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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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自行车棚效应:我们为什么在小事上纠结,却对大事视而不见?   https://limboy.me/posts/bike-shedding Benz-Patent   https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/milestones/benz-patent-motor-car/ 豐田博物館   https://toyota-automobile-museum.jp/tw/ 值得一去的汽车博物馆 一人公司   https://github.com/cyfyifanchen/one-person-company one-person-company, 一人公司 AI 工具系列 wujiaxian   https://wujiaxian.com/ 可能吧创始人的个人Blog,介绍自己的方式,很值得学习 日本京都10大設計熱點!「建築大師貝聿銘操刀美術館,皆川明設計旅館、選物店,還有全球最美的藍瓶咖啡店舖!」   https://www.elle.com/tw/life/style/g33846398/2020-kyoto-10-hotspots/ 京都真是非常美 Henry L. Stimson   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Stimson?useskin=vector While Kyoto may have satisfied the military criteria for a useful target, Stimson objected, declaring in a meeting if the Interim Committee on June 1, 1945, "...there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto." 人性的努力保护了京都 Brooke Astor, 105, Aristocrat of the People, Dies   https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/obituaries/14astor.html 值得尊敬...

产品随想 | 周刊 第127期:晨光只开一刻钟,但比千年松,并无甚不同

Cherry Studio   https://github.com/CherryHQ/cherry-studio Cherry Studio is a desktop client that supports for multiple LLM providers. Support deepseek-r1 Aalto Repository beta   https://repo.aalto.fi/ Images, sounds and videos from Aalto University 这个系列,价值极高 Nokia Design Archive   https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/ 芬兰这个国家很了不起 对话影石刘靖康:两代未出现划时代的产品,就会沦为平庸的品牌   https://www.geekpark.net/news/308996 还挺喜欢这个创始人的,有一种海盗的内涵 从哈佛、明星创业者到酷家乐副总裁,苏奇的传奇   https://app.modaiyun.com/mdy/article/3FO4K4W0M259 WHO关于猫狗咬伤、抓伤的处理建议 动物咬伤: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/animal-bites 狂犬病: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies 关于狂犬病的10个事实: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/rabies INDIGO 新年直播(2025)   https://www.youtube.com/live/ZIgPvSDGAfY 对2024年AI发展的回顾部分特别好 Artab   https://github.com/get-artab/artab Get Inspired by the World's Greatest Artworks Every Time You Open a New Tab. Extension Available for Chrome, Edge, and...

MongoDB学习笔记

这是我阅读《MongoDB权威指南》的学习笔记,前七章侧重在开发者角度谈MongoDB,后面才是运维管理者角度 一. 理论部分 入门 文档:多个键及其关联的值有序地放置在一起便是文档 集合:一组文档 虽然子集合没有特别的地方,但还是很有用,很多MongoDB工具中都包含子集合 GridFS是一种存储大文件的协议,使用子集合来存储文件的元数据,这样就与内容块分开了 MongoDB的Web控制台通过子集合的方式将数据组织在DBTOP部分 绝大多数驱动程序都提供语法糖,为访问指定集合的子集合提供方便。例如:在数据库shell里面,db.blog代表blog集合,db.blog.posts代表blog.posts集合 在MongoDB中使用子集合来组织数据是很好的方法,在此强烈推荐 数据类型 JSON表现力也有限制,因为只有null,布尔,数字,字符串,数组和对象几种类型, MongoDB保留JSON键值对基础上,增添了其他一些数据类型 使用GridFS存储文件有如下原因: 会直接利用业已建立的复制或分片机制,所以对于文件存储来说故障恢复和扩展都很容易 可以避免用户上传内容的文件系统出现的某些问题 不产生磁盘碎片,因为MongoDB分配数据文件空间以2GB为一块 开发者角度到此为止,下一篇是运维角度的学习

无处不在的监控: Hacking Team:WP8 监控代码分析

原文来自乌云,备份 地址 0x00 背景 最近Hacking Team被黑客入侵,近400GB的资料泄漏,在安全界炒的沸沸扬扬.其中泄漏的资料包括:源代码,0day,资料入侵项目相关信息,相关的账户密码,数据及音像资料,办公文档,邮件及图片。 Hacking Team在意大利米兰注册了一家软件公司,主要销售入侵及监视功能的软件。其远程控制系统可以监测互联网用户的通讯,解密用户的加密,文件及电子邮件,记录各种通信信息,也可以远程激活用户的麦克风及摄像头。其产品在几十个国家使用 在源代码中有各个操作系统平台的远程控制软件源码, RCS(Remote Control System) 。经过我们的分析,发现其监控内容不可谓不详尽。 Android,blackberry,ios,windows,window phone,symbian 均有与之对应的监控代码。 在源码中,rcs为前缀的源码文件是其远控功能,包括代理 控制 监控数据库 隐藏ip 等,而针对特定平台架构的是以core前缀命名。其中和相关window phone监控代码在 core-winphone-master.zip 文件中。其主要用于实时手机系统的系统状态信息如(电池状态,设备信息,GPS地址位置),联系人,短信记录,日历日程安排,照片;同时还能录音,截取手机屏幕,开启摄像头,话筒等功能,由此可见监控信息的详细程度令人害怕。 0x01 WP8监控源码分析 core-winphone-master\MornellaWp8\MornellaWp8 下是其主要核心代码,主要文件如下: 通过观察源码流程图可以看出,整个监控项目源码的逻辑还是比较复杂的,但是深入之后,发现其还是设计的比较巧妙 0x01-1 程序框架分析 1.项目主要分为3大块 Modules,Events,Actions ,主要的功能Modules核心监控代码在此处,Event等待监控事件的到来并调用对应的监控模块,Action主要负责一些行为的启动和停止 程序启动流程如下: main->mornellaStart->BTC_Init->CoreProc->Core->Task setLoadLibraryExW 分支主要负责加载一些API函数的地址,...

产品爱好者周刊 第26期:PRISM, XKeyscore, Trust No One

  Products Gitea - Git with a cup of tea   https://gitea.io/en-us/ A painless self-hosted Git service. 自建Git服务,避免GitHub隐私侵犯 https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu LuLu is the free macOS firewall 监视Mac的出站流量,且阻断 OverSight   https://github.com/objective-see/OverSight OverSight monitors a mac's mic and webcam, alerting the user when the internal mic is activated, or whenever a process accesses the webcam. 监视是否有应用调用Mac的麦克风、摄像头 Mozilla Hubs   https://github.com/mozilla/hubs The client-side code for Mozilla Hubs, an online 3D collaboration platform that works for desktop, mobile, and VR platforms. 开源的多人虚拟空间,Mozilla打造,企业级VR诉求 数字移民   https://shuziyimin.org 关于内容源、工具的推荐,适合刚接入国际的新人 SimpleLogin   https://simplelogin.io/ 匿名邮箱工具,转发用,Michael Bazzell推荐 Telegram 群组、频道、机器人 - 汇总分享   https://congcong0806.github.io/2018/04/24/Telegram/#机器人-bot https://archive.ph/iJMBj 献给那些将来到Telegram的朋友 Design Patrick Wardle   https://www.instagram.com/patrickwardle/?hl=en 他的IG,摄影也精彩,审美...

ifconfig参数备忘

       主要指标说明: eth0/lo:网络接口名 Link encap:网络类型

产品随想 | 读《中国是部金融史》:第三章至第五章

  第三章 犯我货币者,虽强必诛(汉高祖一汉武帝) 刘邦大概没有想到,他的土地政策奠定了此后两千年的社会结构:皇帝是社会最高层,具有至高无上的权力;皇帝之下是三公九即等封建官僚,拿皇帝的钱,逐级管理小农;最底层是万千小农,他们对帝国纳税,用自己的血汗钱养活帝王与封建官僚。此后,中国封建社会结构始终没有摆脱“皇权一封建官僚一小农”这个三位一体的窠臼。 既然消灭了异姓王,正常思维应该是仿效秦始皇强化郡县制,但是这位平民皇帝选择了…条谁也想不到的道路,他分封自己的兄弟子侄为王,并与诸王约定,此后非我子孙称王,天下人都可以杀了他(非刘氏而王者,天下共击之)。刘邦亲眼目睹了秦帝困的分崩离析,危急时刻无人愿意支撑起破败的帝国。华竟,官僚靠薪水吃饭, 就算贪污的本事很大,也没有理由维护别人的一姓天下。 如果没有血浓于水的同姓诸侯王,汉帝国将来同样无法应对真正的危机。事实证明,分封刘氏诸王是对的,如果没有刘邦留下来的同姓诸侯,恐怕汉朝早就得跟着皇后吕雉姓“吕”了。 人们习惯于将刘邦的皇后吕雉称呼为“吕后〞,这是中国古代历史上第一位临朝称制的太后,另外两位要等到盛唐和晚清才能在本书中出镜,三位女强人都是中国货币史上浓墨重彩的人物。 然而,从吕雉开始,仅仅不到一个世纪, 破败的汉帝国就一跃变为当时世界上最强盛的国家,直接把打遍天下无敌手的匈奴骑兵赶到了西欧,让罗马帝国受尽了欺凌。吕后末年,西汉单个农业劳动力的原粮产量已经突破了三干四百斤,这不但是西欧一干五百年后的劳动生产率,也远高于1973年中四的劳动生产率(二千二百四十斤)。应该说,中西文明争霸就是从汉帝国驱赶匈奴开始的,在第一轮交锋中,西欧完败。 ──原来西汉能超过1978年,厉害 吕雉坚决执行了一项前无古人(后有来者)的税收政策—“十五而税一”,换算一下,吕雉时代庶人个人收入所得税税率为 6.6%,而且,没有累进税率。 《二年律令》彻底改变了中国历史的发展轨迹,秦人以军功授田,刘邦以服兵役为代价授田,只有到了吕雉才真正实现了全困范用的“均田“。这是中国历史上第一次以法律形式明确了土地私有制度,每一个最普通的庶人都获得了土地,整个社会实现了孟子的“百亩之田、五亩之宅”理想。这是无数先贤追求的大同世界梦想一“耕者有其田”,请注意,我没有说这是“耕者有其田"的雏形,而是实实在在的“耕者有其田"。 ──对汉朝,充满敬...

常用建筑素材站点

高大上的建筑竞赛效果图中的素材是如何收集的回答,感谢知乎 Vincent Ku 以下是之前搜寻过的素材网站,应该这些够用了 http:// skalgubbar.se/ http:// skalgubbrasil.tumblr.com / http://www. immediateentourage.com/ http://www. gobotree.com/ http://www. mrcutout.com/ http://www. cutoutlife.com/ http://www. nonscandinavia.com/ http://www. escalalatina.com/ http://www. mayang.com/textures/ind ex.htm http://www. textures.com/ ===== 感谢知友 @SJTUboy 补充 http:// maps.stamen.com/# watercolor/12/37.7706/-122.3782 http:// maps.stamen.com/m2i/# toner-background/2000:2000/10/31.1674/121.6063 作者:Vincent Ku 链接:https://www.zhihu.com/question/31584353/answer/73642305 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。

The Little MongoDB Book

The Little MongoDB Book 基础 在一个MongoDB实例中可以有若干数据库或一个都没有,不过这里的数据库都是高层次容器,用来储存其他的所有数据 一个数据库可以有若干集合或者一个都没有, 集合由若干文档组成,也可以为空 文档由一个或更多的域组成 索引的意义 游标和以上概念不同,很重要但是常常被忽略,有一点很重要,每当向MongoDB索要数据时,总是返回一个游标 小结一下,MongoDB由数据库组成,数据库由集合组成,集合由文档组成。域组成了文档,集合可以被索引,从而提高了查找和排序的性能。最后,从MongoDB读取数据的时候是通过游标进行的,除非需要,游标不会真正去作读的操作 读到后面觉得实战意义不是很大,就跳过了

产品随想 | 周刊 第126期:Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world

FolderPaint   https://github.com/MichaelTr7/FolderPaint Folder colour changing application for macOS. 乔布斯说:“对于我和苹果公司的许多人来说,索尼的盛田昭夫是最大的灵感来源之一。我希望我们今天的所想所为能让他会心一笑。” 乔布斯甚至从索尼挖走了一位顶级设计师。哈特穆特·艾斯林格被苹果挖走前,已在 100 多种索尼产品的创造中发挥了重要作用。 供职于索尼时,艾斯林格所在的设计工作室与管理办公室和工厂车间享有同等地位。他说,这样有助于促进公司生产和设计团队之间在一定程度上达成团结,这正是乔布斯试图重建的团结。 艾斯林格指出:“乔布斯有能力洞察事物的好坏,却不知道如何实现以及如何通过组织去构建。因此,我们向苹果提出的第一个建议是,赋予设计师一定的话语权。” 斯卡利表示,乔布斯和盛田之间的深厚友谊和相互敬重可以归结为对于设计的共同热忱。 “他们以非常积极的方式产生了共鸣”,斯卡利说,“两位来自不同文化背景的创始人共聚一堂,这是非常难能可贵的。他们讨论设计原则,却从不谈及商业模式。” “Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” City Lights Bookstore   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Lights_Bookstore?useskin=vector 旧金山的城市之光独立书店 Vesuvio Cafe   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesuvio_Cafe?useskin=vector 好奇怪,这家Cafe居然没有太多的介绍 “One of the things that I was fortunate of was to see and understand the context of San Francisco through the eyes of Steve Jobs,” Mr. Ive said. “He kn...