. It was literally a printer. It was a teletype printer with keyboard on it.

  我有幸在NASA Ames研究中心见到一台,那还不是一台完整的计算机,只是一台分时共享的终端机。设备非常简陋,连显示器都没有。只是一台带键盘的电传打印机。

  So you would keyboard this commands in and you would wait for a while, and then things would go "tatatatatata", and it would tell you something else.But even with that, it was still remarkable, especially for a 10-year-old, that you could write a program in BASIC, let's say, or FORTRAN.

  你在键盘上输入指令耐心等待,然后它会哒哒哒地输出结果。即便如此这玩意也太奇妙了,尤其是对十岁的男孩而言。你可以用Basic语言或Fortran语言编写程序。

  And actually this machine would sort of take your idea, and it would sort of execute your idea and give you back some results. And if they were the results you predicted, your program really work, and it was incredibly thrilling experience. So I became very err.... captivated by computer.

  机器接受并执行你的设想,然后把结果告诉你。如果结果和设想的一样,说明程序见效了,这太让人激动了。我完全给计算机迷住了。

  And a computer to me was still a little mysterious cause it's at the other end of wire,I had never really seen the actual computer itself. I think I got towards computers after that, saw the inside, and then I was part of this school byHewlett-Packard.

  当然计算机对我而言仍然有些神秘,因为真正的计算机藏在电缆的另一端,而我从未见过。打那以后我总想着计算机,后来我在惠普附近的学校读书。

  When I was 12, I called up Bill Hewlett who lived in Hewlett-Packard at the time. And again it dazed me...But there was no such thing as unlistedtelephone number then, so I can just look into the book and look his name up.

  12岁时我打电话给Bill Hewlett,他当时住在惠普。又是一次奇妙的经历,当时所有的电话号码都印在号码簿里,只要翻电话号码簿,就能查到他的电话。

  And he answered the phone, and I saidHi, My name is Steve Jobs. You don't know me, but I'm 12 years old, and I'm building a frequency counter, and I'd like some spare parts. And so he talked to me for about 20 minutes, I will never forget as long as I live, he gave me the parts, but he also gave me a job working in Hewlett-Packard that summer. And I was 12 years old, and that really made a remarkable influence on me.

  他接了电话,我说我叫Steve Jobs,你不认识我,我12岁,打算做频率计数器,需要些零件。我们聊了大概20分钟。我永远记得他不但给了零件,还邀请我夏天去惠普打工。我才12岁,这件事对我产生了不可思议的影响。

  Hewlett-Packardwas really the only company I'd ever seen in my life at that age. And it forms my view of what a company was and how well they treated their employees.

  惠普是我见过的第一家公司,它让我懂得了什么是公司,如何善待员工。

  You know, at that time, I mean they didn't know about cholesterol back then. And then at that time they used to bring a big car full of donuts and coffee out at 10 o'clock every morning, and everyone take a coffee and have a donut break, just little things like that.It was clear that the company recognized its true values was its employees.

  那时还没有胆固醇偏高一说。每天上午十点公司拖来满满一卡车的甜面圈和咖啡,大家停下工作喝杯咖啡,品尝甜面圈。很明显惠普明白公司真正的价值在于员工。

  So anyway, since with HP and I started going up to their Palo Alto Research Labs every Tuesday night, with a small group of people to meet some of the researchers and staffs. And I saw the first desktop computer ever made which was the HP 1900.

  之后我每周二晚都去惠普的Palo Alto实验室,与一些研究人员见面。我见到了第一台台式计算机HP 1900。

  It was that as big as a suitcase but it actually had a small Cathode Ray Tube(CRT) displayed in it. And it was completed self-contained. There was no wire going off behind the curtain somewhere, and I fell in love with it. And you could program BASIC in APL. And I would just, for hours, you know, get right up to HP and just hang around that machine and write programs for it.

  大概有行李箱那么大,装着小小的CRT显示器,它是一台可以独立工作的一体机,我很喜欢。它使用Basic或APL编程,我常常数小时地守着它编程。

  So that was the early days. And I met Steve Wozniak around that time too, maybe a little earlier, when I was about 14, 15 years old. And we immediately hit it off, and he was the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did. So I like him a lot and he was, uh, maybe 5 years older than I.

  那是早些年,也差不多也是在那时我认识了Steve Wozniak。我大约十四五岁,可能还要小些。我俩很投缘,他是我遇到的第一个比我更懂电子知识的人。他大概比我大五岁,我很喜欢他。

  He gone off to college and got kicked out for pulling pranks. And he was living with his parents and going to the ends of the local junior college. so we became best friends and started doing projects together. We read about the story in Esquire magazine about this guy named Captain Crunch, who could supposedly make free telephone calls, you heard about this I'm sure.

  他因为制造恶作剧被大学开除。刚刚回到父母家,正在修大专的结业课程。我们成了最要好的朋友,开始一起做项目。我们在《Esquire》杂志上看到有个叫Captain Crunch的人。据说他有办法打免费电话,你肯定也听说过。

  And we again, we were captivated. How could anybody do this? And we thought it must be a hoax. And we started looking through libraries, looking for the secret tones that would allow you to do this. And it turned out that we were at Stanford Linear Accelerate Center one night, and way in vaults of their technical library, way down at the last bookshelf in the corner bottom rack.We found an AT&T Technical Journal that laid out the whole thing.

  我们很好奇,怎么可能做到呢?多半是吹牛。我们开始泡图书馆,寻找打免费电话的秘密。一天晚上我们去了斯坦福线性加速中心,在科技图书馆角落的最后一排书架上,我们找到一份AT&T技术手册,揭开了所有的秘密。

  And that's another moment I'll never forget. We saw this journal and we thought "My God! It's all real." And so we set out to build a device to make these tones. And the way it work was, you know when you make long distance call you used to hear "dududududu" right in the background. They were tones that sound like the touch tone you make on your phone, but with different frequencies so you can make them.

  我永远忘不了那一刻。我们看着这份手册,心想老天这一切都是真的。于是我们着手制作能够发出这种音频的装置。它的原理是这样的,我们打长途电话时会听到嘟嘟的声音,听起来像拨电话的按键音,频率不同,但可以模拟。

  It turned out that was the signal from one telephone computer to another, controlling the computers in the network. And AT&T made a fatal flaw when they designed an original telephone network, digital telephone network, was they put the signal in from computer to computer in the same band as your voice, which meant if you could make those same signals, you could put it right into the handset. And literally, the entire AT&T international phone network would think that you were an AT&T computer. So after three weeks we finally built a box like this, it worked.

  实际上那是从一台计算机传到另一台计算机的信号,它可以控制交换机的工作。AT&T公司设计的数字电话网络有严重漏洞,他们使用与声音相同的频段来发送控制信号。也就是说只要你模拟出相同的音频信号,通过听筒发送出去,整个AT&T的国际电话网就会把你当成一台AT&T计算机。三周后我们做出了这样的一个装置,真的管用。

  And I remember the first call we made was down to, uh, LA, one of Woz‘s relatives. We dialed the wrong number. But we woke some guy up in the middle of the night. We were yelling at him like ‘Don’t you understand we made this call for free!’ and this person didn’t appreciate that.But it was miraculous.

  我记得第一个电话想打给Woz住在洛杉矶的亲戚。我们拨错了号码,大半夜把某个家伙吵醒了。我们兴奋地冲他嚷嚷:打这个电话是免费的。对方一点也不感激我们,但这已经是奇迹了。

  And we build these little boxes to do Blue Box as it was called. And we put a little note in the bottom of them, and our logo was he’s got the whole world in his hands, hahaha. And, they work. We built the best blue box in the world, it was all digital, no adjustments.

  我们做出了这个称为“蓝盒子”的装置。盒子底部贴着我们的logo,写着“世界握在手中”,这是世界上最好的“蓝盒子”,全数字化,简便易用。

  And, so you could go to the pay phone, you could, you know, take a trunk over the white plane, and take a satellite over the Europe, and then go to Turkey, take a cable back to Atlanta. You could go around the world, you could go around the world 5 or 6 times cause we learned all the codes and how to get on the satellite and stuff. And then you could call the pay phone next doors, so you could shout at the phone, after about a minute it would come to another phone, it was, it was miraculous.

  你可以拿着它去电话亭轻松拨打长途电话,打卫星电话去欧洲、去土耳其,然后接有线电话打回亚特兰大,你可以满世界跑,跑五六趟,因为我们知道所有的交换密码。你可以给家门口的电话亭打电话,在家喊话,隔一会电话亭就能听到,真是奇妙。

  And you might ask what so interesting about that. What so interesting is that we were young, and what we learned was that we could build something, ourselves, that could control billions of dollars worth of infrastructure in the world. That was what we learned, was that, us, two, you know, we didn’t know much, we could build the little thing that could control a giant thing. And that was an incredible lesson. I don’t think there would have ever been an Apple computer had there not been Blue Box.

  你也许会问这样做有意思吗?它的意义在于虽然我们年纪还小,但已经意识到我们有能力做出控制庞大系统的工具。这就是我们得到的启发,我们两个人尽管懂得不多,但我们制造的小玩意可以控制庞然大物。这是不可思议的经历,没有“蓝盒子”就不会有苹果电脑。

  Woz said you called the Pope?

  Woz说你们给教皇打了电话?

  Yeah, we did call the Pope. He, uh, he pretended to be Henry Kissinger. And we get the number of the Vatican and we called the pope. They started waking people up in the hierarchy, you know,like that. And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope. When finally we burst out laughing they realized that we weren’t Henry Kissinger. And, so we never got the talk to the Pope but it was very funny, so...

  没错,。我们弄到梵蒂冈的电话号码,打电话给教皇。教会的重要人物逐个被叫醒,最后终于派人把教皇叫起来。要不是我们憋不住哈哈大笑起来,。虽然没跟教皇通上话,但实在是搞笑。

  So the jump from Blue Boxes to personal computers, what sparked that?

  你们是怎么从“蓝盒子”想到做个人电脑的?

  Well, necessity. In a sense that there was time sharing computers available, and there was a time sharing company in Mountain View that we could get free time on. So, but we need is a terminal. And we couldn’t afford one. So we designed and built one. And that was the first thing we ever did, we built this terminal.

  这很自然。当时Mountain View有分时共享计算机,我们可以免费上机。但我们需要一个终端,买不起就自己动手设计制作。这个终端是我们的第一件作品。

  So what an Apple I was, was really an extension of this terminal, putting a micro process around the back end. That what it was. It’s really a kind of two separate projects put together. So first we built the terminal and then we built the Apple I.

  Apple I是这台终端的扩展,它用微处理器代替了后台主机。就像是把两个独立的项目整合在一起,一开始是做终端,然后才是Apple I。

  And we, we really built it for ourselves because we couldn’t afford to buy anything. And we scavenge parts here and there and stuff. And we built this all by hand. I mean it take, you know, 40 to 80 hours to build one, and it would always be breaking cause all these little tiny wires. So it turned out that a lot of our friends want to build them, too.

  自己动手做完全是因为我们买不起,我们四处收集零件,全部手工制作,做一台大概要40~80小时,那些小零件太难安装了。后来周围很多朋友也想要。

  And although they could scavenge most of the parts as well, they didn’t have the sort of skills to build them that we had acquired by training ourselves through building them. So we ended up helping them build most of their computers and it was really taking up all of our time.

  虽然他们也能弄到零件,但他们不具备制作经验和技能。我们只好替他们做,这事占用了我们所有时间。

  And we thought, you know, if we could make, what’s called printed circuit board, which is a piece of fabric glass with copper on both sides that etch to form the wire, so that you can build a computer, you know, you can build an Apple I in a few hours instead of 40 hours.

  于是我们想到制作印刷电路板,就是在镀铜的玻璃纤维板两面腐蚀出铜导线,采用印刷电路板,只要几小时就能做出一台Apple I。

  If we only had one of those, we could sell them to all of our friends for, you know as much as it cost to make them, make our money back. And everybody would be happy, we say, we get a life again.

  有了这些,我们能把电路板以成本价卖给朋友,把钱赚回来这样皆大欢喜,我们也可以休息休息。

  So we did that. I sold my Volkswagen bus and Steve sold his calculator, we got enough money to pay a friend of us to make the art work to make a printed circuit board. And we made some printed circuit boards, and we sold some to our friends, and I was trying to sell the rest of them so we can get micro bus and calculator back….

  说干就干,我把玩具大众车卖了,Woz卖了计算器。我们凑够了钱,请朋友设计印刷电路板。电路板做出来后,卖给了朋友。我想把剩下的也卖了,把玩具车和计算器赎回来。

  And I walked into the first computer store in the world, which was the Byte Shop of a Mountain View, I think, on El Camino. It metamorphosized within an adult bookstore, but at this point, it was the Byte Shop. And the person I ran into, I think his name was Paul Terrell. He said ”You know, I’ll take 50 of those”, I said “this is great”. “ But I want them fully assembled.”

  我去了世界上第一家计算机商店,Mountain View的字节商店,那时它藏在一家成人书店里。我见到了老板Paul Terrell,Paul说“我预订50套”,我说“太好了。”“但我要完全组装好的计算机”。

  We never thought of this before, so we then kicked this around, we thought “Why not? Why not try this?” And so I spent the next several days on the phone talking with electronic parts distributors, we didn’t know what we were doing, and we said, “look, here is the parts that we need.” We figured we’d buy a hundred sets of parts, build 50, sell them to the Byte Shop for twice what they cost us to build them, therefore paying for the whole hundred and then we have 50 left so we could make our profits by selling those.

  我们从没想过出售整机,不过还是答应了,何乐而不为呢?我花了好几天打电话联系电子元件批发商,告诉对方需要哪些零件,我们完全是摸着石头过河。我们打算买100套零件,做好后以两倍的成本价卖给字节商店50台,剩下50台就是我们的利润。

  So we convince these distributors to give us the parts on next 30 days credit. We have no idea what that meant... “30? sure... sign in here”, so we have 30 days to pay them. So we bought the parts, we built the products and we sold 50 of them to the Byte Shop in Palo Alto, and got paid in 29 days and went to pay off the parts people in 30 days.

  我们说服批发商赊给我们零件,30天后还款。我俩就这样懵懵懂懂地拿到了零件。Apple I做好后,卖了50台给字节商店。第29天才收到账款,第30天正好付清赊零件的钱。

  And so we were in business, but we have the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, the profit wasn’t in liquid currency, our profit was in 50 computers sitting in the corner. So then all of a sudden, we had to think, wow, how we gonna realise our profit? So we started thinking about distribution, are there any other computer stores?

  我们就这样做起了生意,不过也碰到利润危机。我们的利润不是现金,而是堆在角落的50台电脑。我们不得不考虑如何实现利润。我们想继续寻找批发商,是不是还有其他计算机商店?

  We started calling the other computer stores we had heard across the country. We just kind of eased into business that way. The third key figure in the creation of Apple was the former Intel executive Mike Markkula. I ask Steve how he came aboard. We were designing the Apple II. And we really had some, some much higher ambitions for the Apple II.

  我们打电话给全国的计算机商店,就这样做起了生意。苹果的第三位关键创始人是英特尔前高管Mike Markkula。我问Steve他是怎么入伙的。当时我们正在设计Apple II。我们对它充满了期待。

  Woz's ambitions were he wanted to add color grahpics. My ambition was that, it was very clear to me that a bunch of hardware hobbists, they could assemble around the computers, or at least take our board, and add the transformers for the power apply, the case, the keyboard, and go get, and etc. You know, go get rest of the stuff.

  Woz希望实现彩色图形界面。我希望…当时有一大群硬件爱好者,他们自己组装电脑。或者用我们的主板,自己安装电源、键盘等等。

  For everyone of those, there were a thousand of people, they couldn't do that but wanted to mess around with programming, software hobbists, just like I had been, you know, when I was 10, discovering my computer. And so my dream for the Apple II was to sell the first real packaged computer, packaged personal computer. You didn't have to be a hardware hobbist at all.

  还有许多人是软件爱好者,他们只想写程序。就像我10岁刚刚接触计算机那样。所以我希望Apple II成为第一款功能齐备的个人电脑。就算你不懂硬件也能轻松使用。

  And so combining both of those dreams, we actually designed a product. And I found the designer and we designed the packaging and everything. And we wanted to make it out of plastic and we had the whole thing ready to go. But we needed some money for tooling the cases and things like that. We needed a few thousand of dollars. And this was way beyond me.

  这就是我们对Apple II的基本设想。我找到设计师,设计了所有细节。我们还打算使用塑料机身,什么都想好了。可我们资金不足,还缺几万美元。

  So I went looking for some venture capital. And I ran across one venture capitalist name Don Valentine, who came over to the garage and he later said I look like a renegade from the human race, that was his famous quote. And he said he wasn't willing to invest us but he recommended a few people to mine. One of those was Mike Markkula.

  于是我开始寻找风险投资。我找到Don Valentine,他还来参观了我的车库。他说我看起来像人类的叛逆者,这话成了他的名言。虽然他不打算投资,但推荐了几个人给我。其中就有Mike Markkula。

  So I called Mike on the phone and he came over. And Mike had retired for about 30 or 31 from the Intel, he was a product manager there and got a little bit stock. And, you know, like made a million bucks on stock options, which at that time was quite a lot of money.

  我给Mike打电话,跟他见了面。Mike以前是英特尔的产品经理。他大概30岁离开英特尔,手里有英特尔的股票。他靠股票期权赚了一百多万,当时非常富有。

  And he a bit invest in oiling and gas deals and kind of staying at home, doing that sort of thing. And he, I think, was, was kind of ask him get back into something. And Mike and I hit it off very well. And so Mike said, "OK, I'll invest", after a few weeks and I said "No, we don't want your money , we want you." So we convince Mike to actually throw in with us, as an euqal partner.

  他在家投资石油、天然气之类的生意。我感觉他想干一番大事业,我俩聊得很投机。最后Mike答应投资。几周后我说我们不光要钱,我们希望你入伙。"于是Mike成了我们的合作伙伴。

  And so Mike put in some money, and Mike put in himself, and three of us went off. We took this design, and it was virtually done as an Apple II, and tooled it up, and announced it, a few months later at the West Coast Computer Faire.

  他不仅投资,还参与创业,我们就这样起步了。我们拿出Apple II的设计,召开新闻发布会。几个月后Apple II首次在西海岸计算机展览会上露面。

  What was that like?

  情况怎么样?

  It was great. We got the best, you know this West Coast Computer Faire was small at that time, but to us it was very large, and, so we had this fantastic booth there, er, we had a projection television showing the Apple II and showing its graphics which today look very cool but at that time were by far the most advanced graphics on the personal computer. And I think, you know, my recollection is that we stole the show, and a lot of dealers and distributors started lining up and we were off and running.

  妙不可言,Apple II最受欢迎。那时西海岸计算机展览会规模不大,但对我们而言已经很大了。我们在展台上用投影展示Apple II和它的图形界面。现在看有些简单,但当时是PC上最先进的图形界面。我们出尽了风头。批发商和经销商蜂拥而至,进展非常顺利。

  How old were you?

  当时你多大?

  21.

  21。

  21? you were 21 and you were a big success, you have just sort of done it by the seat of your pants. You don’t have any particular training on this. How do you learn to run a company?

  21岁就这么大成功。可你从来没有这方面的经验,完全是凭直觉。你是怎么学会管理公司的?

  er… you know, throughout the years in business, I found something, which was I always ask why we do things, and the answers you inevitably get are “oh that’s just the way it’s done”, nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody thinks about things very deeply in business, that’s what I found. I’d like to give you an example.

  在生意场多年,我发现一个现象。我做事前总问为什么。可得到答案永远是“我们向来这样做”。没人反思为什么这么做,我给你举个例子。

  When we were building our apple Is in the garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into factory in the Apple II days, the accounting had this notion of the standard cost, where you kind of set a standard cost at the end of a quarter, and you adjust with the varies, and I kept asking why do we do this?

  我们在车库里组装Apple I时,成本算得清清楚楚。可工厂生产Apple II时,财务部使用的是标准成本。每个季度估算标准成本,然后根据实际情况调整。于是我不断追问,为什么要这样做?

  And the answer is “that’s just the way it’s done”, and after about 6 months of digging into this, what I realized was the reason you do it is because you don’t really have good enough controls to know about how much cost, so you guess, and you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason why you don’t know how much it cost is because your information systems aren’t good enough. So ...but nobody said it that way.

  得到的答复是,这是一贯的做法。6个月后我发现其实是因为我们无法精确计算成本,所以只能先估算,然后进行修正。根本原因是信息管理系统不够完善。但没有人承认这一点。

  So later on when we design this automatic factory for Mackintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts, and know exactly what something costs to the second. So in business, a lot of things are … I call it “folklore”, they are done because they were done yesterday, and the day before. And ...so what that means is that if you are willing to sort of ask a lot of questions, think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast, not the hardest thing in the world.

  后来我们为Mackintosh设计自动化工厂,抛开这些陋习,做到了精确控制所有成本。生意场上有很多约定俗成的规定,我称为陈规陋习,因为以前这样做,所以就一直这样做下去。所以只要你多提问多思考,脚踏实地工作,你很快就能的学会经商,这不是什么难事。

  Not rocket science?

  不是什么深奥的技术?

  It’s not rocket science.

  不是。

  Now...when you were first coming in contact with these computers and inventing them before the HP1900, you do talk about writing programs. What sort of programs? What do people actually do with these things?

  最早接触HP1900时,你谈到自己编程的事。都是些什么样的程序?用途是什么?

  See what we did with them, well, I would give you a simple example … when we were designing our blue-box we used… we wrote a lot of custom programs to help us design it. you know to do a lot of the dog work for us in terms of calculating, master frequencies with sub devisor to get the other frequencies and things like that…we use computer quite a bit to calculate how much error we would get in the frequencies, and how much can be tolerated. so we use them in the work, but much more importantly, it does nothing to do with using them for anything practical…have to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process, to actually learn how to think.

  举个简单的例子,我们设计“蓝盒子”时,写了很多程序,用来处理繁琐的计算工作,计算主频、分频之类的东西,还计算不同频率的差错率和容错性。编程可以帮助我们完成工作,它没有明确的实用性,重要的是我们把它看作思考的镜子,学习如何思考。

  I think the greatest value of learning how to think.... I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think, it’s like going to law school, I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school may actually be useful coz it teaches you how to think in a certain way. In the same way the computer programming teaches you in a slightly different way how to think... And so … I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something everybody takes in a year in their life, one of the courses they take is, you know learning how to program.

  我认为学习思考最大的价值在于... 我觉得所有美国人都应该学习编程,学习一门编程语言,学习编程教你如何思考,就像学法律一样,学法律的人未必都成为律师,但法律教你一种思考方式。同样编程会教你另一种思考方式,所以我把计算机科学看成基础教育,是每个人都应该花一年时间学习的课程。

  I learned APL, you know, obviously, is part of the reason why I'm going through life sideways.

  我学了APL,很明显它丰富了我的人生。

  Was it you look back and consider it, enriching experience that taught you to think in a different way, or not?

  你有没有觉得它教给你独特的思考方式?

  Err... No, not that particularly. Other language perhaps more so, I started with APL. So I mean, obviously, the Apple II was a terrific success, just incredibly so. And the company grew like topsy and eventually went public. and you guys got really rich. What's it like to get rich?

  他语言也许更明显些,我最先学的APL。显然Apple II很成功,公司飞速发展,成功上市。 你们都成了富翁,富有的感觉如何?

  It's very interesting. I was worth, err, about over an million dollars when I was 23, and over 10 million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25. And it wasn't that important, Because I never did it for the money. I think money is wonderful thing because it enables you to do things; it enables you to invest ideas that don't have a short term payback and things like that. But especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing.

  很有趣,我23岁拥有超过100万美元的财产。24岁超过了一千万,25岁超过了一亿. 但这不重要,我不是冲着钱去的。 钱允许你做想做的事. 钱让你实现那些短期内看不到效益的创意. 但钱不是最重要的。

  The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were going to enable people do with these products. So I didn't think about it a great deal and I never sold any stock, and just really believe the company would do very well over the long term. Central to the development of the personal computers was the pioneering work being done at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which Steve first visited in 1979. I had 3 or 4 people who kept bugging me that I get my rear over the Xerox Park and see what they are doing. And so I finally did. I went over there, and they were very kind and they showed me what they were working on.

  重要的是公司、人才、产品,是产品带给客户的价值. 所以我不太看重金钱,我从不出售苹果的股票。我相信公司会发展得越来越好。 1979年乔布斯第一次拜访施乐Palo Alto研究中心, 在PC成形之初,Palo Alto研究中心起到了关键作用。 同事一直怂恿我去施乐公司,看看他们在做什么。于是我去了,对方非常友好地展示了他们的研究。

  And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't ever really see the other two. One of the things they show me was object oriented programming, they show me that. But I didn't even see that. The other one they show me was really a network computer system, they had over hundred Alto computers all network using email, etc, I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was graphically user interface. I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed, when we saw it, it was incomplete, they had done bunch of things wrong, but we didn‘t know that at that time, it’s still though they have the germ of the idea was there, and they had done it very well…

  他们展示了三个项目, 但我完全被第一个项目吸引了,另两个没怎么看。 我记得有一个项目是面向对象编程,我没怎么看. 还有一个是计算机网络系统。 当时他们已经有上百台联网的计算机,可以互发email,也没有吸引我。吸引我的是图形用户界面,那是我见过的最漂亮的东西。虽然现在看来它还很粗糙,有瑕疵,但是当时我们还看不出来,这个创意太棒了,他们做得很好。

  And within, you know, 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday, it was obvious, I mean you can argue about how many years it would take, and you can argue about who the winners and losers might be, but you couldn’t argue about the inevitability it was so obvious, you would have felt the same way had you been there.

  很快我就意识到所有计算机都应该变成这样。我们可以争论要久后能现实,谁会是最后的赢家。但是没人会质疑图形界面是必然的发展方向。如果你当时在场,你也会这样想的。

  You know, that’s … those were exactly words Paul Allen used. It’s really interesting.

  Paul Allen也说过同样的话, 真有趣。

  Yeah, it’s obvious.

  是的,显而易见。

  But there were two visits… you saw and you brought some people back with you, and what happened the next time, they made you cool your heels for a while.

  听说你去参观了两次,第二次你带了些人去。对方是不是让你们坐了冷板凳?

  No.

  没有。

  Someone (a woman) said something.

  有人说过。

  what do you mean?

  我不明白。

  Well, she did the demo when the group came back; she said that she argued against doing it for 3 hours, and they took you to other places showing you other things while she was arguing.

  她说是她负责向你们展示的图形界面。起先她拒绝展示,大约僵持了3个钟头。这期间对方只好先带你们参观其他的项目。

  Oh… you mean they were reluctant to show us the demo. oh, I have no idea. I don’t remember that, I thought you meant something else.

  你是说他们不太乐意让我们参观。这个我一点不知道,没印象了。

  So they were very skillful.

  看来对方掩饰得很巧妙。

  Yeah, but they did show us. And it’s good they showed us because the technology crashed and burned Xerox, they used to call...

  是的,不过他们还是让我们参观了。还好他们让我们参观了,因为施乐后来被拖垮了……

  Why?

  为什么?

  what’s that? Why?

  怎么啦?为什么?

  Yeah, why?

  对,为什么?

  I actually thought a lot about that, and I learned more about that with John Sculley later on and I think I understand that now pretty well. What happens is, like with John Sculley, err…John came from Pepsi co, and they almost would change their product once every 10 years, to them, new product is like a new size of bottle, so if you are a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much, so who influences the success of Pepsi co?

  我一直在思考这个问题。认识约翰•斯卡利以后,我现在有了清晰的答案。是这样,就像斯卡利一样,他以前在百事可乐工作,他们的产品可以数十年不变,顶多更换可乐瓶子的尺寸。所以产品部门的人说话没什么份量。在百事公司谁最有发言权?

  The sales and marketing people, therefore they would once get promoted and therefore they would once run the company. Well, for Pepsi co, that might have been okay. But it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies, that they get monopolies, like old IBM and Xerox. If you are a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copy or a better computer, so what?

  是营销部门的人,他们很容易升职从而掌管公司。对百事来说,这不是件坏事。问题是垄断科技公司也有这种情况,比如IBM和施乐。即便IBM和施乐的产品经理能做出更棒的产品,那又怎么样?

  When you have a monopolies market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people who can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people.And they end up running the companies, and the product people get driven out of this decision making forms. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. It... Sort of the product sensibility, and... The product genius brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running this companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

  这些已经垄断市场的公司很难靠新产品提高业绩。要想提高业绩还得依靠营销部门。于是他们逐渐控制公司,而产品部门的人被边缘化。公司就丧失了打造优秀的产品热情和能力。产品部门的功臣慢慢被不懂产品的人排挤。

  They have no conception of craftsmanship that’s required … that take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers. So that’s what happens in Xerox, the people in Xerox PARC used to call the people who run the Xerox tonerheads, and these tonerheads would come out to the Xerox and PARC says they have no clue of what they are saying.

  后者通常缺少研发产品的技术和能力。而且也并非打心底愿意替客户解决问题。施乐公司就是这样。施乐研究院的人私底下把管理层叫做墨粉脑袋,而这些管理人员完全不明白为什么被嘲笑。

  For our audience, toner is what?

  观众可能不清楚墨粉是什么?

  Toner is what you put in a copier; you know the toner you add to an industrial copier?

  就是复印机里用的墨粉。

  The black stuff?

  那个黑色的东西?

  The black stuff, yeah. Basically they were copier heads, just have no clue about what a computer can do, and so they just grabbed the feed from great victory of the computer industry, Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been company 10 times of its size, could have been IBM, Could have been IBM in the 1990’s, …. could have been the Microsoft in the 1990’s. So ... But anyway that’s all ancient history, doesn’t really matter anymore.

  是的。这些墨粉脑袋压根不知道计算机能做什么,他们不过是碰巧赶上了计算机产业的顺风车,施乐本来有机会把规模扩大10倍,独占整个行业。就像90年代的IBM或微软,不过都已经过去了,不重要了。

  Sure. You mentioned IBM, when IBM entered the market, was that a daunting thing for you at apple?

  的确如此。你提到IBM,IBM进入PC市场是不是对苹果构成了威胁?

  Oh sure. I mean… here was apple, you know a 1 billion dollar company, and here was IBM, at that time, probably about 30 some billion company entering the market, sure. it was very scary. Err... we made a very big mistake though, that IBM’s first product was terrible. It was really bad. We made a mistake of… not realizing that a lot of other people have strong vested interests to help IBM to make it better. So ...If it has just been IBM, it would have crashed and burned. But IBM did have I think a genius in their approach, which was to have a lot of people have vested interests in their success. And that’s what saved them in the end.

  那当然,苹果当时的市值只有10亿,而IBM大约是300亿。确实让人胆寒,尽管IBM的第一款产品十分糟糕,但我们太轻敌了,我们忽略了很多人的利益与IBM捆绑在一起,如果没有这些帮助,IBM早就输了。IBM的确很高明,它建立了强大的同盟阵营,终于救了它一命。

  So you came back from visiting Xerox PARC with a vision, and how do you implement the vision?

  你从施乐研究中心找到了灵感,如何付诸行动呢?

  Well, I got our best people together and started to get them working on this. The problem was we hired a bunch of people from HP, and they didn’t get this idea, they didn’t get it. I remember having dramatic arguments with some of these people, who thought the coolest thing in user interface was the soft keys at the bottoms of the screen, you know. They have no concept of proportionally spaced fonts, no concept of the mouse.

  马上召集身边的骨干来实现这个创意。问题是从惠普跳槽来的几个人不理解图形界面的本质,我跟他们大吵过几次,他们觉得图形界面就是在屏幕下方加上几个按钮,完全不明白比例字体和鼠标的重要性。

  As a matter of fact, I remember arguing with these folks, people screaming at me, it could take us 5 years to engineer a mouse and it would cost 300 dollars to build. I finally got fed up and just went outside and found David Kelly design, I asked him to design me a mouse in 90 days and we had a mouse that we can build for 15 bucks and that was phenomenally reliable. So I found that, in a way... Apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea in many ways. That was core team did, but there was a larger team that mostly had come from HP that didn’t have a clue.

  我记得他们和我争执不下,冲我大嚷大叫。说什么研发鼠标至少要5年,成本不会低于300美元。把我搞烦了,我找到David Kelly设计公司。对方90天后设计出了质量稳定的鼠标,成本只要15美元。我这才发现苹果没有足够人才来实现这个创意。核心团队有这个能力,但是许多从惠普跳槽来的成员不行。

  It comes to this issue of professionalism, there’s dark side and light side? Isn’t it?

  这涉及到职业分工的问题,每个人特长不同,不是吗?

  No, you know what it is... No, it’s not dark and light. People get confused, companies get confused, when they started getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think well somehow there are some magic in the process, of how success is created... so they started to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content…that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM.

  不,这不是擅长与否的问题,而是他们犯糊涂,公司也在犯糊涂。公司规模扩大之后,就会变得因循守旧,他们觉得只要遵守流程,就能奇迹般地继续成功,于是开始推行严格的流程制度,很快员工就把遵守流程和纪律当作工作本身。IBM就是这样走下坡路的。

  IBM has the best process people in the world, they just forgot about the content. And that’s so what happened a little bit at apple too, we had a lot of people who are great at management process, they just didn’t have a clue at the content, and in my career, I found that the best people you know are the ones who really understand the content, and they are pain in the butt to manage, you know but you put up with it because they are so great at the content, and that’s what makes a great product, it’s not process, it’s content.

  IBM的员工是世界上最守纪律的,他们恰恰忽略了产品,苹果也有这个问题,我们有很多擅长管理流程的人才,但是他们忽略了产品本身,经验告诉我,优秀的人才是那些一心想着产品的人,虽然这些人很难管理,但是我宁愿和他们一起工作,光靠流程和制度做不出好产品。

  So we had a little bit of that problem at apple. And that problem eventually resulted in the Lisa, which had its moment of brilliance, in a way it was very far ahead at its time…but that was not enough fundamental content understanding. Apple drifted too far away from its roots. To these HP guys, 10,000 dollars was cheap, to our market, to our distribution channels, 10,000 dollars was impossible. So, we produced the product which completely mismatch for the culture of our company, for the image of our company, for the distribution channels of our company, for the current customers. None of them could afford a product like that. And it failed.

  苹果也有这方面的问题。这些问题最终导致Lisa电脑失败。Lisa是一款非常超前的产品,但是它过于超前了,以致偏离了产品的宗旨,在这些从惠普跳槽来的人眼里,1万美元的零售价不贵,但是市场和经销商觉得这个价格太离谱了。Lisa的定位彻底背离了苹果的企业文化,背离了公司的形象,也背离了经销商与消费者的期待。苹果的老顾客根本买不起这么贵的产品。所以它失败了。

  Like you and John Couch fought for leadership?

  就如同你同John Couch对领导权的争夺一般?

  Absolutely, and I lost. That’s correct.

  是的,我输了。

  How did they come about?

  为什么会起争执?

  Well... I thought Lisa was in serious trouble, and I thought Lisa was going off this very bad direction as I have just described, and err... I couldn't convince enough people and the senior management of Apple, but that was the case...we ran the places as team for most part. So I lost, and at that point of time, you know I bruted for a few months…but it was not very long after that it really occurred to me that if we didn't do something here, the Apple II was running out of gas, and we needed to do something with this technology fast, or else Apple might cease to exist as the company that it was. So I formed a small team to do the Mackintosh, and we were on a mission from God to save Apple.

  我认为Lisa当时面临困境,而且越陷越深,我没能争取到大多数高管的支持,所以我也无能为力,只能服从团队的决定。我失败了,那段时间我很消沉。但我很快意识到如果不振作起来,Apple II会重蹈覆辙,应该尽快利用这些新技术,否则苹果将止步不前。所以我组织了一个小组研发Mackintosh,就像是奉了上帝的旨意来拯救苹果。

  No one else thought so, but it turned out we were right. And as we evolved the Mac, it became very clear that, this was also a way of re-inventing Apple. We re-invented everything, we re-invented manufactures, I visited probably 80 automatic factories in Japan, and we built the world's first automatic computer factory in the world, in California here, so we adopted the 16,000 Micro Processors that leads ahead, we negotiated the price that was 1/5 of what Lisa was going to pay for, because we were using much higher volume, and we really started to design this product that can be sold for a thousand dollars, called the Mackintosh, and we didn't make it.

  其他人并不这样想,但事实证明我们做的没错,在研发Mac的过程中,我越发觉得我们是在重建苹果。我们大刀阔斧地改革,重新设计了生产线,我去日本参观了大约80家自动化工厂,然后回加州建了世界上第一条生产计算机的自动生产线,我们采购了1万6千颗最先进的微处理器,由于数采购量大,价格不到Lisa的1/5,我们打算把Mackintosh打造成一款平价产品,可惜没成功。

  We could have sold it at 2000 dollars, but we came out 2,500, and we spent 4 years in our lives doing that and we built the product, we built the automatic factory, the machine to build the machine, we built a completely new distribution system, and we built a completely different marketing approach, and I think we worked pretty well.

  原定价格是2000美元,最终价格是2500美元,这款产品花了我们4年时间。搭建了自动化工厂和生产线,采用了全新的销售渠道和营销方法。我觉得我们干得很出色。

  Now, you motivated this team, I mean you have to guide them...

  是你在鞭策这个团队,引导他们。

  We built the team.

  团队是我们建立的。

  You built the team, motivated, guided them dealt with them. We have interviewed just lots and lots of people from the Mackintosh team, and you know what keeps coming down to is your passion, and your vision, how do you order your priorities in there? What's important to you in the development of a product?

  你建立了团队,而且负责鞭策和引导它。我们采访过很多Mackintosh团队成员。他们都提到你的工作热情和独特的想法。你是如何处理工作的轻重缓急的?你觉得什么对产品最重要?

  You know... one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious "disease", and that "disease", I have seen other people get it too, it's the "disease" of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people, "here is this great idea!", then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there is just tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve the great idea, it changes and grows, it never comes out like it starts.

  我离开苹果以后,发生了一件几乎毁掉苹果的事。John Sculley有个严重的"毛病",我在其他人身上也见到过。那就盲目乐观,以为光凭创意就能取得成功。他觉得只要想到绝妙的主意,公司就一定可以实现,问题在于优秀的创意与产品之间隔着巨大的鸿沟,实现创意的过程中,想法会发生变化甚至变得面目全非。

  Because you learn a lot more, you get into the subtleties, you also find ... There's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make, I mean you know there are just certain things you can't make electrons do, there are certain things you can't make plastic do, or glass do, and... or factories do, robots do, and you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain. These concepts, and fitting them all together in... and kind of continuing to push and fit them together and in new and in different ways to get what you want. And everyday you discover something new that is new problem or new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. It's that process that is the magic.

  因为你会发现新东西,思考也更深入,你不得不一次次权衡利弊,做出让步和调整。总有些问题是电子设备解决不了的,是塑料、玻璃材料无法实现的,或者是工厂和机器人做不到的。设计一款产品,你得把五千多个问题装进脑子里,必须仔细梳理,尝试各种组合,才能获得想要的结果。每天都会发现新问题,也会产生新灵感,这个过程很重要。

  So we had a lot of great ideas when we started, but what I always felt that a team of people doing something that's really believing is like ... When I was a young kid, there was a widowed man lived up the street. And he was in his eighties, he was a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit... I think he might pay me for cutting mow his lawn or something …One day he said "come along to my garage, I want to show you something."

  无论开始时有多少绝妙的主意,我一直觉得团队的合作就像是…我小时候,街上住着一位独居老人,他大概80岁,看上去凶巴巴的,我认识他,我想让他雇我帮他修剪草坪,有一天他说"到我车库来,我给你看点东西"。

  And he pulled out his dusty old rock tumbler, that was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them, and he said "come out with me", we went out to the back, and we got some just rocks, some regular old ugly rocks, and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grits powder, and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on, and he said, "come back tomorrow".

  他拖出一台布满灰尘的磨石机,一边是马达,一边是研磨罐,用皮带连着。他说"跟我来",我们到屋后捡了些很普通的石头。我们把石头倒进研磨罐,加上溶剂和沙砾。他盖好盖子,开动电机,对我说"明天再来"。

  And this can was making rack of his stones, and I came back the next day, and we opened the can, and we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks, err... the same common stones that go in through rubbing against each other like this, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks. And that's always been in my mind that, my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other. and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

  磨石机开始研磨石头,第二天我又去了。我们打开罐子,看到了打磨得异常圆润美丽的石头。看上去普普通通的石头就像这样互相磨擦着。互相碰撞,发出噪音,最终变成了光滑美丽的石头。我一直用这件事比喻竭尽全力工作的团队。正是通过团队合作,通过这些精英的相互碰撞。通过辩论、对抗、争吵、合作,相互打磨。磨砺彼此的想法,才能创造出美丽的"石头"。

  So it's hard to explain, and it's certainly not the result of one person. I mean people like symbols, so I am the symbol of certain things. But it's really the team effort on the Mac. Now, in my life I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which … I didn't know how to explain it then, I felt a lot about sense. Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and the best, is at most 2 to 1. Like you are in New York city, you get an average Taxi cab driver versus the best Taxi cab driver, you know you would probably get to your destination with the best cab maybe 30% faster, you know in automobile. What's the difference between an average and the best? Maybe, I don't know 20%?

  这很难解释,但显然这并不是某个人的成就。人们喜欢偶象,大家只关注我,但为Mac奋斗的是整个团队。我以前在苹果就发现一种现象,很难表达出来,更像是一种感觉,生活中多数东西,最好与普通之间的差距不超过两倍。好比说纽约的出租车司机,最棒的司机与普通司机之间的差距大概是30%,最好与普通之间的差距有多大呢?20%?

  The best CD player and an average CD player, I don't know, 20%? 2 to 1 is a big..big dynamic range in most life. In software, and it used to be the case with hardware too. The difference between average and the best is 15 to 1, maybe a 100 to 1, Okay? Very few things in life are like this. But what I was lucky enough to spend my life in, is like this, and so I built lots of my success of finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for being C players, really going for A players. They really like working with each other, because they never had a chance to do that before, and they don't want to work with being C players, so they become self-policing, they only want to hire more A players. So you built up these pockets of A players and itpropagates, and that's what the Mac team was like, they were all A players, and these were extraordinarily talented people.

  最棒的CD机与普通CD机的差距有多大?20%?这种差距很少超过两倍。但是在软件行业,还有硬件行业,这种差距有可能超过15倍,甚至100倍。这种现象很罕见,能进入这个行业,我感到很幸运,我的成功得益于我发现了许多才华横溢、不甘平庸的人才,而且我发现只要召集到五个这样的人,他们就会喜欢上彼此合作的感觉,前所未有的感觉,他们会不愿再与平庸者合作,只招聘一样优秀的人,所以你只要找到几个精英,他们就会自己扩大团队。Mac团队就是这样,大家才华横溢,都很优秀。

  But there were also people who now say that they don't have the energy any more to work for you.

  但是有人说他们再也不愿意为你工作了。

  Huh, true. I think if you talk to a lot of people on the Mac team, they would tell you it was the hardest they have ever worked in their lives. Some of them would tell you it was their happiest they ever had in their lives, but all of them would tell you that it certainly is one of the most intense and cherished experiences they would ever have in their lives.

  呃,的确。大多数Mac团队成员认为那是他们这辈子最辛苦的日子。有些人觉得那是一生中最幸福的日子,但是没人否认那是这辈子最难忘、最珍贵的经历。

  Yeah, they did.

  没错。

  So...err... you know, it's a … some of those things are not sustainable for some people.

  只是有些人无法长时间忍受这样的工作。

  What does it mean when you tell someone they work a shit?

  你说别人"工作很烂"时,想表达什么?

  I … it usually means they work a shit. Sometimes it means I think you work a shit, and I am wrong. Hehe, but .. it usually means that their work is not anywhere near good enough.

  嗯……就是他们干得很烂。有时是我认为你干得很烂,也许我错了。一般是说他们的工作很不合格。

  I have this great quote from Bill Atkinson, who says "when you say get someone to work a shit, you really mean.... I don't quite understand, would you please explain it to me?"

  Bill Atkinson说这话的真正含义是"我听不懂,请再解释一遍"。

  Haha, no, that's not usually what I meant. I... you know, when you get really good people, they know they are really good, and you don't have to baby people's ego so much, and what really matters is the work, that everybody knows that and that all that matters is the work. So people are being counted on to do specific pieces of little puzzle, and the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who's really good, and who's really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn't good enough. And you need to do it in a way that doesn't call in questions about your confidence and abilities, but... leaves not too much room for interpretation that the work they have done for the particular thing is not good enough… to support the goal of the team.

  哈哈,不是的,我不是这个意思。要知道与优秀、自信的人合作,不用太在乎他们的自尊。大家的心思都放在工作上,每个人负责完成一块很具体的任务,如果他们的工作不合格,你要做的无非是提醒他们,清晰明了地提醒他们恢复工作状态,同时不能让对方怀疑你的权威性,要用无可置疑的方式告诉他们工作不合格。

  And that's a hard thing to do. Err... I always take a very direct approach, so I think if you talk to people who worked with me, err... the really good people have found it beneficial, some people hated it you know, but … I am also one of these people, I don't really care about being right, I just care about success. So you will find a lot of people that would tell you that I had a very strong opinion, and they present evidence in contrary and 5 minutes later I can change my mind, because I'm like that, I don't mind being wrong, and I admit that I am wrong a lot, doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.

  这很不容易,所以我总是采取最直截了当的方式。有些同事觉得这种方式很好,但有些人接受不了。我是那种只想成功,不在乎是非的人。所以无论我原来的想法多么顽固,只要反驳的人拿出可信的事实,五分钟内我就会改变观点,我就是这样,不怕犯错。我经常承认错误,没什么大不了的,我只在乎结果。

  So how and why did Apple get into desktop publishing, which will become Mac's killer-app?

  苹果为什么研发桌面排版?它是Mac最受欢迎的应用。

  I don't know if you know this, but we got the first Canon laser printer engine shipped to US at Apple, and we had it hooked up to a Lisa actually imaging pages before anybody, long before HP, long before Adobe. But I heard few times people tell me "hey there's these guys over the garage in Xerox PARC... let's go and see them" and I finally went and saw them, I saw what they were doing, and it was better than what we were doing. They were gonna be a hardware company they wanted to make printer and the whole thing. So I talked to them being a software company and within 2 or 3 weeks, we had cancelled our internal project.

  我们是全美第一个试用佳能激光打印引擎的公司。早在惠普和Adobe之前,我们就已经把它用在Lisa电脑上了,后来我听说有人在施乐的车库里捣腾类似的玩意,我去参观,发现他们比我们做得更好。他们打算成立一家硬件公司,生产打印机,我劝他们成立一家软件公司,就是Adobe。两三周后我撤消了苹果内部的桌面出版项目。

  A bunch of people wanted to kill me over this. But, we did it. And I had cut a deal with Adobe User Software, and we bought 19.9% of Adobe to Apple, they needed financing and we want a little bit control. we were off to the races so we got the engine from Canon, and we designed the first laser printer controller at Apple. We got the software from Adobe, we introduced the laser writer. No one at the company wanted to do it, but a few of us in the Mac group, everybody thought a 7000-dollar printer was crazy, what they didn't understand was that you can share it with Apple Talk, I mean they understood intellectually, but they don't understand visionary.

  有些人恨死我了,但还是撤消了。苹果和Adobe达成协议,买下了他们19.9%的股份。然后买下佳能的激光打印引擎,自己开发驱动软件,接着从Adobe购买排版软件,激光打印机就这样面市了。除了Mac团队,公司其他人都不看好激光打印机。他们觉得一台打印机定价7000美元太贵。可他们忘了客户可以通过Apple Talk共享打印机。虽然他们知道这项功能,但看不到它的潜力。

  Because the last really expensive thing we tried to sell was Lisa. So we pushed this through, and I had basically do it through over a few "dead bodies. And we pushed this thing through and it was the first laser printer on the market as you know, and the rest of history. When I left Apple, Apple was the largest printer company, measure by revenue in the world. It lost that distinction to HP about 3 or 4 years after I left, unfortunately, but when I left it was the largest printer company in the world.

  毕竟他们对Lisa电脑糟糕的市场表现记忆犹新。我们坚持上马打印机项目,得罪了不少人。第一台激光打印机就这样面市了。我离开时,苹果是世界上最大的激光打印机公司,只过了三四年惠普就追上来了,真可惜。

  Did you envision desktop publishing, was that a no-brainer?

  你预见到桌面出版的前景吗,还是显而易见的?

  You know… yes, but we also envisioned really the network office, and so in January, 1995 when we had our annual meeting and introduced our new products, I made probably the largest marketing blunder of my career. Bob: 1985. Steve: 1985, sorry. Made probably the largest marketing blunder in my career by announcing the Mackintosh Office instead of just desktop publishing. And we had desktop publishing as a major component of that, but we announced a bunch of other stuff as well, and I think we should just focus on desktop publishing at that time. [After series of disagreements with Apple's CEO, John Sculley, Steve left the company in 1985.]

  是的,我预见到了。但是我们同时还想推广网络办公,所以1995年发布新产品时,我犯了这辈子最大的营销错误。Bob: 是1985年。Steve: 1985年,对不起。我们发布了Mackintosh Office办公系统,其中包括桌面出版,当时应该集中力量推桌面出版,而不是所有功能一拥而上。[1985年乔布斯被CEO John Sculley排挤,离开了苹果]

  Tell us your departure from Apple.

  说说你离开苹果的情况。

  Oh it was very painful and I am not even sure if I want to talk about it. What can I say? I hired the wrong guy.

  很痛苦,我都不太愿意聊这事。怎么说呢?我招错了人。

  That was Sculley?

  是指Sculley?

  Yeah, and he destroyed something I spent 10 years working for. Starting with me, but that wasn't the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple had turned out like I wanted it to. He basically got on a rocket ship that is about to leave the pad, and the rocket ship left the pad, and he kind of went into his head, and he got confused and thought he built the rocket ship, and he kind of changed the trajectory, so that it's inevitably gonna crash to the ground.

  是的,他毁了我十年的心血。他逼我离职,但这还不是最糟糕的。如果苹果能按我的设想发展,我会很开心。他侥幸登上了一艘正要发射的火箭。他还以为自己建造了火箭。轻率改变火箭的飞行轨道,结果是箭毁人亡。

  But there was always … in Pre-Mackintosh days and early Mackintosh days, there was always Steven and John show. You two were kinda joined at the hip for a while there.

  可是在Mackintosh时期,你俩总是一起出现在媒体上,几乎形影不离。

  That's right.

  没错。

  And then something happened to spilt you, what was that, what was that?

  后来怎么会产生矛盾呢?

  Well, what happened was … that the industry went into a recession in late 1984, sales started seriously contracted, and John didn't know what to do, and he had not a clue. And there was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple. There were fairly strong general managers running the divisions, and I was running the Mackintosh division, somebody else was running the Apple II division etc. There were some problems with some of the divisions, and there was a person running the storage division that was completely out of lunch. A bunch of things needed to be changed.

  1984年底IT行业进入萧条期,销售业绩大幅下降,John开始惊慌失措。这时苹果公司正好群龙无首,各个部门的负责人都很强势,互不相让。我管理Mackintosh部门,有人管理Apple II 部门,还有些部门已经濒临关闭,比如存储部门,公司百废待兴。

  But all those problems got put into a pressure cooker, because of this contraction in the market place, and there was no leadership, and John was in a situation where the board was not happy, and where he was probably not long for the company. And one thing I did not ever see about John, until that time was, he had incredible survival instinct. Someone once told me "this guy didn't get to be the this you know president of Pepsi co without these kind of instincts", and it was true. And John decided that a really good person to be the root of all the problems would be me. And so we came to loggerheads, and John had cultivated a very close relationship with the board, and they believed him, so that's what happened.

  市场疲软又进一步激化了公司的内部矛盾。大家各自为阵。董事会对公司的业绩很不满意,John的职位岌岌可危。那时我才发现John有一种很强烈的自救本能。有人曾提醒我百事前总裁绝非善茬儿,他说得没错。John把一切问题都归咎到我头上,我们因此反目。董事会一向很信任John,所以我被扫地出门了。

  So there were competing visions for the company?

  你们对公司的发展有不同的看法?

  Oh clearly … well... not so much competing visions for the company. Because I don't think John had a vision for the company.

  是,也不是,因为John根本没有自己的看法。

  Well, I guess I'm asking was what was your vision at that time, lost out in sentence?

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