Chapter 2 “I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”
The story of Steve Jobs’s first tenure at Apple Computer is the tale of a young visionary in the adolescence of his career. After playing such a crucial role in making and selling the Apple 1, Steve faced the challenge of moving his vision, intelligence, intuition, and ferocious personality from his father’s garage into a much bigger “space”—the corporate and financial and industrial world of Silicon Valley. Steve may have been a quick study, but he didn’t have an instinctive sense of how to do this. Some young men and women are bred for corporate life—Bill Gates comes to mind. Steve was not.
As he told me several times: “I didn’t want to be a businessman, because all the businessmen I knew I didn’t want to be like.” Steve’s natural inclination was to position himself as the critic, the rebel, the visionary, the lithe and nimble David against the stodgy Goliath of whatever powers might be. Collaborating with “the Man,” to use the colloquial terminology of his day, wasn’t just problematic, it was tantamount to collusion. Yes, he wanted to play their game, but by his own rules.
后来乔布斯知道了索尼，知道了更多“I was really lucky to get into computers when it was a very young industry,” he once told me. “At that point in time there weren’t many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. Wherever they came from they loved it, and there were some incredibly brilliant people involved.” He had no qualms about calling anyone up in search of information or help; heck, he’d been doing that since his phone call to Bill Hewlett when he was fourteen years old. Steve had none of the tentativeness most young men or women might have as they set out to learn the nuances of a complicated new world like the venture capital business. He had such faith in the excellence of his work that he assumed someone would eventually agree to fund. He could be genuinely charming when this confidence didn’t lead him into boorishness.
真正热爱自己的工作，才会真正有信心，最终会找到VCAt this point in his life, he deemed deodorant, footwear, and the like affectations. McKenna was a unique member of the Silicon Valley elite. Well coiffed, with magnetic blue eyes, he was frank, unforgiving, and ubiquitously networked, and had a sly sense of humor and brash self-confidence that matched Steve’s. His business card simply read: Regis McKenna, Himself. He saw past the boys’ nerdy slovenliness to their remarkable intelligence, and found himself liking them. “Steve had breadth,” McKenna remembers, “and a sort of thoughtful way about him that would always be there.” So he and Nolan Bushnell, Jobs’s old boss at Atari, steered Steve to Don Valentine, a founding partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the first venture capital firms to master the art of early-stage investing in high-tech companies.
Valentine came from the chip world. He had worked with the founders of Intel before they abandoned Fairchild Semiconductor to open their own shop, and he had once held a senior position at National Semiconductor. He met with the boys only because McKenna was a friend, and quite literally held his nose to hear Steve and Woz out. After their visit, he called McKenna to ask, “Why’d you send me these renegades from the human race?” Yet he did point the boys toward an individual “angel” investor who would be more apt to work closely with an idiosyncratic startup such as Apple.
为什么你们要给我送来这些人类的叛徒，哈哈哈，笑死我了！Rather quiet, Markkula was at heart a computer geek, and could do some programming himself. He immediately grasped the potential in the ambitious ideas of Jobs and Wozniak, and he also could see how intelligent, resourceful, and yet malleable they were. After a few meetings he bought in, driving a pretty hard bargain. In one of the greatest angel investments of all time, Markkula ponied up $92,000 out of his own pocket and arranged for a $250,000 line of credit with Bank of America, in return for a one-third stake in Apple.
三分之一的苹果股份！！！So he made one last presentation to HP, to give them a final shot to develop his still rough concept for the Apple II. They weren’t interested. “Big experienced companies and investors, analysts—those kinds of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were—they didn’t think that this was going to be a real big market,” Woz remembered. “They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radios, that a few techie people would get into.” So he quit his job and signed on.
所以每个时代，每个节点，都会诞生属于自己的新创Woz built in eight so-called expansion “slots” that would allow the insertion of special circuit cards—essentially smaller circuit boards—that could work in concert with the microprocessor and memory chips on the motherboard for particular purposes, such as adding a floppy disk drive, or more advanced video graphics, or better sound, or the expansion of memory. This gave the Apple II the potential to become a much more capable computer once professionally designed software applications and special expansion circuit cards were available for it, and they weren’t long in coming.
As it had in the garage, Steve’s perfectionism and his comfort with being out of synch with conventional wisdom led to conflicts. Steve had opposed adding those expansion slots, for example, because he thought a perfect consumer computer should be so easy to use that no one would ever want to add to the hardware’s capabilities by opening it up. The instinct—to deliver a computer with the simplicity of an appliance—may have been an admirable long-term goal, but it was a profoundly wrongheaded choice for a personal computer in 1977. Business-minded tinkerers had already expressed interest in designing add-in cards that would let the Apple II interact with or control telephones, musical instruments, laboratory instruments, medical devices, office machines, printers, and on and on. Woz understood this, and won the argument.
原来多插槽当时的一个目的是与外部电话、乐器设备、实验设备、医疗设备、打印机等等来交互，make sense.Jobs also pushed for an external shell that looked more like an appliance than a piece of lab equipment, going so far as to visit department stores for inspiration. This insight seems obvious now, but at the time computer hobbyists preferred industrial-looking cases, or even topless machines that showed off the complexity of their insides, and allowed for easy modification. For less hard-core consumers, the Apple II’s design was more inviting and self-contained and presentable, and those qualities alone made it very different from anything else out there at the time.
好的设计，避免让人看到就产生明显的距离感，make senseIt was far more complicated for Steve, and not just because he had an adolescent problem with authority. He had seen now that his contrarian thinking was essential for the kinds of breakthrough products he wanted to engineer, and he had also seen that his irascible methods could prod a group of people to deliver that vision. Those were qualities that didn’t mesh easily with the grown-up leadership that Scotty was trying to bring to Apple.
At Apple, he provided most of the managerial heavy lifting required to build a sophisticated high-tech company from scratch: leasing office and factory space and equipment, masterminding the design of a reliable manufacturing process, building a sales team, creating quality controls, supervising the engineering, installing management information systems, and putting together an executive staff to handle finance and hiring. He initiated the critical process of developing solid relationships with key components suppliers and software developers. Steve absorbed a lot by watching Scotty handle these tasks.
好难得的机会Adding to the complexity of what Scott was trying to manage was the fact that Apple was pioneering a nascent industry that was different from most others in one crucial way: computers were systems that blended three key underlying technologies that all were in a state of perpetual and rapid change—semiconductors, software, and data storage. A company couldn’t simply devise a single great, innovative product, tool up, stamp it out, and then sit back and count the money. That had worked for high-tech companies like Polaroid and Xerox during their first decades. But this was different. As soon as a computer company had breathed life into one new system, it had to buckle down and start all over again in order to outdo itself before some other Promethean company reconfigured newer versions of these ever-improving technologies and stole its fire. And it would have to do so over and over again, generation after generation. In fact, it soon became clear that it was smart business for a company to start work on the product that would render obsolete its latest and greatest offering well before the first one even made it to market. That’s how fast things would change in the tech marketplace that was just beginning to materialize. And each of the system’s three underlying technologies was improving independently at its own breathtaking pace, so there was always more leverage to be had by employing the latest, greatest building blocks as they became available.
这段话非常有insight!!!
在PC硬件早期如此
在当下的软件开发周期内，这种态势更加明显，软件或者APP，需要持续迭代自己，不然就会被盗火The great technology CEOs could impose rigor on their companies and yet accept the fact that all this rapid change would eventually disrupt their operations anyway. Mike Scott was not a great CEO. He had the skills and personality of a COO—a chief operating officer. When he didn’t get the stability he so avidly tried to engineer, he became frazzled. And, thanks in great part to Steve, Scotty didn’t achieve a whole lot of stability at Apple.
这就要求在硬件行业的一部分，或者是软件行业的大部分，应该积极去拥抱变化，清晰地推动组织架构的变动Steve certainly knew, intellectually, that he needed the orderly and well-oiled basic operations of a corporation to achieve his vision. But he was enamored with instability. His vision was based on destabilizing the existing computer industry. Stability was a quality that IBM had, and Apple, in Steve’s mind, was the anti-IBM.
所有后来的Tim Cook才对乔布斯至关重要A harbinger of its eventual demise occurred in the first couple of weeks after Scotty arrived at Apple. He had to assign numbers to the workplace badges everyone wore around the new Stevens Creek Boulevard office. When he decided that Woz would be “Employee #1,” Steve went to him and whined; it didn’t take long till Scotty relented and gave Steve a new, customized tag: “Employee #0.”
零号员工IN PART BECAUSE of the way Steve quarreled with Markkula and Scott, in part because he so brazenly asserted his opinions as fact, and in part because, over the length of his career, he neglected to share credit for Apple’s successes in the press, Steve developed a reputation as an egomaniac who wasn’t willing to learn from others. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the man, even during his youngest, brashest, and most overbearing years.
乔布斯即使是在最骄横自大的岁月里，也非常善于学习While Steve looked to his elders at Apple for guidance, he also sought it out elsewhere. He didn’t yet have the skills to build a great company, but he admired those who had pulled it off, and he would go to great lengths to meet them and learn from them. “None of these people were really in it for the money,” he told me. “Dave Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation. He may have died the richest guy in the cemetery, but he wasn’t in it for the money. Bob Noyce [cofounder of Intel] is another. I’m old enough to have been able to get to know these guys. I met Andy Grove [CEO of Intel from 1987 to 1998] when I was twenty-one. I called him up and told him I had heard he was really good at operations and asked if I could take him out to lunch. I did that with Jerry Sanders [founder of Advanced Micro Devices] and with Charlie Sporck [founder of National Semiconductor] and others. Basically I got to know these guys who were all company-builders, and the particular scent of Silicon Valley at that time made a very big impression on me.”
美国，或者说硅谷里，这种上一辈企业家，带动下一辈企业家的精神，真的特别了不起，而不是像中国这样，可能上下几辈企业家，都是在竞争，而没有传承Most of these older men enjoyed sparring with and advising someone this glib, smart, and anxious to learn. Of course, they didn’t work with him, which lowered the stakes on the relationship considerably. Some were heroes whom he only met once or twice, like Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Steve admired many things about Land, among them his obsessive commitment to creating products of style, practicality, and great consumer appeal, like the groundbreaking SX-70, the folding camera that wowed America in the 1970s; his reliance on gut instinct rather than consumer research; and the restless obsession and invention he brought to the company he founded.
原来宝丽来对乔布斯的影响这么大：1）产品的内在精神、美感； 2）产品直觉而不是用户调研； 3）不懈的公司改进At City College of New York he mastered English, including its most scathing expletives, which he could hurl with astonishing venom thanks in part to his Hungarian accent. His combination of pragmatism and expansiveness was something Steve admired, something he aspired to himself.
格鲁夫对乔布斯的影响Jobs and Wozniak presented the Apple II to Noyce and the rest of the Intel board in 1977. While Noyce appreciated the technology, he didn’t appreciate the two young men, with their long hair and shabby attire. But Steve pursued Noyce, and over the years the two became friends. Noyce’s wife, Ann Bowers, was an early investor in the company, and in 1980 she even became Apple’s first vice president of human resources.
诺伊斯也对乔布斯有诸多启发Steve’s relationships with outside mentors could be very personal. “Steve wanted that family thing,” remembers Regis McKenna. “He used to come over and just sit at the kitchen table with me and my wife [Dianne McKenna, an urban planner who at one point became mayor of Sunnyvale]. He always wanted to talk to her when he called up. She and I always had the sense that he wanted a family, that he really wanted that. He used to come over from Apple to fix things on my Apple II! I would tell him, Steve, you’ve got more important things to do than that, but he’d insist on coming over. ‘Besides,’ he’d tell me, ‘then I get to chat with Dianne.’ ”
Partly because he is so personable, partly because Markkula asked him to work for Apple as an adviser, and partly because his expertise is in something that Steve found instinctually appealing—marketing—McKenna became Steve’s most significant early mentor. McKenna was expert at presenting a company’s tale, but he was also a master corporate business strategist. Silicon Valley has long depended on marketers nearly as much as it has depended on engineers. Every technological advance must be framed in a beguiling narrative if it’s to get off the workbench and into businesses or homes. These advances often are foreign concepts, after all, with potential that seems opaque if not daunting, so the job of a great marketer is to wrestle the concept back to earth and make it approachable for mere technophobic mortals. McKenna’s consultancy would have a hand in the creation of many of the elite companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, including National Semiconductor, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Compaq, Intel, and Lotus Software.
每家公司的价值观与精神McKenna quickly saw that Steve was unusually articulate and driven. “He had what I’d call Silicon Valley street smarts,” says McKenna. “You know how certain kids who grow up in the inner city know where to go to get what, and how the power structure of the neighborhood works? Here, you’re likely to live next door to an electrical engineer or a software programmer, and a smart and curious kid can learn a lot just by wandering around and paying attention. From junior high on, Steve was out there figuring things out.”
有趣The two spent many hours in the basement of McKenna’s ranchstyle Sunnyvale home, talking about Steve’s goals for Apple and its wondrous Apple II. Their conversations ranged widely, over design, marketing, product development, and strategy, and how these were intertwined in a healthy business. McKenna was expert at framing a company’s development in a narrative Steve could relate to. “We talked about how your financials are your best marketing tools,” says McKenna. “To get people to sit up and pay notice, especially in the computer business, you need to be a successful financial company.”
不大理解，为啥一定要是a successful financial company.McKenna was absorbed and engaged by Steve. “He was very pleasant and enjoyable, and had a lot of depth intellectually. He could talk about a wide range of subjects. We could have real trivial conversations, and then we could talk about Apple and the business. I remember him once asking me if I thought Apple would ever be bigger than Intel. The answer, of course, is that Intel was a component manufacturer, and usually the equipment manufacturers get much bigger in revenue.”
当年就在思考，能否超越Intel，非常了不起！！！现在Apple还是第一I was trained in the semiconductor industry under Charlie Sporck and Don Valentine and those guys. If you weren’t strong, they’d just gobble you up. So it didn’t bother me to say, ‘Hey, Steve, shut up.’ He didn’t dominate you to be mean. But when people acted as minions, he let them be minions.”
必须要坚强！Tough！McKenna and his team worked with Steve to craft a marketing pitch designed to make the Apple II stand out as the friendly computer for more than just computer geeks. The headline of the first promotional brochure McKenna created for the machine asserted, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It was a concept that went against every industry trend, since most of the existing manufacturers, including Commodore and MITS and Vector Graphic, advertised in the hobbyist rags with endless gray type that alerted obsessive geeks to this or that great new feature. Friendly marketing would distinguish Apple from its competitors for decades.
简约是细腻的极致！！！原来这么早就出现了！！！ “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”McKenna also helped Steve understand the value of presenting this image across every platform the company touched. Early on, he convinced Steve that since there was nothing remotely quaint about Apple’s computers, the company would need an unmistakably modern visual identity, rather than Ronald Wayne’s archaic etching, which was more appropriate for a Berkeley head shop than a company that hoped to lead a global revolution in computing.
非常了不起！！！The replacement was the now-famous apple with the bite taken out and five exuberant rainbow stripes—each fitting perfectly atop the other, as Steve insisted. It seemed sharp and modern, and seemed to promise that computing from Apple would be something much more fun and easy than those mainframes from IBM, with its sober, stratified, white initials against a deep blue palette—almost like a pin-striped suit laid sideways. As Steve explained at the time: “Our whole company is founded on the principle that there is something very different that happens with one person, one computer. It’s very different than having ten people to one computer. What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.”
原来当时的彩虹苹果Logo，是在回应枯燥的蓝色IBM LogoLike McKenna, Steve had the gift of being able to explain profoundly complicated technology in simple, clear, and even rhapsodic terms. McKenna and Jobs knew this was a profound asset for Apple, especially given the company’s other nondescript leaders. There’s a long and wonderful extemporaneous quote from a New Yorker piece in late 1977 that offers rich proof of Steve’s fully formed verbal mastery.
能把复杂的技术，清晰易懂地解释给普罗大众听，也是非常重要的能力“People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.”
建议全文背诵!!! 此时乔布斯只有22岁哟！Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created. He understands their fundamental fear that computers may take over too much of modern life (a fear he would capitalize on repeatedly, most notably in the Orwellian imagery of Apple’s famous “1984” commercial). He sympathizes with their ignorance. He offers several analogies to comforting examples they will understand: Chevys, typewriters, cameras. Indeed, he makes using a computer seem no more complicated than taking a photograph, going so far as to call the Apple II “domesticated.” And yet he elevates both his company and its computer into something aspirational. He links this machine made a few months ago by some disheveled California misfits to Rolls-Royce, the seventy-three-year-old paragon of sophisticated industrial manufacturing and elite consumer taste. He even calls Apple a world leader, an absolutely unprovable claim that rockets the little company into the same league as IBM and DEC and Burroughs, which were then the industry’s giants. He was an extraordinary extemporaneous speaker, and McKenna helped him wield that tool to great effect.
TWO KEY IMPROVEMENTS to the Apple II sent its sales skyward. First, the company incorporated a floppy disk drive that made loading software much easier. Then, in 1979, VisiCalc became the very first massive software hit. VisiCalc was a relatively simple financial modeling spreadsheet, and its existence suddenly gave nongeeks a concrete reason to own a computer, as they realized how much time they could save handling accounting chores, managing inventory lists, and trying out business scenarios. Suddenly Apple enjoyed an unprecedented, meteoric rise. It manufactured computers that cost more than $1,300 a pop, so when unit sales quickly ramped up into the tens of thousands per month, Apple became the electronic equivalent of a gusher. Sales rose from $7.8 million in 1978 to $47 million in 1979 and all the way up to $117.9 million in 1980, the year of its initial public offering (IPO, in Wall Street parlance). No other company had ever grown that fast. The mainstream media began to take note, with publications like Esquire, Time, and BusinessWeek starting serious coverage. Inc. went so far as to put Jobs on its cover, with the hosanna of a headline “This Man Has Changed Business Forever.”
1）软盘让电脑更加易用； 2）VisiCalc作为killer app.Each of Steve’s informal outside mentors had been able to cleverly exploit his own idiosyncratic talents in a corporate setting. Edwin Land was a pioneer whose inventions were dismissed, and yet he’d created a great company by dint of pure stubbornness. Robert Noyce was charismatic and forward-thinking and had only been able to start Intel after leaving the shadow of the most imposing figure in semiconductor history, William Shockley. The systems that Andy Grove put in place were more complex and rigorous than anything Mike Scott had ever seen, and yet Grove had also been able to make his company one of the most creative places in Silicon Valley. And Regis McKenna became so adept at deftly navigating the constant shifts and tremors of Silicon Valley culture that he would wind up writing several books explaining how others could do the same. These were well-rounded, complicated, deep, and fascinating men. They were comfortable with change, and they lived where Steve wanted to live himself—at the intersection of technology and something that was more like the liberal arts. They were people who played the corporate game by rules of their own devising.
It’s impossible to say what would have happened next if Steve had had someone like these men as his boss at Apple. Maybe they would have been able to channel his bundle of contradictions to good purpose. But you don’t get to replay the experiment. What he had instead was Scotty and Markkula. And they, it would now become clear, could not control him. They could barely even channel his creative energy toward useful purposes. The encounter between young Steve Jobs and the broad, real world around him was about to become something more like a slow-motion collision. It would cost him friends, it would cost him his job, and it would leave him without the company he had created.