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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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原文地址 独家教程 | “真假难辨”的效果图如何打造,以一只笔为例(下)——渲染篇 上期独家教程,康石石带大家用Rhino完成了 COPIC MULTILINER 针管笔建模(复习请戳: 独家教程 | “真假难辨”的效果图如何打造,以一只笔为例(上)——建模篇 ),下面我们把它丢进Keyshot渲染器里,看看究竟Keyshot究竟能不能打造真实照片一般的既视感。 Keyshot虽为各家晚辈,但近年来突飞猛进。有的同学说Keyshot渲染效果不如V-Ray,但我们可以看下本期独家教程内容再作判断。 基础材质赋予 首先我们打开 Keyshot 基本导入参数 导入后 由于我们事先在Rhino中,对各个部件分过色,所以我们可以直接,尽情 把左边各种需要的材质球直接拖到需要的部件上 。 初步赋予材质后效果 特写效果 环境光赋予 Keyshot预设的材质显然不能够完全适合所需情况,且物体上的光线并不是很正确。因此同学们需要 将环境光换成更加接近真实摄影棚的灯光场景 。 选用 3 Panels Tilted 2k 作为的基本环境光,将环境光拖入环境里之后,效果如下: 模型各部材质赋予 由于光影的变化,整个模型已更加真实。 接下来 各部的材质还需根据实际的视觉情况 手工调整 。 以下是这次模型各部材质的参数:   笔身主要的金属材质 黑色塑料件部分以及笔头的黑色 笔夹与笔头所使用的金属材质 Tip:金属材质是将Keyshot预设的钢材质的粗糙度调整为0.01而成。 握柄处的塑料材质 Tip:因为塑料的视觉特点,此处特地选用了 半透明属性的材质 做调整,除了表面颜色的参数之外,剩余的三个颜色区域均使用了 R255,G255,B255的纯白 。 笔身标签渲染 在给各部赋予了材质之后,产品很重要的一个环节就是印刷于产品之上的各种商标与说明,在Keyshot中,这些效果可以很轻松的通过标签功能来实现。 首先对实物上的印刷效果进行观察, 可以看出实物上的印刷效果其实是比较立体的 。 Tip: 细节,往往是产品品质的一种体现。 在效果图的渲染中,也应该...

《沸腾十五年》

  《沸腾十五年》 讲述中国,1995-2009 1995互联网商业元年 马云中国黄页 杭州电信有着非常好的社会资源和政府资源,马云却一样都没有。 杭州电信利用中国黄页( chinapage.com )已有的名声,做了一个名字很接近的网站,也叫“中国黄页”( chinesepage.com ),借以分割马云版“中国黄页”的市场。 海归、极客、商人成为中国互联网创业者中的三大特色群体(VC是推手) 1996海归归来 为了确保搜狐不被遗忘,张朝阳选择了最便宜也最有效的方法:树立个人品牌。 1997大门洞开 互联网的一年等于其他行业的7年 网易免费电子邮箱系统一出,中关村性急的评论家们甚至给丁磊戴上第三代程序员的帽子,这个代别划分是这样的:基于DOS平台开发的是第一代,基于Windows平台开发的是第二代,基于Internet平台开发的是第三代。 1998极客当道 曾李青是腾讯5个创始人中最好玩、最开放、最具激情和感召力的一个,与温和的马化腾、爱好技术的张志东相比,是另一个类型。 周鸿祎在公开场合经常教育年轻的创业者,应该先用创业的心态去打工,充分积累自己在管理和业务上的能力和资源 1999狂欢开始了 海归、商人、极客、VC推手,这四类人一起齐刷刷地汇聚在1999年,1999年就这样成为中国互联网最黄金、最灿烂、最辉煌、最值得念想的大年份。 2000泡沫四溢 亚马逊的卖点是:‘最近50年的书我们都有’——这是它提供海量品种的意义。(因为国外有很高的信息化程度,以查询库房是否有存书) 雷军在商店买T恤的时候,发现了求同消费现象。“中国经济和美国经济处在不同的发展阶段,美国消费者寻求个性消费,中国现阶段,需求高度趋同,中国需要50年前版书的人极少。” 单品价格压得再便宜,但5元钱的配送费卓越坚决不免,用户冲着几乎免费的产品而来,但想想既然要出5元的配送费,买一样商品是这个钱,10样商品也是,不如多挑几样商品。 雷军发现,互联网比软件要好玩得多,可以不断地改,不断地去修正,用户可以很快地反馈给你,你也可以很快地进步 2001大转折 段永平反问他:“你卖了公司之后干吗?”丁磊说:“我卖了公司有钱后再开一家公司。” 段永平发现,网易股票被低估是因为公司面临一场官司,也可能被摘牌,这里面有些不确定性。段永平就去找一些法律界人士问官司的问题,问类似的官司最可能的结果是什么,得到...

产品随想 | 陪读《芯片战争》:一、二章

作者其它书也值得读读 已出版《食用油营销第1书》《金龙鱼背后的粮油帝国》《鲁花:一粒花生撬动的粮油帝国》《手机战争》等财经书籍。 第一章 从晶体管到芯片 肖克利要创业的消息,就像17世纪的牛顿宣布要建立工场一样引起了轰动。那时候,美国还在草创时期的半导体产业主要集中在东部的波士顿和纽约长岛地区,许多科学家和工程师精英都慕肖克利之名前往美国西海岸,不远千里地聚集在肖克利旗下。可以这么说,肖克利给硅谷带来了最初的火种。 ——我也認可這個說法,不是斯坦福或其他校園,純粹是人才的原因 芯片发明后的六年间,政府对芯片项目的资助高达3200万美元,其中70%来自空军。同期美国半导体产业的研发经费有约85%的比例来自政府,政府的支持成就了美国在半导体领域的技术优势。“华盛顿通过支付技术研发费用和保证最终产品的市场份额,将原子弹最终制造成功的间隔缩短至六年,晶体管缩短至五年,集成电路缩短至三年。”不过,这些半导体企业实力壮大以后,往往不愿再参与美国政府出资的研发项目,因为那意味着专利权归政府所有,而且还得受保密条款的约束。 ——這纔是更合理的產業支持政策 诺伊斯采用激进的价格政策,将主要芯片产品的价格一举降到1美元,不仅是市场上的主流芯片价格的零头,还低于当时芯片的成本。这不是传统意义上的亏本倾销,而是第一个以反摩尔定律为定价依据的案例。反摩尔定律认为,同样的芯片在18个月后价格就会跌一半,所以按照几年后的价格为当前的芯片定价是有一定合理性的。市场被迅速打开,芯片很快在民用市场得到越来越广泛的应用,仙童的营收和利润都迅速上升,还带动了其母公司的股价上涨。摩尔后来评论:“诺伊斯以低价刺激需求,继而扩大产能、降低成本的策略,对于芯片产业的发展而言,其重要性堪比芯片的发明。” ——看到這裏的時候,真是非常震撼,好厲害的定價策略 东通工用磷渗透法研发出了高频的晶体管,于1957年做出世界上第一款袖珍收音机,并在这款产品上启用了索尼商标。盛田昭夫到美国去推销袖珍收音机的时候,德州仪器刚刚轻率地放弃了这个市场。美国人对盛田昭夫说:你们为什么要制造这种小收音机?美国人都想要大收音机。盛田昭夫回答:单单纽约就有20多家广播公司,同时就有20多套节目在播放,每人使用一台小收音机收听自己喜欢的节目,岂不更好?索尼用“一人一台”的宣传成功打破了美国人全家共用一台大型收音机的观念,成为全世界最畅销的收音机...

Steve Jobs on the iTunes Music Store: The Unpublished Interview

A candid talk with Apple's CEO on a landmark day in its history. By Laura Locke  |  Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 1:15 am Steve Jobs announces the iTunes Music Store. On April 28th, 2003, moments before I was about to interview Steve Jobs at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, I was jittery. Anticipation? Nerves? Excitement? You bet. All of those visceral emotions were firing. Knowing Jobs’ storied reputation as an irascible and exacting Silicon Valley CEO had me on edge. But I had prepared a tight set of questions. Secretly, I was hoping he might enjoy the line of inquiry. In turn, I would have a lively and candid report for my editors at TIME. What I didn’t know was that the interview was taking place on what would turn out to be one of the most important days in Apple’s history: The launch of the iTunes Music Store. Once again, Ste...

产品随想 | 周刊 第50期:2010年kkndme:写在房价暴涨前

Products Digital Clock 4   https://sourceforge.net/projects/digitalclock4/ 开源的桌面时钟工具,开源,Linux, Mac, Windows FlipIt   https://github.com/phaselden/FlipIt Flip Clock screensaver 开源的翻页时钟 Windows 11 Fixer   https://github.com/99natmar99/Windows-11-Fixer Windows 11 Fixer is a program designed to make customizing your Windows 11 as easy as possible. 在一个集中的位置,能直接Win11相关的设置 即食历史   https://cuphistory.net/ 非常简短的历史科普,Base香港,很多内容有广东话 kkndme聊房   https://github.com/momo0853/kkndme kkndme聊房,数据整理自天涯。提供HTML、PDF和Markdown三种形式。 v86   https://github.com/copy/v86 x86 virtualization in your browser, recompiling x86 to wasm on the fly 浏览器中模拟x86 GitHub City   https://github.com/honzaap/GithubCity Create a 3D city from your GitHub contributions 让过往成城 Layoffs.fyi   Tracker   https://layoffs.fyi/ Tracking all tech startup layoffs since COVID-19. 用技术,监测疫情依赖的美国科技公司裁员 Trianglify   https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify Algorithmically generated triangle art Low Poly生成工具...

Scott Forstall: "Great leaders exude a positive attitude of possibility and don’t shy from working harder than their employees and taking risks."​

  Scott Forstall led the team at Apple that developed the iPhone – and is equally successful in vastly different realms, including co-producing multiple Tony Award winning Broadway shows. What has always impressed me most, though, is the time he devotes to mentoring a diverse set of entrepreneurial founders. We’ve had the pleasure of knowing each other for several years, thanks to mutual friend Ali Partovi ’s incredible Neo community , a mentor community, accelerator and VC through which we support junior engineers to become senior leaders. Ali was an early backer of Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber and Facebook, so I knew I was in good hands! At our recent Neo reunion I was able to catch-up with Scott for a wide-ranging conversation on the landscapes of opportunity in technology and what we’re anticipating next. He kindly agreed to go o...

巴菲特致股东信-1971年

 编者笔记: 保险业务因为高毛利,开始有了更多竞争(资本逐利性) 确保当保险灾难来临时,有能力调集足够的资金来解决 巴菲特几乎从不进行恶意收购,收购的主要目的是:长期持有企业以获得经营利润并利用自由现金流再投资 原文: https://xueqiu.com/6217262310/131103035  To the Stockholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: It is a pleasure to report that operating earnings in 1971, excluding capital gains, amounted to more than 14% of beginning shareholders' equity. This result--considerably above the average of American industry--was achieved in the face of inadequate earnings in our textile operation, making clear the benefits of redeployment of capital inaugurated five years ago. It will continue to be the objective of management to improve return on total capitalization (long term debt plus equity), as well as the return on equity capital. However, it should be realized that merely maintaining the present relatively high rate of return may well prove more difficult than was improvement from the very low levels of return which prevailed throughout most of the 1960's. ...

产品随想 | 周刊 第116期:Great things in business are never done by one person.

Cromite   https://github.com/uazo/cromite Cromite a Bromite fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser! awesome-shizuku   https://github.com/timschneeb/awesome-shizuku Curated list of awesome Android apps making use of Shizuku KernelSU   https://github.com/tiann/KernelSU A Kernel based root solution for Android Love, Hate or Fear It, ​​TikTok Has Changed America   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/18/business/media/tiktok-ban-american-culture.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mE0.DpEZ.VWmNssw5B6_c "My model for business is The Beatles.There were four guys who kept each others, kind of, negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that's how I see business. You know, great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. "Our motivation is simple--we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we wa...

产品随想 | 周刊 第117期:He saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

He disliked biography attempts. “I regard my scientific papers as my essential biography,’’ Land said. “I pour my whole life into the scientific project I’m investigating. I leave behind the things I’ve done in the past to do the work in the present.’’ “The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic,’’ Land said in 1947, announcing the process’s invention. “We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.” — Edwin Land, Statement to Polaroid Corporation employees (25 June 1958) The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter ask...

产品随想 | 周刊 第75期:2023.1.8 君民共主之国

Products 各大高校课程资源汇总   https://github.com/nwuzmedoutlook/university 120+国内高校课程资源纯手工整理,欢迎补充、修订 Ideas Marc Andreessen   https://www.theobservereffect.org/marc.html 关于阅读,工作计划 Design The biggest auction sales of 2022   https://insider.hagerty.com/trends/the-biggest-auction-sales-of-2022/ 非常精美的老车集合 它可能是個人電腦史上最重要的一張椅子:Herman Miller 和科技怎麼共同演化的?   https://blog.starrocket.io/posts/herman-miller-mother-of-invention/ 「如果說 Engelbart 是透過 科技 推動心智發展(他稱之為 bootstrap),那 Herman Miller 就是透過 家具 提升人類智識。」 Every Default macOS Wallpaper – in Glorious 6K Resolution   https://512pixels.net/projects/default-mac-wallpapers-in-5k/ Mac原始壁纸 Citizenship Consciousness & Privacy 豆瓣9.0分以上的社会学好书,你看过几本?   https://www.sohu.com/a/536977365_565460 读懂中国 史料搬运工 | 一生事业付诸流水后的反思   https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/666961.html 「李鸿章是个谨小慎微之人。他没有在信函中说要如何做才能实现上下一心。但在郭、曾、薛三人的日记里,这个问题有一个共同的答案,那就是:将清廷变革为“君民共主之国”。」 Economy & Business & Market data 中国软件三十年:烟尘隐入,夹缝重生   https://mp.weixin.qq...