Apple didn’t attend CES. Steve preferred to announce his products in an environment he controlled.
在一个自己能控制的舞台上表演，对乔布斯很重要That evening, Gates spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of more than three thousand people at the Las Vegas Hilton Theater, where he revealed how Microsoft would “usher in the ‘consumer-electronics-plus’ era.” PCs running the Windows operating system would become the central component of “home media centers” that would harness the Internet and interact with consumer devices and even household appliances, all loaded with Microsoft software. This would be a bonanza for consumers, he explained, because they would now get “personalized, convenient access to their favorite music, news, entertainment, family photos and email through an array of consumer electronics, including televisions, telephones, home and car stereos, and Pocket PCs.”
原来PC作为个人资料的中心，这个思考是盖茨提出来的，非常了不起The speech was a forecast, a warning, and a blueprint. Gates posited a vision of what the home would look like after the realization and interweaving of a set of trends. There would be much more connectivity among devices, access to a new range of digital content and programming via the Internet, newly interactive video games played at home, and gizmos with responsive screens and software smarts to replace mere electronic gadgets with push buttons. This is what we are going to do to your world, Gates was telling the manufacturers of consumer electronics. It is coming whether you like it or not, because this is what digital technology does to an industry. So get on board, you old-timers tinkering with microwave ovens and car stereos and televisions and headphones. Here’s how you can fit in to your own future, which actually belongs to us!
Once you can sell computing to consumers directly, and once you get computing into products that become part of their everyday lives, the volumes become transformative. Consider this: According to researchers at the Gartner Group, 355 million personal computers—servers, desktop PCs, and laptops—were sold around the world in 2011. Some 1.8 billion cellphones were sold the same year. And that’s a number that doesn’t include all the other kinds of computing-based or networkable devices that might become part of a consumer’s life, including video game consoles, audio players, radios, thermostats, car navigation systems, and anything else that can become smarter through the power of connected computing.
Gates, who is perhaps the world’s shrewdest business strategist, saw this future coming. And he expected Microsoft to garner the same slice of this world that it had of the computing world. After all, who else could possibly define the standards for digital interaction between devices? This had been Gates’s game: envisioning and delivering the future. The scale of his concerns and ambitions dwarfed Steve’s. He wanted Microsoft software on billions of devices; Steve just wanted anything that would help him sell a few thousand more Macs each month. Gates was the only one who could reasonably think about dominating his awkwardly named but clearly inevitable “consumer-electronics-plus” era. He was powerful, and very, very smart: despite his penchant for dense verbiage, he had done a wonderful job describing the future of computing as we now have it, some fifteen years later. All he and Steve Ballmer had to do was execute the strategy. If they could, they would steer the company through its transition to this future, and in so doing return Microsoft to the kind of growth that investors wanted to see.
盖茨上一次看到了15年
那这一次的AI盖茨宣言，又需要多少年才会实现？Instead, a company still struggling to survive on the fringes of computing would execute Gates’s vision. It would do so by moving incrementally, by following its nose where the technology led, and by being opportunistic. Over the next few years, Steve Jobs would steer Apple toward a whole new rhythm of doing business. No one would have guessed it then, but the future belonged to Apple, not Microsoft.
微软最大的失败在于，没有在移动时代或者物联网时代，开发出属于自己的操作系统WHEN WORD GOT back to Cupertino of Bill’s ambitious CES presentation, Avie Tevanian and Jon Rubinstein persuaded Steve to convene an emergency off-site executive staff meeting at the Garden Court Hotel in downtown Palo Alto to rethink where Apple was headed. “Bill Gates was already talking about what we would end up calling our ‘digital hub’ strategy,” recalls Mike Slade. “So I just cribbed his talk and pitched it to Steve at the off-site meeting. I said, ‘Shouldn’t we be doing this? We can’t let Microsoft do it. They’ll just screw it up!’ ”
传奇人物的思考，总是相似的Apple employees had never had much respect for Microsoft’s ability to create anything but ungainly, confusing, and half-baked technologies for consumers. The animus went back decades. Even though Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were instrumental in the early success of the Mac, Microsoft’s unforgivable sin, from the vantage point of Cupertino, was its derivative creation of Windows. Steve was being expedient when he offered to abandon Apple’s long-standing lawsuit against Microsoft to seal the deal with Gates upon his return in 1997. But folks at Apple still considered Windows a rip-off of Apple’s ideas, pure and simple. Worse yet, they saw it as an inelegant theft, and one that got imposed on the world by a kind of bullying that Apple both despised and envied.
Gates always knew that he could never hope to approximate Steve’s aesthetic sensibility. “He had an expectation of superlative things in his own work and in the products they would create,” he says. “Steve had a design mind-set. When I get to a hotel room, I don’t go, ‘Oh, this bedside table is so poorly designed, look at this, this could have been so much better.’ When I look at a car, I don’t say, ‘Oh, if I had designed this car I would have done this and this.’ People like Jony Ive and Steve Jobs are always looking at stuff that way. You know, I look at code and say, ‘Okay, this is architected well,’ but it’s just a different way of understanding the world. His most natural, innate sense was a world-class instinct about whether this or that object met certain standards. He had extremely high standards of what was shit, and what was not shit.” By those standards, Steve’s executive team was right: Microsoft and Apple had dramatically different notions of what constituted acceptable design, much less great design.
我越发觉得，盖茨的评价，非常到位！！！Apple had already dipped its toe into this emerging market with a well-designed but ill-chosen application called iMovie. It was introduced at precisely the moment when affordable digital video cameras from Japanese manufacturers like Sony, JVC, and Panasonic were beginning to hit the market. Steve had thought that an elegant and simple movie-editing application was just what the buyers of those cameras would need. iMovie was sophisticated software that radically simplified the tedious process of editing jerky amateur video into slick home movies with almost professional-quality production values. But if iMovie was proof that Apple could create cool consumer software, it was also proof that the consumer market could be diabolically hard to predict. iMovie was an elegant solution to a problem consumers weren’t yet dying to have solved.
最后一句评价到位，让用户剪辑影片是个真实需求，但这个需求还没有那么强烈In October 1999, Steve introduced iMovie as part of the rollout of a new generation of juiced-up iMacs. But sales were sluggish. Steve blamed himself for not explaining it well enough. So at an executive team meeting in December 1999, Steve gave early prototypes of new Sony digital camcorders to six of his top execs, asking each to shoot and edit his own four-minute home movie, with the finished productions to be shown in a week. He would pick the best of the bunch to show during his appearance at the January 2000 MacWorld in an effort to demonstrate how iMovie was something anyone could master over a weekend.
挺真诚，将销量不好，归咎为自己没有解释好，当乔布斯的高层也挺累的，还有家庭作业，还要被挑中去展示，哈哈哈“Fred [Anderson], Ruby [Jon Rubinstein], Avie [Tevanian], Tim [Cook], Sina [Tamaddon], Steve, and me all made four-minute movies. I’ll be honest, it was a painfully cumbersome process, even for geeks like us,” remembers Slade. “You had to shoot the movie, then spool the video into the iMac, edit it, add music and credits, and then spool it back out onto the camcorder because the hard disk wasn’t big enough to hold both the original video clips and the finished movie, and we didn’t yet have recordable DVD drives. Many of us thought it was a pretty worthless strategy.
“But the movies were pretty funny,” he allows. “I had little kids back then, so I showed them playing in the leaves on a fall day with Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’ as the background music. Steve’s was about his kids, too. And Fred, well, apparently his life was so boring that all he could do was make a movie about his goddamn cat. Tim Cook made one about trying to buy a house in Palo Alto, and how overpriced they were. I thought Ruby’s was the best, though. He had been on a business trip to Dallas on his birthday that week, so he made this totally deadpan movie of the highlights of his day, where he had scenes sitting alone in his hotel room, and in conference rooms, and other boring places showing himself saying ‘Happy Birthday, Jon. Woohoo!’ everywhere he went. And Sina made a beautiful one about his kids playing with their pets and jumping on the bed to a Green Day song.” (That’s the one Steve chose for MacWorld.)
哇，作业是真的！！！The short little movies may have been fun to watch, but most of them had taken many hours to create. Movie editing, even when simplified by iMovie, was a process that required time, dedication, and skill. It was the kind of thing that a parent might do once in a while, but only in rare cases when he or she had a lot of free time over the weekend. It wasn’t until after the Garden Court off-site convened by Avie and Ruby that Steve acknowledged that Apple needed to create a much simpler consumer application than iMovie, something that users could engage with easily every day. The consensus at the meeting was that a digital music management application seemed like a good possibility. Rather than dig in his heels and insist on greater effort to make iMovie a hit, Steve chose to follow his team into the world of digital music. The big question now was whether Apple could move fast enough to make up for arriving so late to that party.
分析到位，本质上iMovie解决的问题-剪辑视频这件事情，没有那么高频
而听音乐很高频，那么随之而来的音乐管理，也make sense
原来Music是他们团队的ideaIT’S NOT SURPRISING that Steve had been so attracted to iMovie, since it was a piece of software designed primarily for parents. He and Laurene now had three children, after the birth of Eve in 1998, and by the turn of the century had settled into a relatively predictable and normal domestic routine.
原来iMovie设计的目标群体，是父母亲，感动！！！On a spectrum plotting how much time parents spend with their kids versus time they spend focused on their job, Steve would land far toward the latter end. Both he and Laurene knew Steve would always work very, very hard—it had been a basic assumption when they’d gotten married. “Neither of us had much of a social life,” says Laurene. “It was never that important to us.” Laurene often worked beside him at night, at first on Terravera, a small health food business she eventually sold, and then on College Track, her first philanthropic venture. They had adjoining studies; she’d run ideas past him, and on many nights he’d spend an hour or two talking over Apple business with her. They’d often catch a TV show before falling asleep, mostly The Daily Show with Jon Stewart after it launched in 1999.
乔布斯非常非常努力在工作！！！Very slowly, Steve and Laurene even added furniture. “Those stories are true,” Laurene sighs, albeit with a chuckle. “He truly could take forever to decide on stuff like that, but then so could I.” While you could see the telltale signs of children around, it usually was far neater than my own house—having a staff can help with that. As lovely as it was inside, I always thought the heart of the place was the rambling vegetable and flower garden outside the kitchen door. It was the property’s most distinct feature and completely unlike the landscaping that graced other homes in the area. When I visited I’d sometimes catch Steve having just finished up in the garden, or Laurene walking in with one of the kids and a basket of freshly picked veggies and flowers.
Steve had done his research, so it didn’t take long. We were in and out of Palo Alto Bicycles on University Avenue in ten minutes. He said, “I’d never have Andrea do something like this,” referring to his longtime administrative assistant. “I like buying presents for my family myself.”
亲自给家人买礼物“I have to stop here—it’s a Kodak moment—something you want to remember. It’s a beautiful Fall evening in Palo Alto. Your car’s broken. A formally dressed close friend of Steve Jobs is under the hood working on your engine. You are talking with Steve’s absolutely lovely and down-to-earth wife. Steve is in the car, with his kid, trying to crank it. You don’t often get close to people like Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people. They’re normal, funny, charitable, real people. Not the people the press talks about. Steve is not the maniacal business and design despot the media loves to portray—well he is, but not always.”
It isn’t that I looked at Steve and saw a model father. I knew how hard he worked, and that his relentless drive carried a personal cost. But I had been given a look inside his home life over the years, and it seemed every bit as authentic as that of my own friends and colleagues. These stories on Quora, and the moments I experienced with him around Palo Alto or at his house, are mundane. But as time went on I came to realize that this was exactly the point: he craved a certain normalcy in his life, and he was able to get that most at home. With his family. They provided a therapeutic—and very human—outlet that he needed, especially in contrast to Apple, where he was gearing up to dive head-first into an uncertain future.
家庭是充电用的！IF IMOVIE HAD been a sort of exploratory mission into the world of digital applications for consumers, iTunes would prove to be the expedition itself. Armed with a leadership team he trusted more and more, his keen aesthetic sensibility, a belief that the intersection of the arts and technology could lead to amazing things, and the growing understanding that great ideas develop in fits and starts, Steve was ready to see what Apple could bring to the world of music. In hindsight, of course, this seems like such an obvious course of action. But as in all of the most challenging and eventually rewarding journeys, there was little certainty at the outset of where they would end up. Steve would just have to follow his nose.
Since the files were in digital form, the free copies were practically indistinguishable from the originals. It was one of the first truly “viral” Internet applications, a genuine killer app, that attracted tens of millions of users within months. It also was illegal. Napster facilitated the widespread piracy of recorded music, triggering a wholesale behavioral shift among music consumers that would eventually all but wreck the recording industry’s traditional business model. The courts would shut down Napster in 2001, but not before it had become a cultural sensation, and Shawn Fanning a celebrity worthy of the cover of Time magazine.
Napster也才是22年前的事情啊，时间过的真是太快了Historically, Steve had always preferred that Apple create its own software from scratch—he didn’t trust anyone as much as he trusted his own people. But since Apple was coming so late to digital music, it would not have time to develop a music management program on its own. So Steve decided to go shopping for an existing jukebox app that Apple could adapt to its own style.
Three independent developers had already created jukeboxes for the Macintosh. The best of the bunch was a forty-dollar application called SoundJam, which happened to be developed by two former Apple software engineers. SoundJam was also of interest to Steve because at its heart was a sophisticated database program that would allow music to be cataloged by more than a dozen attributes. It was a favorite of so-called power users who had large libraries of thousands of music tracks to manage. It was simple to navigate and operate, and it could import music files directly from audio CDs and compress them in a variety of formats into smaller chunks of digital data.
In March 2000, Apple bought SoundJam and attached some unusual terms: the authors of SoundJam would come to work for Apple, but their software distributor could continue selling the existing SoundJam product until Apple had reengineered it into iTunes. The other catch was that the whole transaction be kept secret for two years. There would be no public indication that anything had changed at SoundJam, the distributor and the SoundJam programmers would continue to make money, and Apple could keep its designs on building a jukebox application under wraps. Secrecy was key, since so many parties—studios, consumer electronics manufacturers, tech companies, broadcasters—were trying to find a way to lead digital music. Apple had been a leaky ship during its early years and throughout the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era. But Steve had eradicated that problem by making it more than clear that anyone caught leaking company information or plans would be fired immediately. So the transaction stayed a secret, as he wished.
保密开发两年，也是非常不容易的Saying no—to software features, new projects, new hires, boondoggle conferences, all kinds of press queries, even to Wall Street’s desire for better guidance on future earnings, and anything else deemed extraneous or distracting. Above all, saying no became a crucial way of keeping everyone, including himself, focused on what really mattered. The sheer simplicity of the quadrant strategy had laid the foundation for an organization that would say no again and again—until it said yes, at which point it would attack the new project with fierce determination.
确实，拒绝是非常重要的品质The iTunes team moved remarkably fast. A mere nine months after having purchased SoundJam, and just a year after Bill Gates’s public christening of the concept of a world of connected computers, consumer electronics devices, and applications, Steve was able to unveil iTunes at the MacWorld trade show in San Francisco on January 9, 2001. He had a strong set of products to show off besides iTunes, including the Titanium PowerBook, the first of what would become Apple’s exceedingly popular laptops to be clad in metal rather than plastic, and OS X, which would finally ship as a finished product in March.
期待2001年的发布会！！！还没有看到那里Also, for the first time in public, Steve took his first steps on the path to publicly co-opting Gates’s promised future. In classic Apple style, he began by reworking the language of Gates’s vision, trading “consumer-electronics-plus” for the much more felicitous “digital hub.” Energetically pacing the stage, he walked the audience through an enormous screen shot showing a Mac in the middle of six spokes extending to a digital still camera, a PDA, a DVD player, a CD Walkman, a video camcorder, and something called a digital music player. It was an image that updated his old principle of a computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” The Mac, Jobs explained, would be the ideal tool for managing, editing, and organizing content from all these devices, as well as a central repository for software updates, contacts, music and video files, and anything else you needed on your mobile devices. The computer industry’s P. T. Barnum made it all seem so much friendlier than the intimidating future Gates had painted. He made it seem accessible and human and simple. Apple promised to deliver software and hardware that you could manage and bend to your will. That was the power of the “I” in iTunes. You ruled this future, not Microsoft, or even Apple. Such was the power of Steve’s elocution.
During the first week after iTunes was introduced and made available online for free, 275,000 copies were downloaded. That was just a slice of the 20 million Macs installed around the world, but it already exceeded the number of actual users of iMovie, which had been available for download for fifteen months. There was just one problem: other than the iMac sitting in the center of the octopus-like digital hub diagram Steve had shown at MacWorld, none of the connected devices had been made by Apple. That had to change.
iMovie也太惨淡了吧！
开始往音乐播放器发散EARLY IN 2001, toward the end of a meeting with Steve, Eddy Cue, a young software engineer with a good head for business who would come to play a key role in Steve’s executive team, bellyached. “We can’t make things better than we’re making them,” he said. “Yet we’re at the same place we were at back in 1997.” Indeed, while annual sales had reached $7.9 billion in 2000, they were projected to drop well below $6 billion in 2001. “You’ve just got to hang on,” Steve told him. “People will come around.” His patience was admirable, but then again, Steve had believed since the 1980s that the world would eventually come to recognize the superiority of Apple products. Here he was in a new millennium, still waiting on humanity. His company was stable, but it wasn’t yet strong. It needed something to get it growing. It needed a new kind of product.
人们总能意识到优秀的产品The desire to create a portable digital music player arose directly from the development of iTunes: as more and more Apple execs and engineers started listening to MP3s on their computers, it was only a matter of time before they wanted to take their digital music with them in some sort of portable digital version of the old Sony Walkman. The few pocket-sized MP3 players on the market were poorly designed and clumsy to use. It wasn’t so much that the sound was bad, but instead that the procedures for loading them with music and then finding what you wanted to hear were hopelessly opaque. Steve was proud of iTunes, and especially of how easy it made it for someone to organize and manage large libraries of recorded music. Not one of the existing devices could make the most of his nifty piece of software.
痛点和用户需求非常明确
但Apple Vision Pro的用户需求和解决的痛点，就貌似没有那么明确The only solution, the team decided, would be for Apple itself to make something better. It was a gambit that would push the company further out of its comfort zone: the only mass-market consumer electronics product it had ever manufactured was a long-forgotten Apple-branded digital still camera from the Sculley years. Steve himself had been involved in nothing like this since the illegal “blue box” long-distance telephone dialer he and Woz built and sold back in the 1970s. Computers were Apple’s focus and raison d’être. But this group was starting to function at such a high level that they welcomed the challenge of making a new kind of device. And none of them thought a portable music player alone would be transformative, so it seemed like a low-risk gamble. The terminology they used suggested the limits of their ambitions: many of them saw a music player primarily as a “computer peripheral,” like a printer or a Wi-Fi router.
压根没想到会那么成功Ruby couldn’t believe his eyes. This was the first thing he’d seen that had enough capacity at a small enough size to form the heart of an Apple music player. Unlike the tapes or CDs that you played in Sony’s Walkman or Discman, this hard drive would have enough disk storage to hold copies of perhaps a thousand tracks, rather than just a dozen. And its “random access” capabilities distanced it even more from the likes of a Discman, since it gave you the potential to find a particular song out of that enormous trove almost instantly.
带着目的去寻找技术“I expected an overbearing tyrant,” he says, “but he wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t resemble the guy from their stories at all. On the things he cared about he could be very intense, but in general, he was much softer, much more considerate. He wasn’t a crazy micromanager. He trusted his guys.”
No one had any idea what the end product would look like, or how users would control it, or how much it would have to function like a tiny computer itself, or how exactly it would interact with iTunes song libraries on the iMac, or even when it possibly could be shipped. All they knew were the basic requirements: that it would somehow pack the tiny hard drive, an audio amplifier powerful enough to drive headphones, a small screen to display and navigate through the music it contained, a microprocessor or microcontroller to give it enough smarts, software to make it programmable and to help it interact directly with iTunes, and a high-speed FireWire port to let it mate via a cable with a Macintosh, in the space of something that you could easily slip into a front pocket of your Levi’s. Of course it had to look cool and of course Steve wanted it as soon as possible.
想明白这些问题，产品就出来了“What I loved about working for Steve,” says Cue, “is that you learned that you could accomplish the impossible. Again and again.”
Another reason that Steve felt confident that Apple could create a great consumer device was that a successful music player could only be the result of a holistic mix of great hardware and software. The iPod was truly a “whole widget” challenge, as Steve described it. With a crash schedule in hand, Fadell led the group building the iPod, but contributions came from everyone on the executive team, as well as from engineers who worked elsewhere in the company. Turning Ruby’s Toshiba microdrive into the heart of a pocket-sized piece of functioning hardware was not, by any means, the biggest challenge. The hard part was creating a usable device, one that would make those thousand tracks accessible with a click or two of a switch, and that would pair simply and directly with a Mac so its owner could import copies of his iTunes digital music files, along with his custom playlists. It also would be nice to be able to display some information about each track and to take full advantage of iTunes’ ability to sort them by artist, album title, and even genre. To make all that happen, the music player would need enough smarts to host a rudimentary computer database program. The iPod, in other words, would actually be a tiny, specialpurpose computer.
But that was just the beginning. Out of all the various aspects of computing, Steve was always most fascinated with the contact point between a person and a computer. It was the user interface that had made the Macintosh seem the epitome of a personal computer in its time. There were good reasons that Steve found this point of interaction so critical. If the point at which a person interacted with a machine was complicated, he or she would likely never unlock its secrets. Most people don’t care about the innards of their computer—they care only about what’s on the screen, and what they can get to through that screen. Steve understood the profound importance of this from the very beginning of his career. It was part of what distinguished him from so many other computer makers, most of whom were engineers who believed that a rational customer would of course care deeply about the insides of his or her computer. This bias held true nearly two decades after the introduction of Mac. So if Apple could make its portable music device a cinch to interact with, users would revel in portable, programmable music in a way they’d never imagined possible. If Apple couldn’t do so, its machine would be a clunker like all the rest.
定义新的人机交互Getting the hardware right was harder. This is where Ruby’s hardware guys Jony Ive and his team of designers really showed their mettle. At the suggestion of marketing chief Phil Schiller, they created something known as a “thumb-wheel,” which functioned in some ways like the “scroll-wheel” on many computer mice. The iPod’s thumb-wheel was basically a flat disk that you could rotate clockwise or counterclockwise with your thumb to rapidly navigate up and down the long lists displayed on the screen. The iPod software team gave the thumb-wheel a series of imaginative touches that made it truly intuitive to use. The faster you spun the wheel, the quicker the list would move up or down the list. In the middle of the wheel was a button you clicked to make a choice, just as you clicked the button of a Mac’s mouse.
原来iPod的滚轮交互，设计思路的来源是鼠标的滚轮和按键，有趣The breakthrough on the iPod user interface is what ultimately made the product seem so magical and unique. There were plenty of other important software innovations, like the software that enables easy synchronization of the device with a user’s iTunes music collection. But if the team had not cracked the usability problem for navigating a pocket library of hundreds or thousands of tracks, the iPod would never have gotten off the ground. It was a solution that came with ancillary benefits as well. The iPod interface was so well designed that it was able to grow and become even more useful as other technologies in the device improved and became cheaper. And since the thumb-wheel technology was half hardware and half software, it was much easier for Apple to lock in this design advantage with patents and copyrights so tough that no competitor dared try to copy it. Were it primarily a software feature, it would’ve been far more vulnerable to being aped. Once again, Apple had found a beautifully intuitive way to control a complex, intelligent device hidden underneath a gleaming, minimalist exterior. This is where Ive first showed that he could design far more than the shapes of things. He could help design the user experience, too. There was nothing that mattered more to Steve.
有趣的insight: 1)最关键的软件创新在于浏览歌曲曲库时候的简洁易用； 2）半软件半硬件的结合，是门槛最高的
后者也是苹果持续依赖的商业策略
People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.To use one was to fall in love with it. Apple gave an iPod to every journalist who attended the October introduction, something it had never done before. These technology writers and reviewers and other cognoscenti wound up raving in print about features Apple hadn’t even touted. The showstopper for many was the iPod’s random-play capability, something Steve initially considered to be of marginal interest. This so-called “shuffle mode” turned the device into the equivalent of a personal radio station that would play only your own music, in a totally unpredictable sequence. If you had a large library, your iPod operating in shuffle mode was a wonderful way to stumble upon music you had forgotten that you even owned. In that way, the iPod helped people rediscover the pleasures of the music itself.
随机播放是killer featureEven the iPod tested Steve’s faith in consumers, however. It took them a while to fully warm to the device. It presented an unfamiliar method of interacting with music, and its $399 price was a significant impediment, especially when you could buy a Sony Discman CD player for under $100. Sales started out on the slow side: Apple sold just 150,000 iPods during the first quarter they were available.
原来初代iPod也是其它竞品的4倍价格
Apple Vision Pro初代，价格是其它的10倍，离谱The iPod had accelerated Apple’s creative metabolism, instilling a new organizational discipline that would make the promise of frequent, market-churning, incremental improvements—the kind that Bill Gates had lectured Steve about in that joint interview in Palo Alto a decade before—into a breathtaking new kind of rapid-fire technological innovation.
渐进式地更新，因为不是每一天都能有新技术The iPod had led Apple to a newfound ability to keep outdoing itself almost like clockwork. Some of this required execution at a very high level. The iPod’s low price (at least compared to Apple’s computers), forced Apple to learn how to ensure high-quality manufacturing at higher unit volumes than Apple had ever delivered before. These new demands on manufacturing were exacerbated by the competitive dynamics of the consumer electronics market, which expected Apple to refresh the iPod product line far more frequently than its computers. To churn out iPods this way, Apple had to develop disciplines that would fundamentally transform the company into a much more capable enterprise. Tim Cook had to build up an extensive international supply chain, and he and Ruby had to develop relationships with a set of Asian factories capable of delivering lots of high-quality machines in record times. The iPod had quickened the company’s metabolism in a way that would pay off for years to come.
原来iPod带来的另一个好处是，提前锻炼了苹果快速迭代、快速反馈的能力“Learning about new technologies and markets is what makes this fun for me and for everyone at Apple,” Steve once told me, a few years after the iPod’s debut. “By definition, it’s just what we do, and there are lots of ways to do it. Five or six years ago we didn’t know anything about video editing, so we bought a company to learn how to do that. Then we didn’t know anything about MP3 players, but our people are smart. They went out and figured it out by looking at what was already out there with a very critical eye, and then they combined that with what we already knew about design, user interface, materials, and digital electronics. The truth is, we’d get bored otherwise.” In another interview, Steve said, “Who cares where the good ideas come from? If you’re paying attention you’ll notice them.” When his focus had been directed entirely on fixing Apple’s own problems, Steve had almost missed the digital music revolution. Now that Apple was on more solid footing, he was focused outward again, and paying attention very carefully. “When I came back, Apple was like a person who was ill and couldn’t go out and do or learn anything,” Steve explained. “But we made it healthy again, and have increased its strength. Now, figuring out new things to do is what keeps us going.”
Pixar employees called their new headquarters in Emeryville “Steve’s movie,” because he invested so much time in its creation. Here he leads Schlender on a private tour of the grounds in 2000, shortly before it opened. He took pride in the “random” pattern of the bricks on the wall ahead of him, which had been meticulously arranged to appear random.
精心安排的随机，笑死我
原文 地址 江湖中历来不缺乏传奇。在建筑软件的这片江湖中，风云变幻，豪杰辈出，有两大世家始终屹立不倒——一个来自欧罗巴，名字低调：“图形软件”（Graphisoft），却继承了一身的艺术家气质，手握长剑白衣胜雪；一个来自美利坚，人称“自动桌子”（Autodesk），性格豪放不羁，七种武器样样精通。本文所说的，就是这两大世家的代表人物：ArchiCAD与Revit之间的较量。 这个论题本是老生常谈了，谈到BIM绕不过的就是Revit与ArchiCAD。两者的对比许多帖子都讨论过，但往往大而化之，原则性的东西多，细节的东西少，因此我想再作一次比较，希望能深入一点，具体一点，力争较为全面地反映两者的真实面貌。但这种对比往往两面都不讨好，你懂的，因此本文也多用戏说的语气，我姑妄说之，列位看官也就姑妄听之吧，有不当之处还请多多包涵！ 先介绍一下本人对这两个软件的熟悉程度。我用ArchiCAD有4年了，出过几套施工图，都已竣工，编过一系列向日葵图库，颇受好评，对ArchiCAD的认识偏重于施工图；用Revit一年半，出过四个工程的土建及MEP模型，也用其API编了若干插件，对Revit的认识偏重于建模（包括结构及MEP建模）。应该说对ArchiCAD与Revit的认识都算深入了。 当然两者的深度比较是一个庞大的工程，而且个人看法难免有偏见，技术上也多有误解之处，因此希望各位能指正与补充。 1 软件的思想、架构对比 从软件的历史来说，无疑是ArchiCAD悠久得多，Revit是Autodesk在2002年才收购回来的，但Revit有一个强有力的东家，马上推出“BIM”这个很炫的口号，一下把ArchiCAD沿用多年的“虚拟建筑”这个老老实实的口号给打败了，于是ArchiCAD也只好宣称自己是个BIM软件，搞得在外人看来，倒像是Revit占了先机。 从软件设计的角度来看，两者也是差别巨大的。ArchiCAD从20多年前就致力于三维建筑设计，在这方面积累了足够多的经验，多年来也是沿用其架构做一些小更新、小完善、小整合。从我接触的7.0到最新的14.0，感觉比较大的变动就是10.0版整合PlotMaker、12版支持多核计算提升速度、12版新增幕墙工具、13版团队工作大幅改进。在界面上、使用习惯上一直差别不大，这也在一个侧面反映了ArchiCAD软件设计的一个“精英思路”——我本来就...