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《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 3 Breakthrough and Breakdown


  • Every cliché is built on some truth. The cliché that Steve Jobs was half genius, half asshole is based largely on his actions during the nine years that constituted his first tenure at Apple. This is when his highs would shine most famously, and when his lows were reprehensible. It was the period when he most sought the limelight, and when he was most out of control. He developed followers and he created enemies. This is when his bundle of contradictory qualities unraveled, leaving him, and his company, at loose ends. These years provide a baseline for the rest of his career.

  • Steve’s personal life, which had been chaotic in the scattered, sloppy way of most twenty-somethings—especially those throwing themselves at a career without regard for sleep, social life, or family—spun out of control in 1978, when he denied the paternity of his own child.

  • He was twenty-three years old when Lisa’s birth presented him with a clarion call to accept adult responsibility. He rejected the call as fully as he rejected her.
    当时才23岁

  • Arthur Rock would later describe Steve’s behavior as “delusional.” Especially for someone as unsentimental as Rock, Steve’s behavior tied in to a pattern of irresponsibility that was developing at Apple. Whether working with his ostensible superiors, such as Rock, or making decisions that widely affected subordinates, Steve could seem indifferent to the impact of his choices. He conveyed a lack of empathy.
    缺乏同理心

  • Several years later, Jobs told Susan Barnes, a financial manager at Apple and at NeXT, that December 12, 1980—the date of Apple’s IPO—was the most important day of his career, because only then was he sure that the folks who had driven Apple’s early success would make serious money.

  • Jobs had a bureaucratic rationalization for doing so: they were hourly employees, and therefore not guaranteed the “founder’s stock” that helped make three hundred longtime salaried employees millionaires. But Steve’s lack of generosity was reflective of something that was starting to seem part of a broader character trait.

  • “He had this incredible bandwidth,” explains Lee Clow, the Chiat\Day ad director who would become Steve’s close friend after working on the famous “1984” television ad, “but he devoted almost all of it to work.” Prioritizing things in this way, especially as an immature young man, made most people in his life replaceable. Fernandez and Kottke, for example, had been important to Steve three years earlier, but to Steve’s way of thinking they had not kept up. They were not key contributors to Apple, and therefore to Steve’s life, anymore. The bigger priority was to reward the people who were improving Apple at present. It was a cold evaluation by a young man whose work life was exploding into something much bigger than he had ever anticipated. But his logic carried an emotional cost the young man didn’t even consider. Kottke and Fernandez and others like them felt snubbed and unappreciated. Steve’s behavior isolated him within the company. He had little sense at this point of how important it can be to have true allies in a corporate setting. It was a blind spot that would catch up to him eventually.
    就跟后续乔布斯吐槽Avie在打高尔夫球一样

  • Apple, which had grown from a handful of people in 1977 to 2,900 employees by the summer of 1981, was riven in more ways than one. In the fall of 1980, its head count had doubled in just three months. Apple “old-timers” took to calling that short stretch of time “the bozo period,” and scorned the newbies.
    过快的组织扩张,是个很危险的事情,会让很多人并不真正尊重或者关注公司的文化

  • Steve was rarely showy about his newfound wealth, but he widened the rifts in the company in other solipsistic ways. Broadly speaking, Apple employees were focused either on supporting and milking the revenue from the Apple II or on exploring new products. The Apple II was the breadwinner driving the company’s growth. The work going on around it was the classic, incremental work of improving and deepening the usefulness of a product so that it would be successful for years. Apple II staffers built an extensive retail sales channel of hundreds of resellers; worked with the emerging world of software developers to ensure that they had the necessary tools to write more interesting software that would attract even more buyers; and labored on follow-up machines, like the Apple IIe and the Apple II GS. Their work paid off: the Apple II, in its various models, was a remarkably resilient product, selling nearly six million units before it was finally discontinued in 1993. For a decade, the company would depend on Woz’s reliable old Apple II to fuel its soaring growth. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1988 that Macintosh revenues at long last exceeded those from Apple II sales.
    其实Apple II才是那个驱动苹果最初期成功的功臣,一款好的产品,能支撑公司10多年

  • It didn’t take long for Steve, whose official job was to head up product development, to simply stop caring about the Apple II. He felt, in his bones, as he liked to say, that Apple would need a great new product, that the industry was moving at such a rapid pace that the company would be fatally wounded if all it had to offer were slightly improved versions of the Apple II. He made his feelings very clear, and suggested that any engineer or marketer worth his salt would be drawn to working on the creation of the next breakthrough product with him. While Steve’s narrow attitude slighted scores of the company’s hardware and software designers, it was especially insulting to Woz, who eventually chose to nurse along the Apple II rather than join the Mac team. “Some Apple II engineers were being treated like they didn’t exist,” Woz would later say. As the company grew, he and Steve couldn’t help but grow apart.
    开发新产品固然重要,但持续优化已有的好产品,也不得不少

  • In a broad way, Steve was correct in thinking that Apple needed a significant new offering, and soon. The best recipe for maintaining steadily rising revenues in the computer hardware business is to have a breakthrough product ready just when your last breakthrough is reaching the peak of its own success. Markkula, Scotty, and the board all agreed that the company urgently needed a new model, ideally one better tailored to the needs of office workers.

  • The personal computer industry was in its infancy, and everyone was flying blind, including Steve. One important thing he didn’t yet understand was that most breakthrough products result from a long cycle of hit-and-miss prototypes, the steady accumulation of features, and a timely synthesis of existing technologies. He and Woz, on the contrary, had stuck their heads down, worked hard, and on their very first try created something brilliant that the industry had never before seen. That was Steve’s idea of product development. But he was about to discover that that wasn’t the way it worked inside a corporation.
    看似轻而易举的新产品的成功,并不是一夜之间,需要非常非常多的努力

  • The success of the Apple 1 and the Apple II had given Steve a little too much confidence in his own technical judgment. He made a series of bad decisions that would be hard to undo later, the most important being his edict that the Apple III, whose footprint had to be small enough to leave lots of open room on an office desk, would be absolutely silent, which meant no internal cooling fan. This slowed the development process to a crawl, because engineers had to figure out how to create convection currents to draw heat away from the motherboard, which held all the semiconductor chips, as well as from the power supply. Without a fan, those components could make the innards of a small computer hot as a pizza oven. The solution the engineers finally came up with was to make the cabinet itself act as a heat sink to help draw out and dissipate the heat; however, that meant making it out of cast aluminum, a good heat conductor but a material that added considerably to the cost and complexity of manufacture.
    当时乔布斯的判断其实没有错,只是当时的技术能力,还达不到他的要求,他应该先妥协

  • It wasn’t just Steve’s demands that slowed the Apple III. Since Apple would be wooing customers who might have purchased an Apple II, the company had to make sure that that software created for the II would also run on the III. This “backwards-compatibility” was an annoying requirement that was far more complicated than Steve imagined, and the time his engineers spent learning to accomplish it slowed the project almost as much as his fussy hardware demands. Steve pushed the Apple III engineers relentlessly to solve these problems quickly. It didn’t matter to him that these were gnarly problems to solve. Accustomed to Woz’s magical ability to defy old boundaries and technical obstacles, he expected these new hardware and software engineers to do the same. They couldn’t.
    所以有一群技术大牛,多么重要!!!

  • STEVE’S IMPATIENCE WITH the nuts and bolts of corporate life was understandable. Steve was a visionary. It’s a word that is loosely tossed around these days, especially in Silicon Valley, but it legitimately applied to Steve even from very early in his life. He had the ability to see around corners, to envision how the seeds of existing ideas could be combined to create something unimaginable to others. The challenge he faced was to become an effective visionary—that’s what turns a dreamer into someone who changes the world.
    我一直在想,假如是乔布斯,他看到AI技术的涌现,他会怎么想,他脑子会有怎样的新产品idea

  • STEVE’S IMPATIENCE WITH the nuts and bolts of corporate life was understandable. Steve was a visionary. It’s a word that is loosely tossed around these days, especially in Silicon Valley, but it legitimately applied to Steve even from very early in his life. He had the ability to see around corners, to envision how the seeds of existing ideas could be combined to create something unimaginable to others. The challenge he faced was to become an effective visionary—that’s what turns a dreamer into someone who changes the world.

  • PARC, as it was known, would become famous for developing the concepts behind any number of important technologies, including Ethernet local area networking, high-resolution video monitors, laser printing, and object-oriented programming. That summer, Xerox had joined a number of venture capital firms in a $7 million secondary investment round in Apple (as part of the deal, Steve sold $1 million worth of his own stock to the investors), and in return had agreed to give Apple a peek at its most advanced technologies, or, as people in Silicon Valley like to say, to “open the kimono.” These visits were nothing short of an epiphany for Steve, because the technology at PARC was the visual expression of everything he believed computers could and should be.

  • Compared to the black screen with eerie green characters that had preceded it, this “graphical user interface”—or GUI (pronounced “gooey”), as it came to be known—represented at least as radical a break as when silent movies shifted to talkies.

  • The PARC researchers understood full well how significant a development this was, and were dismayed that Xerox had, in effect, paid for the privilege of giving Steve and the other Apple visitors access to technology this radical and new. They believed, correctly, that Xerox senior management back east was not that interested in building a full-blown computer; rather, they wanted to create better photocopiers, and perhaps a dedicated word processor to compete with Wang’s. Xerox did not come out with a computer using the PARC technology until 1981. Called the STAR, it was an intriguing device that was sold not to individual consumers but to businesses, as part of a networked system of at least three desktop units that sold for about $16,000 each.
    施乐没有Vision

  • Steve realized that the Xerox GUI could be the foundation of something very ambitious and very personal. Visual iconography on a screen could make computing almost intuitive for just about everyone. Existing computer interfaces put a wall of arcane commands and typographical symbols that looked like expletives between the user and the results spewed back by the computer. If you replaced those commands with visual icons that could be easily manipulated via a mouse, harnessing the data-processing power of a computer might feel more like going to the library and pulling a book off the shelf, or like engaging in a discussion with a really smart friend or teacher. This interaction, this feeling of comfort with the back-and-forth with a computer, could lead to the realization of Steve’s overarching goal, the creation of a truly personal computer for ordinary people. Steve even had a metaphor for what that computer could be—a bicycle for the mind. After visiting PARC he was a changed man; these were technologies he wanted to bring to everyone in the world.

  • NOW STEVE FACED the challenge of delivering on this promise within the gnawing confines of Apple. It would be a staggeringly ambitious project—one that no one at Apple but Steve could have imagined, and one that no one but he could have made so maddeningly complicated. The long road had many detours and would be pockmarked with collateral damage, but it would eventually lead to the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984.

  • The Lisa was supposed to be for businesses, but Steve focused almost exclusively on what would make the machine accessible and friendly for an individual. Once again, he had the right idea for the long run—years later, easy-to-use computers would make personal computing ubiquitous across businesses both small and large—without the perspective needed to succeed in the short term. He paid lip service to the special needs of corporations and institutions, but what really fascinated him were the rounded edges of the icons on the Lisa’s “desktop” interface.

  • Twice now, in rapid succession, Steve had failed when trying to lead a team to create a computer for the business market. While more and more people in the computer industry were keenly in tune with the needs of enterprise customers, Steve wasn’t one of them.

  • But Steve knew that Scotty had borne the heaviest load as Apple morphed from a startup into a real operation. After his departure, Steve reportedly experienced a sudden bout of guilt; he was quoted as saying, “I was always afraid that I’d get a call to say that Scotty had committed suicide.”

  • After he and Allen discovered that hobbyists were giving away pirated copies of their Altair BASIC interpreter, Gates wrote a kind of manifesto, asserting that developers of software for microcomputers should be paid for their programs. If that happened, Gates predicted, an entirely new kind of software industry would arise that would benefit software developers, microcomputer makers, and users alike. This would represent a huge change: at that point, software development was mostly in the hands of the makers of computer hardware, who buried the development costs in the final price of the devices they sold. The prospect of making money by building software, Gates believed, would spur innovation and help the new microcomputer manufacturers take better advantage of the breakneck pace of improvement in semiconductor technology promised by Moore’s law.
    确实,也让普通用户使用到了更好的软件、更丰富的生态

  • Gates was right. Accepting the fact that software was worth paying for led to the emergence of a dynamic new industry. One could argue that Gates’s greatest contribution to the world was not Microsoft, or the MS-DOS or Windows operating systems, or the Office productivity applications that hundreds of millions of people use. It was his role as the first champion of the concept that software itself had value. The mind that could envision all that was a mind suited for the organizational matrixes of the corporate world. In those early days, Microsoft never lacked for enlightened leadership, unlike Apple.

  • In fact, their rush to market had led them to acquiesce to a historic deal with Gates, allowing him the right in the future to license MS-DOS to other computer makers. It was a decision they would forever regret, since it ultimately tilted power from hardware manufacturers to Microsoft—thereby proving the validity of Gates’s manifesto and setting the stage for virtually the entire industry to adopt MS-DOS as a standard that would marginalize Apple, which did not license its operating system. But on that fall afternoon, no one Gates spoke to at Apple seemed aware that their world was about to change, much less acted worried. Years later, Gates remembered that “I kept walking around, asking, ‘Isn’t this a big deal?’ But no one seemed concerned.”
    确实,主动权从电脑硬件厂商那里,来到了软件提供商
    也是后来乔布斯高度评价Gates开创了一个新的产业的原因

  • Steve’s reckless immaturity and authority issues had left the company rudderless, and Markkula was an ambivalent leader who did little to give staffers a clear sense of direction.
    主要当时Markkula已经财富自由,也没有太多动力去奋斗

  • Steve’s personal courtship of Sculley, then the president of PepsiCo, has been endlessly documented. It’s the story of two men who saw exactly what they wanted to see in the other, who salivated at the thought of how pairing up might transform their lives, and who both wound up sorely disappointed.

  • As Steve spun tales of Apple’s potential, Sculley seemed full of ideas of how his expertise could fuel Steve’s notion of where the company should go. The fact that he played hard to get only heightened Steve’s infatuation. He turned down Apple’s initial offer of a salary of $300,000 a year, plus options for 500,000 shares of Apple stock, which at the time were worth about $18 million.
    30万美金年薪,但股票期权1800万!!

  • Standing together on a balcony thirty stories up, Sculley told Steve that before he’d even consider coming to Apple, they’d have to agree to pay him $1 million in salary, plus a $1 million signing bonus, and a guaranteed $1 million severance payment if things didn’t work out. It was a stunning demand for the time, but Steve was undeterred. He said he’d pay it out of his own pocket if necessary.
    100万美金薪水,100万美金签字费,100万美金遣散费,好惊人的条件

  • One of his first hires upon arriving in Cupertino was a technical assistant to help him bone up on digital technology and master the Apple II in his office.
    显然这样的人,是不适合领导Apple的

  • Raskin quit in a huff. But before he left he fired off a memo to his bosses that still stands as an angry summary of Steve’s weaknesses. “While Mr. Jobs’s stated positions on management techniques are all quite noble and worthy, in practice he is a dreadful manager.… He is a prime example of a manager who takes the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the workers when deadlines are not met,” he wrote, adding that Steve “misses appointments … does not give credit … has favorites … and doesn’t keep promises.”

  • Burrell Smith, like Woz, could never say no to an engineering challenge. His central breakthrough was to find a way to multiply the flow of digital data from the 68000 processor through the rest of the circuit architecture, a trick that ingeniously allowed the computer to take full advantage of the increased processing power without requiring more support chips or circuits. The result: detailed and responsive graphics, exactly what was essential for a machine that employed a mouse and made bitmapped images. Smith literally lived in his lab for a month, while others in the company took off for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. He didn’t even stop to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday on December 19. But he accomplished the impossible.
    好了不起的目标,原来还有这号硬件人物
    乔布斯很了不起的一点是:能召集起周边非常非常牛的一批人

  • Personality traits that failed him elsewhere worked here. As always, he could be more temperamental than his subordinates, but with this group of artiste engineers he was afforded considerable leeway. “If you could take Steve, he made you up your game,” says Lee Clow. “People who were too thin-skinned to deal with his abusive approach to demanding what he wanted walked away. But I want to prove to guys like that that I can do it. I’m the kind of person who steps up.” So were many of the other stars on the Mac team.
    Lee Clow的评价的非常中肯

  • Steve led the group on retreats every once in a while, which gave him occasion to have the team all to himself, separate from the distractions of the rest of Apple. He was an inspirational speaker. “The work fifty people are doing here,” he told them, “is going to send a giant ripple through the universe.” His language changed over the months as the project, predictably, took longer than he had expected. “The journey is the reward” and “It would be better to miss rather than turn out the wrong thing” gave way to “Real artists ship.” But the phrasing always gave his team the sense that he did indeed see them as artists, as creative innovators. “He was so protective of us,” one of them told Fortune, “that whenever we complained about somebody outside the division, it was like unleashing a Doberman. Steve would get on the telephone and chew the guy out so fast your head would spin.”
    他真的是一个很不错的领导者,前提是手下的人要足够牛逼,能交付他想要的东西

  • The best of them felt truly empowered and gained Steve’s respect by challenging him directly, using facts, ability, and persistence to change his mind. Sometimes they would simply ignore him outright. One of the Mac hardware engineers, Bob Belleville, worked with Sony to develop a new, much smaller disk drive for the Mac, despite being ordered directly by Steve to not do so. In the end, Sony’s disk drive made it into the Mac and prevented a potentially disastrous delay. Jobs applauded Belleville for sticking it out on his own.

  • Over two years, the team performed heroic work. Steve drove them as relentlessly as he drove himself. He reminded them that the fate of the company hinged on their work. He harangued them for failing to meet deadlines and for falling short of perfection. The pressure grew steadily over time. It was taxing on both mind and body, and some members burned out so completely that they were never able to work in the high-tech industry again. Others found the experience exhilarating, but not something they’d want to repeat, and left Apple to find a less stressful employment environment. And then there was the small group of folks who loved it so much they stuck around, ready to do whatever it would take all over again, in order to work in the rarefied, exhilarating, and charged atmosphere that Steve created when he was running the show. When the job was over, Steve had the signatures of the forty-six key players on the team engraved on the inside of every Mac. Even people working on the Apple II found Steve’s performance inspiring. “We used to say that the Mac people had God on their side,” said one only half jokingly.
    确实,Mac那里的表现,确实跟有God相伴一样

  • THE DEBUT OF the Macintosh established Steve as a master showman. Between the famous “1984” ad, which played just once, during the Super Bowl broadcast on January 22, 1984, and the Mac’s official presentation at the Flint Auditorium on the campus of Cupertino’s De Anza College on January 24, 1984, Steve transformed expectations of what a product introduction could be. “Steve was P. T. Barnum incarnate,” says Lee Clow, a plain-spoken man who sports a wizardly beard and sprangly white hair. “He loved the ta-da! He was always like, ‘I want you to see the Smallest Man in the World!’ He loved pulling the black velvet cloth off a new product, everything about the showbiz, the marketing, the communications.”

  • Working with a team of marketers and PR execs, Steve would rehearse endlessly and fastidiously. Bill Gates made appearances at a couple of these events, and remembers being backstage with Steve. “I was never in his league,” he remembers, talking about Steve’s presentations. “I mean, it was just amazing to see how precisely he would rehearse. And if he’s about to go onstage, and his support people don’t have the things right, you know, he is really, really tough on them. He’s even a bit nervous because it’s a big performance. But then he’s on, and it’s quite an amazing thing.

  • “I mean, his whole thing of knowing exactly what he’s going to say, but up on stage saying it in such a way that he is trying to make you think he’s thinking it up right then …” Gates just laughs.
    你看到的自在得意,来自于一遍遍的排练
    乔布斯都如此努力,你怎么能不努力?

  • According to Clow, it showed the CEO and Jobs walking together through a park. Steve is telling Sculley, “Ya know, I think technology can make the human race better.” The thought bubble above Sculley’s head reads, “I’m gonna win over the board. This kid’s gonna be out of here within six months.”

  • Truth is, the Mac that Steve had delivered was deeply flawed. It was a brilliant piece of engineering and a gorgeous vision of where computing could go, but it was far too underpowered to be useful. Trying to hold the Mac to a $1,995 retail price, he had refused to include more than 128K of memory—about a tenth of what came with the higher-priced Lisa. The Mac’s bitmapping technology soaked up power. The lines and characters that appeared on its screen were pretty, but they sometimes took forever to show up. In fact, the original Mac did just about everything at a glacial pace. It came with a floppy disk drive rather than a hard drive, so copying files from one floppy disk to another was an arduous process in which the user had to pop the two floppies in and out of the computer multiple times. Adding to the machine’s woes: the Mac launched with hardly any software, because the operating system was still being tweaked right up to the day of launch. No wonder sales dried up. In his effort to realize a vision, Steve had slighted the machine’s utility.
    Mac的这一面,确实少有人提及,

  • In fact, shortly after the Mac shipped, he was officially put in charge of the division overseeing both the Lisa and the Mac. But Steve wasn’t interested in supervising incremental improvements for either model. His career to date consisted of a couple of failures—his work on the Apple III and the Lisa—and a couple of breakthrough products. After creating an industry, and then capturing the world’s imagination with another revolutionary computer, he couldn’t be bothered with the heavy lifting required to make the Mac succeed as an ongoing business.
    做出产品后,持续改进产品,以及让产品成功,非常非常重要

  • Steve had alienated the critical software developer community throughout the entire development of the Mac by making it seem that it would be a grand privilege if he allowed them to develop applications for his precious machine. “We’d go down to Cupertino,” remembers Bill Gates, “and Steve would be like, ‘This thing is so fucking cool; in fact, I don’t even know why I’m going to let you guys have anything to do with this. You know, I heard what a bunch of idiots you guys are, and, you know, this thing is so golden. It’s going to ship for $999, we’re about nine months away.’ ” Other times, Steve would betray his own insecurities. “And then the second day we’d have another meeting,” remembers Gates, “and Steve would be like, ‘Oh, shit, is this thing any good? Oh, God, can you help us out with this?’ ” Either way, he wasn’t easy to work with.
    因为以前犯过错,所以后来苹果,极其重视开发者,重视开发者生态

  • Years later, after Steve’s death, Gates told me, “Steve’s a tough character, but he didn’t direct his anger at me all too often.” (Like many of the people we interviewed, Gates slipped into the present tense when talking about Steve, as if he were still alive.) When I asked him if there was anything Steve was terrible at, he laughed: “Sitting in meetings where he wasn’t the person presenting, and the subject was something mundane. Steve was hopeless at that.”

  • In March 1985, Sculley decided that Steve would have to step down as head of the Mac product division. Steve tried to dissuade him for several weeks, with both flattery and scorn, the tools he’d used to great, if isolating, effect on those who had worked for him. But Sculley persisted and brought the matter to the board on April 11. The board sided unanimously with Sculley, even though it included Markkula, Rock, and others who had invested so much in Steve over time. For someone who had given his all to the company he had founded, who was known entirely for what he had accomplished at Apple, the prospect of such a demotion was devastating.

  • Back in California, he visited the Graphics Group, made up of leading-edge computer graphics technicians who were working for film director George Lucas of Star Wars fame, and began to think that the possibilities for computing with high-end, 3-D graphic images were limitless. So he suggested that the Apple board might want to consider buying the group from Lucasfilm. “These guys were way ahead of us on graphics, way ahead,” Steve later told me. “They were way, way ahead of anybody. I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important.” But the board wasn’t paying much attention to Steve anymore, and they passed on acquiring what would eventually become known as Pixar. Indeed, Steve, the cofounder of Apple, wasn’t even consulted on most meaningful decisions anymore.
    有Vision与没有Vision的领导人,完全不一样

  • Sculley made clear that he would take the company in a more “market-driven” direction. Apple would now respond to the demands of its customers, instead of dictating to the market, as Steve had tried to do. Product decisions would be led by the sales and marketing teams, not the engineers. It was a rational decision by a CEO trying to sharpen an organization that had flailed every time it tried to establish some consistency. But it wouldn’t re-create the Apple dream that had drawn so many employees to Cupertino, especially the veterans who had experienced the thrilling and terrifying highs and lows of the Mac development. One employee told Fortune, “They’ve cut the heart out of Apple and substituted an artificial one. We’ll just have to see how long it pumps.” Susan Barnes was one of those who felt the company was becoming mundane, losing its edge. “We were going the wrong way,” remembers Barnes. “Apple was reorganizing, and you had to go down seven levels of management to find an engineer. That’s a really dangerous place for a technology company to be.”
    用心学,能从苹果和乔布斯身上,学到非常多

  • He went to Europe on company business, but he made time to visit museums and enjoy the life of a tourist. He spent a lot of time alone, or with his girlfriend. “Apple had been formed when he was twenty-one,” says Barnes, “so he never really had any time off to think about what he really wanted to do with his life.” It seemed as if this was a time to reflect, to take to heart the hard lessons learned at Apple. It could have been a time to think about what had gone wrong, to understand his own contributions to the quandary that he and the company were in. In some meaningful way, Steve and his followers were right: Steve was the heart of Apple, and without him the company was headed straight for mediocrity. How had he let things get so out of hand?
    希望苹果不要走向平庸

  • Self-reflection didn’t come easy for the thirty-year-old. In Europe he was still hailed as a revolutionary business figure, and his visits to heads of state, university presidents, artists, and others reinforced his vision of himself as an extraordinary person who had been done in by a conventional bureaucrat. That kind of ego inflation was accompanied by the real pain and insecurity resulting from getting rejected by the company he had founded. Later that summer, Steve phoned Barnes from Italy, so depressed that she started to worry that he might be suicidal.

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产品随想 | 陪读《乔布斯传》:1-17章

乔布斯经典照片集 坐在麗莎電腦旁。他說:「毕加索曾說:「好的藝術家懂得模仿,佛大的藝術家善於偷取。」因此,窃取偉大的點子沒有什麼好羞耻的。 與蓋茲在電話中達成協議:「比爾,謝謝你支持蘋果。因為你的支持,世界將變得更美好。」 1997年蘋果在波士頓舉行的麥金塔世界大會,蓋茲透過衛星連線在巨大的螢幕上出現。質伯斯說:「我真是笨死了,竟然讓蓋兹以這種方式現身。他讓我看起來好沙小。」 ──时刻自省 前言 The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. 只有那些瘋狂到以為自己可以改變世界的人, 才能改變這個世界。 這麼些年來,賈伯斯說起話來的認真與專注態度,著實打動不少人。我們一直保持連絡,即使在他被逐出蘋果之後,我們還有來往。每次他有新產品要推出時,像 NeXT 電腦或皮克斯 (Pixar)的電影,他就會來找我。他常帶我去曼哈頓下城一家壽司店用餐,講起他的產品,渾身散發出光和熱,眉飛色舞的說這是他登峰造極之作。我喜歡這個人。 ──对自己产品深深的爱 他的堅持教我疑惑。人人都知道賈伯斯不道餘力捍衛隱私, 而且我不知道他是否看過我寫的任何一本傳記。我還是不敢立刻答應,只說或許再等等。然而到了 2009年,我接到他太太蘿琳. 鮑威爾打來的電話。她直截了當說:「如果你還想為史帝夫寫傳,最好趕快動筆。」這是他第二次因病向公司請長假。我坦言他早在2004 年得知自己罹患胰臟癌的時候就曾主動邀我寫傳,但我當時對他罹癌的事一無所知。蘿琳解釋說,他們盡量保密,因此當時根本沒幾個人知道。他是在動手術的前夕打電話給我的。 ──和Make Something Wonderful对照起来看 他還說,自從他回到蘋果重新掌權,這十二年來是他創造新產品的高峰期,但他還有更重要的目標,也就是效法惠普的惠立和普克(David Packard),締造一家創新動力無限的公司,進而超越惠普。 ──苹果公司才是乔布斯最得意的产品 他說:「我一直認為,自己是個偏向人文的孩子,但我也喜歡電子的東西。後來,我讀到寶麗來(Polaroid)創辦人蘭德 (Edwin Land)曾說過,一個人能站在人文和科學的交會口,兼容贯通,才是真正的人才。在那當下,我决定要當這樣的人。」他似乎在暗示我,這可以做為傳...

零碎思考 | 關於LLM的閱讀筆記

  通向AGI之路:大型语言模型(LLM)技术精要   https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/597586623 拆解追溯 GPT-3.5 各项能力的起源   https://yaofu.notion.site/GPT-3-5-360081d91ec245f29029d37b54573756 清晰明瞭 A Closer Look at Large Language Models Emergent Abilities   https://yaofu.notion.site/A-Closer-Look-at-Large-Language-Models-Emergent-Abilities-493876b55df5479d80686f68a1abd72f 試圖說明LLM的涌現能力] 如何利用GPT-4打造高效智能信息收集神器   https://lpcv.org/fwc/a/MzU0MDk3NTUxMA==/2247483868/1 學習思路 GPT-4编码教程,如何用AI构建和宣传我的Midjourney网站增强插件   https://op7418.zhubai.love/posts/2254193381183922176 AUTOMATIC1111 GUI: A Beginner’s Guide   https://stable-diffusion-art.com/automatic1111/ 其實就是AI界的雲渲染,挺有意思的 Midjourney还是Stable Diffusion: 你应该选哪个?   https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/617157677 看到作者下方的“註冊會計師”,中國太卷了 树莓派4B刷OpenWrt做路由器的经验+踩坑   https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/451788328 關注其中的坑點 doc.openwrt.cc   https://doc.openwrt.cc/

产品随想 | 周刊 第63期:中国城市化的历史思考

Products 李志 · BB   https://github.com/turkyden/lizhi-app 开箱即用,一个珍藏了李志音乐作品集的在线播放器 作者的描述很有意思:我们不能失去信仰~ Watt Toolkit 🧰 (原名 Steam++)   https://github.com/BeyondDimension/SteamTools 「Watt Toolkit」是一个开源跨平台的多功能游戏工具箱,此工具的大部分功能都是需要您下载安装 Steam 才能使用。 语雀为什么没被钉钉吃掉,跟支付宝又是什么关系?   https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/62ed2b1d226f5c1fa0d58357 乱翻书播客推荐 Behind the Curtain   https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/behind-the-curtain/ 我们正在结合我们一直在收集的关于公司游说、国会股票交易和拟议立法的数据,以便让您跟踪华盛顿特区幕后发生的事情您可以使用此工具查看哪些法案正在被国会审议了哪些上市公司正在就这些法案进行游说,以及哪些国会议员交易了这些公司的股票。 民主非常需要这样的信息透明 脑洞大开,给自行车装上倒车雷达和行车记录仪   https://sspai.com/post/73521 佳明-骑行雷达尾灯 Varia RCT 715,非常喜欢,但真的好贵.....3K+ RMB Health 体检报告出现高尿酸,你该如何在饮食方面控制风险?   https://sspai.com/post/73031 Citizenship Consciousness & Privacy 张鸣:中国城市化的历史思考 2019 09 04   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRcPssCkXeI 内核论点是:城市化最重要的有私有产权的商人 这个创作者也值得关注 Run 日本移居指南   https://guoyu.mirror.xyz/bPaDKAcrhJGUbaXu9BWDcdD-F46gBFATTvf_qwZ9Bso 添加加Run模块,润 A Programmer's Guid...

产品随想 | 周刊 第115期:2024.5.16 Great libraries build communities

Loop   https://github.com/MrKai77/Loop Loop is a macOS app that simplifies window management for you! 我的电视 my-tv   https://github.com/lizongying/my-tv 我的电视 电视直播软件,安装即可使用 When we think about this technology, we need to put human dignity, human well-being—human jobs—in the center of consideration. ————Fei-Fei Li Author Talks: Dr. Fei-Fei Li sees ‘worlds’ of possibilities in a multidisciplinary approach to AI   https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-dr-fei-fei-li-sees-worlds-of-possibilities-in-a-multidisciplinary-approach-to-ai Randy Ubillos   https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Randy_Ubillos Randall Hayes "Randy" Ubillos is the original software engineer behind Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. 影响全球视频制作的男人, Reminders MenuBar   https://github.com/DamascenoRafael/reminders-menubar Simple macOS menu bar application to view and interact with reminders. Developed with SwiftUI and using Apple Reminders as a source. Bad libraries build colle...

《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 13 Stanford

Steve was a natural performer who elevated business presentations to something close to high art. But what made him fidgety this day was the prospect of addressing the Stanford University graduating class of 2005. University president John Hennessy had broached the idea several months earlier, and after taking just a little time to think it over, Steve had said yes. He was offered speaking engagements constantly, and he always said no. In fact, he was asked to do so many commencement addresses that it became a running joke with Laurene and other friends who had college or graduate degrees: Steve said he’d accept one just to make an end run around them and get his PhD in a day, versus the years and years it had taken them. But in the end, saying no was simply a question of return on investment—conferences and public speaking seemed to offer a meager payoff compared to other things, like a dazzling MacWorld presentation, working on a great product, or being around his family. “If you loo...

Markdown学习笔记

学习帖来自简书,这是我的笔记, 献给作者的Markdown新手指南 # 一级标题    #数量决定标题层级 - 文本    列表格式

产品随想 | 周刊 第86期:Next Generation of AI

  gerev   https://github.com/GerevAI/gerev AI-powered enterprise search engine 聚合了Confluence,Slack,Jira等非常多的平台,还是很不错的 假如有个定位在C端的产品,能让用户自己来定义来源,就更好了,maybe是alist的思路(精准搜索已经被everything承接了) Dalai   https://github.com/cocktailpeanut/dalai Run LLaMA and Alpaca on your computer. 对计算机硬件的要求,并不高 Chatbox   https://github.com/Bin-Huang/chatbox Your Ultimate Copilot on the Desktop. Chatbox is a desktop app for GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 (OpenAI API) that supports Windows, Mac & Linux. Tune-A-Video   https://github.com/showlab/Tune-A-Video Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation Given a video-text pair as input, our method, Tune-A-Video, fine-tunes a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for text-to-video generation. Diffusion的本质是模仿和乐高式的重新拼接 Jensen Huang — NVIDIA's CEO on the Next Generation of AI and MLOps   https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/gradient-dissent/reports/Jensen-Huang-NVIDIA-s-CEO-on-the-Next-Generation-of-AI-and-MLOps--Vmlldz...

認知香港-梁啟智推薦書目

///// 推 薦 書 單 在 這 邊 ///// 1.《香港簡史》,高馬可,2021,蜂鳥。 2.《香港人之香港史 1841-1945》,蔡榮芳,2000,牛津大學出版社。 3.《穿梭太平洋︰金山夢、華人出洋與香港的形成》,冼玉儀,2019,中華書局。 4.《被遺忘的六日戰爭:1899年新界鄉民與英軍之戰》,夏思義 ,2014,中華書局。 5.《香港六七暴動始末》,程翔,2018,牛津大學。 6.《地下陣線:中共在香港的歷史》,陸恭蕙,2011,香港大學出版社。 7.《香港80年代民主運動口述歷史》,馬嶽 ,2012,香港城市大學。 8.《我是記者:六四印記:六四30》,2019,香港記者協會-人民不會忘記基金。 9.《胸懷祖國 : 香港「愛國左派」運動,趙永佳,呂大樂,容世誠,2014,牛津大學出版社。 10.《勾結共謀的殖民權力》,羅永生,2015 ,牛津大學出版社。 11.《殖民無間道》,羅永生,2017,牛津大學出版社。 12.《中國香港 : 文化與政治的視野》,強世功,2008,牛津大學出版社。 13.《中國天朝主義與香港》,陳冠中,2012,牛津大學出版社。 14.《變局下的徘徊 : 從戰後到後九七香港教會社關史論 》,邢福增,2018,印象文字。 15.《回歸人心——極權臨近的香港文化經濟學》,許寶強,2018,牛津大學出版社。 16.《香港, 鬱躁的家邦 : 本土觀點的香港源流史》,徐承恩,2019,左岸文化。 17.《彭定康英文自傳》,彭定康。 18.《許家屯香港回憶錄(上.下)》,許家屯,1993,聯經出版公司。 19.《大江東去——司徒華回憶錄》,司徒華,2011,牛津大學出版社。 20.《拱心石下——從政十八年》,吳靄儀,2018,牛津/啟思。 21.《相遇》,周保松,2008,牛津大學出版社。 22.《受苦與反抗:陳健民.獄中書簡》,陳健民,2022,聯經出版公司。 23.《破解香港風威權法治:傘後與反送中以來的民主運動》,黎恩灝,2021,新銳文創。 24.《特區選舉:制度與投票行為》,蔡子強,馬嶽,陳雋文,2021,香港城市大學。 25.《二十道陰影下的自由:香港新聞審查日常》,區家麟,2017,中文大學出版社。 26.《香港第一課》,梁啟智,2019,春山。 27.《管治香港:英國解密檔案的啟示》,李彭廣,...

产品随想 | 周刊 第59期:中华人民共和国史

Products anti-anti-AD   https://github.com/Mosney/anti-anti-AD 为什么不应使用antiAD去广告列表,以及选择更多优秀的替代品 很多此类域 Diffusion Bee   https://github.com/divamgupta/diffusionbee-stable-diffusion-ui Diffusion Bee is the easiest way to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. 门槛好高... M1 Aloud   https://aloud.area120.google.com/ Aloud is part of Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator for new products and services. 除去现在的自动生成CC字幕外,探索直接将视频的音轨,变换为其它语言,Google牛逼! Citizenship Consciousness & Privacy 董乐山   https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-sg/董乐山 简介很短,但足以看到时代对他的残酷 《第三帝国的兴亡》 中华人民共和国史   https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/chinesepress/promotion/prc_sample/index.htm 第一卷 断裂与延续──中华人民共和国的创建(1949-1952)(即将出版) 杨奎松 (估计审查,也没机会了) 第二卷 向社会主义过渡 ── 中国经济与社会的转型(1953-1955) 林蕴晖 第三卷 思考与选择 ── 从知识分子会议到反右派运动(1956-1957) 沈志华 第四卷 乌托邦运动──从大跃进到大饥荒(1958-1961) 林蕴晖 第五卷 历史的变局──从挽救危机到反修防修(1962-1965) 钱庠理 第六卷 「砸烂旧世界」──文化大革命的动乱与浩劫(1966-1968) 卜伟华 第七卷 新秩序和新冲突──从中共九大到林彪事件(1969-1971) (即将出版) 高华(作者去世,应该没有机会了) 第八卷 难以继续的「继续革命」 ──从批林到批邓(1972-1976...

优秀的纪录片字幕组推荐

作者:lsmlive 链接:https://www.zhihu.com/question/28231811/answer/85442103 来源:知乎 著作权归作者所有。商业转载请联系作者获得授权,非商业转载请注明出处。 以下提到的字幕组主要都是翻译纪录片的,而且肯定都还活着(还在翻译和发布资源),但具体论坛网站地址请自行搜索(其实关注他们的微博就可以了),因为有些字幕组有保持低调的需要(你懂的)。 1. 纪录片之家字幕组。 如果你经常看纪录片且比较会找资源和字幕的话,那你十有八九应该会知道纪录片之家(简称小家)这个论坛,以及论坛里的原创字幕区。外边的视频网站上的很多纪录片字幕恐怕都来自小家(当然也不少被盗用字幕篡改原创信息的),何况小家里还有很多禁止转载出去的原创字幕。 2. 3E帝国字幕组。 3E帝国论坛曾经挺繁荣的,不过字幕组现在也还挺活跃的,字幕特效做得很好。3E字幕组老大跟小家字幕组老大关系密切。 3. 夏末秋字幕组。 据说组内好多海归姐姐?夏末秋主要就是做BBC纪录片和英剧了。字幕风格特色一直规范沿袭,所以经常一看就知道是她家做的字幕。夏末秋恐怕是最多人知道的一个组了吧,应该也不用多介绍。 4. 人人影视字幕组。 人人影视几乎什么都做(英美日剧电影公开课纪录片…),现在更是直接叫字幕组了,虽然还是没有宇宙组霸气。话说他虽然不是专做纪录片的,但毕竟也做了那么久,累积下来的数量应该也很可观。特色也是其双语特效字幕,几乎也是一眼就能认出是他家的,还有应该就是其HR-HDTV的小体积版本视频了吧。 5. 道兰字幕组。 主要做日本NHK电视台的纪录片。网上很多NHK纪录片恐怕都是他家翻的。因为NHK经常播些反映我国社会现实的片子,所以连带着道兰论坛都被和谐了,需要翻墙访问,不过正如我开头所说的,关注下微博也是可以的。 以上就是我所知道的几个比较大型的纪录片字幕组了,下面是几个 我觉得比较有特色的纪录片字幕组。 6. ACI字幕组 由空中浩劫贴吧里的网友初创组成的字幕组,主要翻译《空中浩劫》系列以及其它一些航空题材纪录片。 7.光合作用园艺 翻译过不少园艺题材的纪录片。 还有些做七七八八的,但也做纪录片的字幕组。 8.诸神字幕组 虽然也做日漫日剧,不过也有做日语纪录片就是了。 9.FIX字幕侠 好像做得挺杂的,不过应该做...