Some of Steve’s indulgences—a BMW motorcycle and a gray Porsche 911—were parked out front. On the inside it didn’t feel much like a home at all. Steve hadn’t gotten around to buying much furniture. Strewn about the house were a mattress, a lamp, some Ansel Adams prints. He’d bought a monstrously big house, but had settled in without bothering to make it a home.
原来乔布斯也喜欢宝马摩托和保时捷911
他一直过着禅僧一般的生活“It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans,” Steve told the reporter. His humility, of course, was utterly disingenuous.
是的，如果苹果畏惧一家几十人的小公司，那么苹果也即将被颠覆了As Steve saw things, he had created the first two signature moments of the personal computing era: the Apple II and the Mac. (There had, of course, been another signature moment: the release of the IBM PC in 1981. But Steve discounted that milestone, since he couldn’t imagine a world in which most people would choose to buy machines that were so much harder to use than the ones he created.) Now it was time for a third shift, and he naturally would be the one to drive the change. He would show those bureaucrats who had mismanaged Apple a thing or two about real leadership and innovation.
现在慢慢明白，领导力不是在发号施令，而是真正把事情做成Steve believed that he now had everything he needed to succeed as a world-class CEO. He had been involved in every aspect of Apple’s business over the previous eight years. He was a quick study, a savant who could envision revolutionary products and inspire the close group of folks who designed and made them, and he was an instinctive marketer. In Steve’s eyes, no one could say the same for Sculley and his “market-driven” tactics. “I think the question everyone is asking about Apple is this,” Steve told me during one of our first interviews. “Does the environment to create the next Macintosh still exist at Apple? Would they know it if they found it?” His new company, called NeXT, would surely grow to be even bigger than Apple, for the sole reason that he had higher expectations for it. “The world doesn’t need another $100 million computing company,” he announced, scoffing at the thought that he might produce something so trivial.
乔布斯对生产平庸的产品嗤之以鼻He was convinced that he really was the only person who could create from scratch the amazing blockbuster products that would give rise to the industry’s next great company. So were his renegades. “I had had plenty of experience with the downside of Steve,” remembers Lewin, the last of the five Apple exiles to sign up. “I definitely thought about the risk of going to work for him and leaving my job at Apple. But I worried that if I didn’t go to NeXT, I would have always said, ‘Dammit, I should have gone along for the ride.’ ” Says another early staffer, who signed on in 1986: “You would have had to be an idiot not to believe that Steve was going to create the next big thing. Everyone believed that.”
At the very moment when Steve had convinced himself that he had won a richly deserved freedom from an oppressive, dull overseer, he was in fact slave to so much else: to his celebrity, to his unbalanced and obsessive desire for perfection in the most innocuous of details, to his managerial flightiness and imperiousness, to his shortcomings as an analyst of his own industry, to his burning need for revenge, and to his own blindness to these faults. He was immature and adolescent in so many ways—egocentric, unrealistically idealistic, and unable to manage the ups and downs of real relationships.
评价的好到位！One afternoon that fall, the wind kicked up outside the Woodside house during an early meeting. “The doors were slamming,” remembers Barnes, who served as NeXT’s CFO, “just opening and shutting, opening and shutting in the wind. It was driving Steve crazy. And I could see, there was a piece of him that wanted to turn on one of us and just take us out. But it was his house. I wasn’t in charge of facilities, like I was at Apple! So, hey dude, it’s your house, you’re the one who’s got the door-slamming problem, not me.” Jobs, it seemed to Barnes, had no clue about the hundreds of little things other people had been doing over the years to keep Apple afloat while he was dreaming up his big ideas. Now he had to learn. “When you’re the CEO and the funder,” she says, recalling that afternoon, “everything’s on your shoulders.”
作为CEO的人，承受王冠之重UNLIKE IN 1975, when he and Woz had pioneered the personal computing industry, in 1986 Steve was trying to enter a hypercompetitive marketplace with such a wide range of offerings that any newcomer would be hard-pressed to offer anything truly unique. Computer technology, drafting on the amazing multiplicative power of Moore’s law, had made tremendous strides in a decade. Nineteen eighty-five was the year that semiconductor makers like Intel and NEC first boasted of cramming a million transistors on a single memory chip.
确实，科研/强运算场景，并不是乔布斯的强项，那些场景比拼的是算力、服务
乔布斯擅长的是艺术、人文
原来1985年的晶体管，也刚刚突破100万，令人振奋！Workstations had two other attributes that really made them stand apart. First, they were designed from the ground up to participate in networks with other workstations. Second, they employed the most advanced microcomputer software operating system of the time, which had been originally developed by computer scientists at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, and then nurtured and improved by academic researchers and scientists in national laboratories. Called Unix, it was the operating system that enabled the first data “network of networks,” which later came to be called the Internet.
Sun set a record that still stands in the annals of American business for being the company that from a dead start reached the $1 billion sales mark faster than any other manufacturer—it took all of four years. In fact, Sun was nearing that heady milestone the year that Steve’s new venture opened for business. Sun was a no-nonsense company. Its powerful computers had no special flourishes other than their outstanding performance benchmarks. They delivered great bang for the buck, but their lack of aesthetics offended Steve; instead of seeing the utility of such computers, he saw only opportunity—of course, he assumed, the world would be partial to something easier to use and more attractive.
Given this fierce competition, it’s easy to understand why Sculley and the Apple board sued Steve. With IBM and the makers of other MS-DOS-based clones dominating the market for PCs sold to corporations, Apple needed the school and university market more than ever. Workstations were quickly becoming the lab benches for many disciplines at research universities and in corporate R&D skunkworks. It was only natural that Apple would want to offer its own unique approach to these machines as well. Apple’s suit stalled Steve’s effort to move quickly, by making it difficult for NeXT to do basic things like arrange deals with suppliers, incorporate, hire employees, and so on.
原来是这样的前因后果But Apple withdrew its legal challenge in January 1986, in part because Sculley finally decided he didn’t have the stomach for the public relations fallout of a court suit against a popular public figure. In the meantime, Jobs had been able to use the fall of 1985 to study the education market. He, Lewin, and some of the other founders made several trips to universities to hear what professors and researchers really wanted. The founders would remember these treks as fondly as they would the gatherings at the Jackling house. Funded by Steve, who could still be a tightwad, the early employees operated on the cheap, with “that startup hustle,” as Steve put it. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” Bud Tribble told me. “All six of us would squeeze into a single rental car to go make our visits. We even shared hotel rooms. We developed a real pioneer spirit.”
好激动人心的旅程LATER IN HIS LIFE, Steve would become more adept at managing the press than any other businessman alive. But as he entered his thirties, his idea of good PR was to get attention of any kind. Launching NeXT, Jobs felt that some initial publicity would help attract the investors he needed to build this new and better version of Apple. So he opened the doors for two prestigious media outlets, Esquire magazine and PBS. The results were fascinating: a portrait of a young entrepreneur trying on the clothes of a seasoned businessman, and not quite filling them out.
看这本书的人，需要对乔布斯的生平，有一个概况的了解，不然真的很难懂As always, Steve had a point he wanted to make, in this case that NeXT was “going to take the technology to the next level,” as he told Nocera. Getting there would mean re-creating the intensity and passion that he had loved during the development of the Mac. “I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac building, when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about my life,” Jobs said. “Just exhilarating feelings about my life. I feel some of that now with NeXT. I can’t explain it. I don’t really understand it. But I’m comfortable with it.”
创业的激情，创作美好产品的那种感动Steve’s strong feelings about Apple rippled through the story, so much so that Nocera called Jobs’s assertion that he had put Apple behind him “wishful thinking.” “Apple,” Jobs admitted, “is like an intense love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who’s not so neat.” The story even dipped into Steve’s relationship with his girlfriend at the time, Tina Redse, describing how Steve wrote her a long note apologizing for working late one night. Nocera found his single-mindedness lonely. Jobs, who at one point in the article failed to remember if he had curtains in his house, refused to acknowledge feeling any kind of wistfulness or dissatisfaction.
“That impression of eternal youth,” Nocera wrote, “is reinforced by some guileless, almost childlike traits: By the way, for instance, he can’t resist showing off his brutal, withering intelligence whenever he’s around someone he doesn’t think measures up. Or by his almost willful lack of tact. Or by his inability to hide his boredom when he is forced to endure something that doesn’t interest him, like a sixth grader who can’t wait for class to end.” Looking back, it’s clear that Nocera had landed on something few people, including Jobs, wanted to see—the fact that the Steve Jobs of 1986 was too raw, too self-centered, and too immature to successfully pull off the balancing act required of a big-time CEO.
现在让我来做CEO，我也很难保证，做的比乔布斯更好But in the end “the other Steve” won out: Steve badgered Thomas incessantly, urging her to cut off all communications with any reporters who criticized him. She would quit in 1993, a few weeks after Jobs paged her three times during the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, which she was attending in Washington, D.C.
三次不接我电话，就把你炒鱿鱼，即使你是在总统就职典礼，果然是乔帮主AFTER ONE OF NeXT’s early board meetings, Steve pulled aside Susan Barnes, his CFO. “When my life is over,” he told her, “people will give me credit for all the creative stuff. But no one will know I actually know how to run a business.”
好有自知之明，敬佩的As Steve started NeXT, it was true that he did know certain key things about running a computer business. He was a strong, if somewhat confounding motivator, and a restless innovator. He had shown himself to be a good negotiator with parts suppliers, often getting Apple better prices in its early days than its volume had really justified. He could synthesize big ideas, and he could see how different technologies could be combined into something that added up to a whole lot more. “He knew about inventory terms, he understood the mechanics of capital investment, he knew cash flow,” says Barnes. “He did understand this, and starting Apple had taught him things you can try to teach an MBA. But he actually knew them. [They were] survival skills.”
所以乔布斯找了供应链管理大师Tim Cook，而且他非常在意产品的定价，利润，现金流等等Steve craved recognition for this, and spoke often about how well he was going to manage NeXT, and how much he had learned from the mistakes Apple had made during its years of unfettered growth. “This is really the third time around for me and a number of other people at NeXT,” he told me. “When we were at Apple, we spent half the time fixing things that were breaking, whether it be an employee stock ownership plan, or a parts numbering system, or a way of manufacturing a product. At NeXT we have the benefit of having the experience of growing a company from zero to a couple of billion dollars before, and we could anticipate some of the more sophisticated problems that we didn’t anticipate the first or second time around. It gives us a certain level of confidence which enables us to take more risks. We’re working much smarter. We’re thinking things through more, which results in more getting done with less work.”
乔布斯自己的话，总是更加有力It sounded good. But much of it was chutzpah and self-delusion. When he started Apple, he had not presumed that he knew how to run a business—he was willing to rely, at least for a while, on his mentors and bosses. Now, however, he acted as if he knew everything, from payroll and engineering to marketing and manufacturing. He was out to do absolutely every little thing right this time. You could see it in his body language. Whenever someone nattered on about a subject Steve believed he knew well—knew better than anyone else, in his opinion—he would look away, tap his feet, shift restlessly in his seat, and behave like a teenager undergoing physical torment until he could finally break in and say his piece. And of course all this was done in a way that was obvious to everyone else in the meeting.
所以其实乔布斯的Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish真是非常非常深的人生体验，他之前并不是非常好学Steve’s overbearing need to weigh in on everything—to get those “twenty thousand decisions” exactly right—slowed everyone down. This micromanagement was the primary example of the fact that Steve did not know how to prioritize in any kind of holistic way at this stage of his career. Remember how he wanted the group at the first Pebble Beach offsite to decide on NeXT’s top priority: a great machine, on-time delivery, or a price tag under $3,000? It was the wrong question. NeXT absolutely needed to do all three things. But Steve couldn’t keep his company focused on what mattered when he couldn’t focus himself efficiently.
乔布斯关注诸多细节是好事，但他的教训在于，不应该全部自己插手，而是应该找到对应领域，非常强，一等一的人才，让他们来做好那一部分，他做自己擅长的Product部分就好了Steve was unable to effectively manage all the cash that he had been able to raise. NeXT was bankrolled by $12 million that Steve put in in two stages, as well as by investments of $660,000 each from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, and $20 million from H. Ross Perot, the idiosyncratic businessman who offered to back NeXT after seeing the episode of The Entrepreneurs. (“I found myself finishing their sentences,” Perot raved to Newsweek.) The investments gave the young, productless company an exorbitant valuation of $126 million in 1987. (Two years later Canon, the Japanese camera and printer maker, would kick in $100 million more, raising the overall valuation of the company to $600 million.) Steve touted the investments as proof of concept. The Carnegie Mellon and Stanford money showed that the schools were anxiously awaiting his computer. Perot’s endorsement just underscored the size of the potential market, and was evidence that the most innovative businesspeople understood Steve’s greatness, potential, and maturity. Perot swore that he’d keep a close eye on his investment: “This is going to be hell on the oyster,” he said in the Newsweek article covering the deal, equating himself in his folksy way to the sand that irritates the oyster to create the pearl inside. But in truth Perot was hands-off with the man he viewed as a young genius. Years before, he had decided against investing early in Microsoft, missing out on billions of dollars as the company’s stock soared, and this time he was determined to roll the dice on one of those brilliant techies from the West Coast. Steve promised to be a careful steward of the cash. In the Entrepreneurs video, he repeatedly urged his staff to conserve resources, to the point of complaining about the hotel room rates they were getting. Despite having seen him throw money around at Apple, Barnes was initially hopeful that Steve might change his ways. “I thought he’d be better when it was his own money,” she remembers. “Boy, was I wrong.”
80年代的1.4亿美金，好震撼的投资数字Most great Silicon Valley startups start out lean and simple. The advantage they have over established companies is the focus they can bring to a single product or idea. Unencumbered by bureaucracy or a heritage of products to protect, a small group of talented folks is free to attack a concept with speed and smarts. Eagerly working hundred-hour weeks, the employees want little more from the “company” than that it pay the bills and get out of their way. They know that if they execute their idea so successfully that their enterprise grows big, at some point they’ll have to deal with the rigors and strains of a corporation. But generally that’s a worry that’s tackled later. At the beginning, corporate trappings can just get in the way, and distract from the all-consuming job of creating an object of desire.
确实，作为创业公司的优势，就在于此
需要持续努力和思考，让自己有机会投身其中，做些激动人心的事情As he had explained to Nocera, Steve enjoyed the spirit of a startup. But his definition of lean and mean had been changed by his experience at Apple. “Living on the cheap was difficult for him after he’d lived the high life there,” says Barnes. Jobs had enjoyed the benefits of Apple’s resources and size, of its manufacturing prowess and rich marketing budget. Despite what he said about wanting to repeat the experience of the Apple II and the Mac, what Steve really wanted at NeXT was the garage spirit of a startup meshed with the safety, status, and perks of the Fortune 500. It wasn’t a combination he could pull off.
后来乔布斯在21世纪初对于商业广告、PR等等的投入，仍然是非常巨大的He recalled the way Steve had lovingly fondled the Sony sales materials, making note of the fine paper stock and professional design: “Steve was a freak about Sony, right? Why did people spend fifteen percent more for a Sony product? Steve would walk into our office, and look at the paper and feel the paper that Sony printed their brochures on. It wasn’t the products, it was the tactile feel, the surface and the presentation that mattered to him.” But NeXT was a startup, not a mature, successful company like Sony with billions in revenues, for whom such a pamphlet would be pocket change.
是产品里面的精神，让乔布斯深深着迷Extravagant expenditures soon became standard operating procedure at NeXT, especially when it came to the company’s headquarters. The Palo Alto offices featured expensive, custom-designed furnishings, Ansel Adams prints, and a kitchen with granite countertops. And when NeXT moved into bigger offices in Redwood City in 1989, no expense was spared. The lobby featured long, lush leather couches imported from Italy. The crowning touch was a floating staircase designed by world-famous architect I. M. Pei, who designed the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre that opened that year. The staircase was a ravishing predecessor to the showy stairways that now grace some of Apple’s retail stores.
品味上决不能差，为乔布斯深深着迷Steve’s spendthrift ways extended throughout the company. “Our information system,” he told me proudly in 1989, “is designed for a company with $1 billion in annual sales.” (NeXT’s 1989 sales would top out at just a few million dollars, leaving the company at least one hundred times short of that $1 billion mark.) But he justified his spending by explaining that he was creating the infrastructure of a Fortune 500 company from the ground up. Unlike Apple, he told me, “We were able to make the investment up front to do it right the first time. Let’s get the best people we can find, and let’s brainstorm and strategize, but let’s just do it once. And let’s have it be good enough to last for a number of years. It will take a little more startup expense, but it will pay many, many times over in the coming years.”
其实和亚马逊的着眼长期、张一鸣的延迟满足感，是一脉相承的With no one around on that quiet day, it seemed like something of a Potemkin factory—an empty shell for show—but Steve claimed it had the capacity to produce up to 600 machines a day, which was the equivalent of, yes, $1 billion worth of hardware in a year.
乔布斯创立Next，原来是以10亿美金年营收来作为目标的，Respect
以10亿美金，然后倒推，需要怎样的IT系统，需要怎样的制造工厂The place had been laid out by an army of manufacturing system engineers—for a while, there were more PhDs working for NeXT’s manufacturing division than for its software arm. It would be flexible, capable of steadily serving a just-in-time manufacturing scheme. The robots would handle almost everything that required great dexterity, including some of the assembly tasks that Woz and Jobs had performed themselves when making the Apple 1: they placed the chips on the circuit boards, soldered everything into place, and tested and measured to make sure everything was right. A human would step in to do one final check, and would handle the final assembly and pop boards into their appropriate slots inside the magnesium cube.
先进的生产理念，just-in-time manufacturing，这个应该是从Sony工厂学习的Steve was right—the place was indeed a paragon. This was at a time when Japanese manufacturers had chased most American companies out of the semiconductor fabrication business and were held up as object lessons for automakers in Detroit. He hoped that his pristine factory would give the world glittery proof that American high-tech manufacturers could still excel. More important, he felt that the seeming perfection of the place and his obsessive focus on its details sent a message to employees: if you aim for perfection in everything you do, you’ll achieve greater results than you could ever imagine.
如果你在你做的每一件事情上都追求完美，你能得到你所能想象的更加美妙的结果It was a lovely principle. But it didn’t come close to justifying spending outrageous sums on a state-of-the-art factory to build computers for which there was not yet any demand. Steve could easily have outsourced manufacturing; by the late 1980s the computer industry had grown to include a host of contract manufacturers right there in Silicon Valley that could build a highly demanding product like the NeXT computer.
作者的点评非常到位，还没有明确的需求前，制作世界最先进的制造工厂，并没有意义
而且后来苹果确实吸取了这个教训，不再自己重资产介入，而是与富士康等合作，自己只是介入给一些资金、制造工艺、技术上的指导For all its beauty, from the lush landscaping out front to the meticulously crafted wheeled tables on which the computer components rolled through the assembly process, the NeXT factory turned out to be a sinkhole. Forget producing 600 computers a day: the factory never produced more than 600 machines in a single month.
好惨，月生产量没超过600，相当于每天也就是20台IN THEORY, THERE’S nothing wrong with a state-of-the-art factory, a beautiful office for your employees, or a fancy logo. It’s just that in decision after decision, Steve failed to account for the trade-offs that accompanied his fanciful choices. Steve couldn’t distinguish between the extraneous and the critical. As CEO of a fledgling company, that was his key responsibility. At NeXT, he utterly failed to do this.
确实，美好的追求没有错，但关键事情与非关键事情，真的非常考验CEO的思考Steve decided early on, for instance, that the NeXT computer should have an optical disk drive for storing information, rather than a standard hard drive. The optical disk drive had two great advantages: its disks could hold up to two hundred times as much information as the standard hard drive of the time, and they were removable.
如乔布斯自己所说的，技术选型上，也非常需要TasteSteve heavily promoted the idea that regular folks could essentially carry around their life in data, moving from one computer to another armed with their own personal optical disk. It seemed that he wanted to enable the utopian idea of a mobile population carrying its key information with it. (Today, of course, we can access much more data from our smartphones or tablets, but the data resides in the so-called “cloud.”)
因为有这样的想法，乔布斯才能在后面新技术来临的时候，能推进iCloudIts designer was Hartmut Esslinger, the German industrial aesthete who had worked with Steve on the first Mac. Esslinger was another expensive choice, a world-class designer who was just as uncompromising as Steve. He ordered up a true cube, with sharp right angles as opposed to the infinitesimal curves found on the edges of the machines from other manufacturers, including Apple. Those curves on the conventional machines weren’t so much an aesthetic choice; they were a concession to manufacturing realities. Creating a perfect cube with true sharp angles required expensive custom molds, which could only come from a specialty metals shop in Chicago. Esslinger and Jobs also insisted that the case be made from magnesium, which is far more expensive than plastic. Using magnesium was a choice, like Jobs’s selection of cast aluminum for the Apple III’s case eight years earlier, that had a significant downside. Magnesium had certain advantages over plastic, but it was much harder to machine perfectly, leading to more flaws in the manufacturing process.
真正的立方体，全新的镁材料Designing a computer laden with details like these made building it for $3,000 absolutely impossible. The flourishes just added up too fast. “The business plan,” says Lewin, “called for a cube whose material cost was fifty dollars, without the motherboard. Steve went off on this fantasy of wanting the paint job to be of the same quality as some titanium tone arm he’d seen on a four-thousand-dollar turntable. So he sends three people off to General Motors to learn how to do paint that way—Perot had been on the board there, and GM knew how to paint metal better than anyone in the world. And so we figured out how to do that. But that cube that was supposed to cost fifty dollars all-in? The paint job alone cost fifty dollars. It was really fantasyland.”
Even more damaging were some of Steve’s aesthetic fiats about the inside of the machine. One in particular stands out. In a typical production sequence, engineers are told the specifications a computer must achieve; they design circuitry to meet those demands; and only then do they wrestle with the question of exactly what size and shape the computer’s circuit board must be. Steve reversed the process at NeXT. He told George Crow and his hardware engineers that the circuit board for the NeXT computer would have to be a square that fit exactly into the magnesium cube. A square was an odd configuration for the engineers. Insisting on the exact shape of the board, Steve severely limited the engineers’ ability to create something inexpensive that met the computer’s specifications. He added an unnecessary level of complexity, meaning yet more money spent for more engineers working more hours to accommodate a design that contributed nothing meaningful to the final product.
但有时候，从形式去反推功能，才有更多可能性创造出更好的产品，不然你看隔壁PC组装机，这么多年，还是那个样子，并没有啥变化Again and again, Steve made choices that seemed justifiable in isolation but that damaged the company’s critical mission. Steve did a poor job of evaluating these ideas against one another. He couldn’t accept that it was impossible for him to have everything exactly the way he wanted it.
乔布斯希望掌控一切，让一切尽可能完美In part, this was because he believed his own press. He was a genius, according to the media and his investors. Ross Perot frothingly described Jobs as “a 33-year-old with 50 years’ worth of business experience.” Little did he know how wrong he was.
The fascination with his new company, so out of proportion for a startup with no product entering a highly competitive industry, confirmed his own sense that he was destined to do great things. That sense of genius and destiny made it harder for Steve to sideline any of his own ideas. He acted as if each detail he advanced could make the difference between creating a breakthrough product and putting out the kind of dreck he thought was offered by other manufacturers. Years later, Perot admitted that he had been snowed. “One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was to give those young people all that money,” he said.
注意哦，这是千万美金级别的错误
还好最后Next被收购，还算是有收获，不然真是血本无归Also, Steve could not resist pursuing anything that would show up Apple. Since Apple had a logo that had become iconic, Steve needed one with the same potential and a great pedigree. Apple had a state-of-the-art factory, so Steve’s tiny company built an outrageously expensive factory that could handle as much volume as Apple needed. His obsession with Apple seemed to ooze out of his pores, despite the silence he’d imposed on his handlers. The first time that John Huey, then the editor of Fortune magazine, went to visit NeXT, Huey was waiting in the lobby when Steve returned from a lunch date with other visitors. Not recognizing Huey, Jobs sat down on another of those expensive lobby couches and spent fifteen minutes flipping through a set of magazines, excoriating Apple’s “stupid” advertising created by whatever “bozos” they had running the show over there now.
虽然没在Apple，但仍心心念念
可能我离职后，也会是这种感觉吧Some writers have tried to cast Steve’s obsessiveness, and his hunger for the spotlight and success, as a Freudian attempt to bring down the birth parents who “rejected” him by letting him be adopted. It always struck me, however, that at his childish worst Steve was really nothing more than a spoiled brat. Brilliant, precocious, and meticulous, he had always gotten his way with his parents, and had brayed like an injured donkey when things didn’t turn out as he planned. As a grown-up he could behave exactly the same way, sometimes exploding in a temper tantrum. At NeXT there was no one to keep that side of him in check. While more grounded and cooler-headed folks like Lewin and Barnes would disagree with him and weigh in with advice, he ignored them with impunity and, often, scorn. Talking about the days after the historic introduction of the Mac, Steve had told Joe Nocera, “I think I know what it must be like to watch the birth of your child.” Unfortunately for the team at NeXT, in many ways Steve himself was still the child, rather than the more mature and supportive parent.
STEVE’S ARBITRARY DECISIONS dumbfounded those under him at NeXT, and his micromanagement gave them no peace. He assumed they would work nights and weekends. He wouldn’t hesitate to call them at home on Sundays or holidays if he’d discovered some “urgent” problem. And yet hardware and software engineers still could not resist working for Steve Jobs.
好想学习，如何让别人能日夜坚持为你工作的技巧Steve understood their sensibility. Engineers, at heart, are problem solvers. They thrive on digging their way out of sinkholes, especially the gnarly kind with no clear path forward. Steve challenged them in ways they had never imagined. No one else in the computer business had such radical goals and expectations; no one else seemed to care so much about their work. The idea of creating a computer that could transform the very process of education was cool; but to his incredibly talented programmers and gearheads, the idea of creating this particular computer for this particular boss was irresistible.
So even as the company drifted from month to month, year to year without delivering a final product to the market, many of the engineers continued to do great work and viewed their jobs as both a noble mission and a labor of love. Engineers ruled the roost at NeXT. They had their own special wing at headquarters, equipped with a grand piano and locks that kept out all other employees. And indeed, Steve’s amazing collection of geeks at NeXT produced some genuinely great work.
好期待有机会加入这样的公司，感受这样的氛围Richard Crandall, a physics professor from Reed College, became the company’s chief scientist and was given enormous latitude to see just how far computing could expand the scope of high-level teaching in fields such as computational science. His work at NeXT carried over into decades of advanced research on cryptography; he later became the head of Apple’s Advanced Computation Group. Michael Hawley, fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked with a group of folks to create the world’s first digitized library, which included the complete works of Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. And when it finally did appear, the NeXT computer would have easy multitasking, easy ways to attach documents to email, and an intuitive user interface to facilitate the networking it made possible.
密码学、融入莎士比亚，好了不起Most important, Jobs convinced Avie Tevanian, a young software whiz from Carnegie Mellon University, to come to NeXT rather than join Microsoft. At CMU, Tevanian had worked on Mach, a supercharged version of Unix, the powerful operating system for workstations. At NeXT he became Bud Tribble’s key developer on the computer’s operating system, called NeXTSTEP. For years, Tevanian kept a calculator window open on his computer that tallied daily the total value of the stock options he gave up when he turned down Microsoft. But he loved the work, in part because Jobs recognized his genius and handed him enormous responsibility as soon as he walked in the door.
还好Avie加入了NeXT, 而不是微软
挺有意思的，还在自己桌面上挂着放弃了多少微软股票期权，哈哈哈Steve said many times that the difference between NeXT and the manufacturers of traditional workstations was that he cared more about software than they did. The NeXTSTEP operating system that Tribble and Tevanian developed truly was elegant; in typical Jobs fashion, it put a gorgeous, approachable face on an operating system that previously only engineers had been able to decipher. And Steve recognized that a technique called object-oriented programming (OOP for short) had great potential to help developers slash the amount of time required to create applications. One OOP toolkit that Tevanian’s team created, called WebObjects, eventually became a profitable product for NeXT; after the rise of the Internet, it proved to be a great help to companies looking to quickly build Web-based services.
乔布斯或者说是Alan Kay的名言又来了，People who are seriours about software should make their own hardware.As much as he depended on Tribble’s and Tevanian’s skills, Steve could not resist managing them ferociously. “Early on,” remembers Tribble’s wife, Susan Barnes, “Bud would complain to me about the fact that Steve kept pushing to see what he was working on in action, on a screen. ‘Steve can yell that the sun shouldn’t rise in the east,’ Bud would tell me, ‘but it’s going to rise in the east, and it’s going to take time to get this software to the point where you can see something visually on the screen. I know he’s a visual learner, I know he can see that way, and I know it’s frustrating for him to look at lines of code. But that’s life!’ ”
好生动形象， 把我逗乐了都I’d be working late at night and Steve would come by and I’d show him what I’m working on, and then he’d yell and scream at me, tell me how terrible it was and all that kind of stuff. But in the end, there was a bunch of stuff that I knew that he didn’t know. He knew that he didn’t know it, so we developed this mutual respect where I could tolerate some of his criticisms because he would also actually listen to me when I had something to say. We made it work.”
你只有真正懂得一些东西，才能让乔布斯闭嘴，来尊重你EARLY ON AT NeXT, Steve said the most important thing he could do was “architect a great company.”是的，我觉得乔布斯已经做到了，苹果公司是他打造的最伟大的产品
We talked about his business a bit, but mostly Steve rattled on about how important families were to NeXT, and about how many families there were over at Pixar, the small graphics computing outfit he’d acquired from George Lucas. Some of it was hot air, but some of it was a reflection of the fact that Steve really was wrestling with the issue of paternal responsibility. Down deep, he ached for a family of his own.
I had the feeling that he looked at those picnics as evidence that he could in fact be a good father, if not to his daughter, then at least to his employees. “I think he looked around those gatherings and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m not just carrying all these employees, I’m carrying their families, too,” says Barnes. “It added to the pressure he felt.”
Steve’s budding paternalism carried over into his efforts to develop friendships with some of his closest executives. When Tribble and Barnes had their first child, Steve snuck into the hospital after hours to visit. “Steve so much wanted to be a father figure,” remembers Jon Rubinstein, who joined NeXT in 1991 and eventually replaced Rich Page as the lead hardware engineer. “He’s just a year older than I am. But he had this father-figure thing going that was very funny because, you know, he thought he knew more about life than anyone else around him. He always wanted to know about my personal life.”
“It’s people who make our factory work. It’s people who write the software, who design the machines. We’re not going to have to out-scale our competitors, we have to out-think them. Every time we hire somebody, we put a brick into building our future.
“Hiring the right people is only the beginning—you also have to build an open corporation. Think of it this way: If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think NeXT will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole basic master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions. Sure, there is some risk with giving everybody access to all the corporate information, and potentially some loss. But what you gain vastly surpasses what you lose.
事实上是，后来苹果的保密变的无所不及，仅仅是最高层之间，能够互通信息“The most visible sign of the open corporation at NeXT is our policy of allowing everybody to know what salary everybody else is making. There’s a list in the finance department, and anyone can go look at it. Why? In a typical company, a typical manager might spend three hours a week on compensation issues. Most of those three hours a week is spent defusing false rumors and talking in caged terms about relative compensation. In our company, the manager still spends those three hours, but we spend them defending in a very open way the decisions we made and explaining why we made them, and coaching the people that work for us about what it will take for them to achieve those levels of compensation. So we tend to look at those three hours as an educational opportunity.”
薪资开放，作为教育员工的方式That’s because Steve was always hell-bent on hiring the very best people in the world, especially engineers. “In most businesses, the difference between average and good is at best 2 to 1,” Steve once told me. “Like, if you go to New York and you get the best cabdriver in the city, you might get there thirty percent faster than with an average taxicab driver. A 2 to 1 gain would be pretty big. In software, it’s at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. We have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.”
可能不止25:1，甚至可能是1000:1But of course, even at NeXT it wasn’t possible to hire the best of the best without strong financial incentives. So Steve started making exceptions for certain hires. Some folks got extraordinary signing bonuses. Others were simply granted higher salaries than their category would mandate. And when these backdoor deals started to make their way onto that list in the finance department, well, all of a sudden that list became a lot harder to find.
也合理，当你看到公司那个滑水的家伙，和你赚一样多的时候，你显然心理不会平衡His inner circle came to understand the pattern of his anger, but that didn’t make it any easier. Tevanian did his best to protect his software engineers from the wrath of Jobs, by making sure they were away from the office when he informed Steve of a slip on schedule, or when a user interface feature he had ordered up turned out to be unworkable. Barnes, who had become familiar with Steve’s unpredictable anger while at Apple, had clear strategies for herself and her employees. “If he’d get mad and start screaming, I’d hang up the phone. He is the only person I knew that you could hang up the phone on, and then pick it up and call him back and he’d be calmer. I mean, if you hung up the phone on me, I would kill you. But with him, if yelling isn’t getting him what he wants, disengage. Leave the room and he will come back nicer, in a different way. I understood that this was something he could turn on and off, and that he would use if it worked.” As for her staffers, she routinely told them to mentally plug their ears and try to “listen through the yelling.” Explains Barnes: “You had to get through the yelling to the reason for the yelling—that was the important part, something you could try to fix.”
这样的下属很不错，已经能够懂得如何应付无常的老板THE SENSE OF urgency around the company ratcheted up as Jobs pressed everyone to prepare for the October 22, 1988, debut of the NeXT computer. Steve always relished putting on a show to unveil his digital creations, but he hadn’t performed onstage since pulling the Macintosh out of the bag, like a rabbit out of a hat, back in 1984. Steve believed that these magic-act announcements not only were good salesmanship but also helped galvanize employees and energize a company that was weary after its Sisyphean struggle to ready the product for launch. His performances would grow more and more elaborate over the years, his stagecraft would show increasing sophistication, and the amount of groundwork involved would increase correspondingly, as well as the stress for anyone involved with staging the event. It was exhausting work, and afterward anyone who could do so would immediately head off on vacation.
原来发布会除了是销售技巧外，也是一个能激励、鼓舞员工的形式，真不错Introducing the NeXT computer called for more sleight of hand than ever. The operating system, which was at least a year away from being released, was buggy. The optical storage drive ran too sluggishly for a demo. There were no apps written by outside software developers. With the possible exception of the iPhone nearly twenty years later, Steve would never unveil a product that was less ready for prime time. But he couldn’t wait any longer. Steve needed the event to be a success. The halo of being “Steve Jobs’s next great company” was wearing off; even potential like Steve’s comes with an expiration date.
好惨啊，也是压力挺大的He did so using presentation slides that had been meticulously put together by hand, because no computer application yet existed to automate the process. Work on the slides had gone on and on; after days of trying to find the exact shade of green for one slide, Steve finally found a tone he liked and kept muttering, “Great green! Great green!”
While at Apple, he admitted, he had overlooked the significance of linking personal computers such as the Macintosh into networks.
原来最开始的Macintosh是没有考虑联网的Steve had always been able to describe the potential of obscure yet real technologies with such aplomb that he created something akin to lust in his audience. He had absolute self-confidence that he could sell people a sense of discovery in the form of technological products they previously didn’t even know they wanted, a confidence that was usually justified. When he held up the NeXT computer’s innards and described it as “the most beautiful printed circuit board I’ve ever seen in my life,” the audience gasped and then broke out into applause, despite the fact that at any distance over a few feet every circuit board looks pretty much the same. The audience even clapped when he described the Cube’s ten-foot power cord. On this day, the crowd would follow wherever Steve would lead. When he called big universities “Fortune 500 companies disguised by another name,” they even seemed to believe that this was true.
其实说的也没错，大学确实是另一种形式的财富500强，而且还不怎么要纳税The tricky part of the show came when he had to explain that this radically new computer would have to make do with black-and-white and grayscale graphics, a cost-cutting decision (it saved NeXT $750 per machine) that had become unavoidable as Steve’s persnickety meddling had delayed the machine and driven up its cost. No matter. Steve simply presented the screen as a magnificent design element. He bragged about the subtle shades of gray in a way that almost demeaned a color screen as an unnecessary extravagance. As the demo went on, Steve’s claims became more grandiose, as if these NeXT machines might revolutionize the academics of not just science but the arts as well. Given all this potential, he suggested, it was remarkable that the NeXT computer would cost only $6,500; that its printer was priced at a mere $2,000; and that customers who wanted a conventional hard drive to augment the machine’s storage capacity would pay just $2,000 more. Still, he couldn’t completely conceal the reality that a fully functioning NeXT computer system would cost well over ten grand—some seven thousand dollars more than it was supposed to have.
人家大学需求的预算是3000美金For the previous six weeks, he had pushed Tevanian, who had been with the company just a few months, to build a music synthesizer software application that could show off the Cube as a more multitalented computer than anything else around.
音乐软件也是自己写的And he just starts swearing at me. ‘Why did you show this to me? I can’t believe you did this!’ he yells. And I say, ‘Steve, you don’t understand, it works!’ And he says, ‘I don’t care, because it sounds horrible. I don’t ever want to see anything like this again.’
“I learned a lot from that interaction,” Tevanian adds. “Most people who work in a Steve Jobs organization end up quitting or being fired when that happens, but I just put my head down and thought, Okay, so there is a bar that you have to exceed before you can show it to him. I can show it to other people, but not to him.”
乔布斯的标准非常高As Steve had intended, I was comparing the machine to existing workstations, and not to the original price point he’d promised the universities that were supposed to be his key customers.
人群找的有些许问题The truth that all of us missed was that this was a machine that had virtually no chance to succeed in the marketplace. Steve’s mismanagement meant that the NeXT computer was only somewhat less expensive than most workstations, with just a few marginal improvements that didn’t offset its many shortcomings. The principles on which NeXT had been based were in tatters, the goals of those long-gone offsite meetings trashed. Jobs had been told emphatically from the start that the machine should cost no more than $3,000; more recently, his collegiate advisers had told him that it should probably be priced at half that. Colleges were not about to spend $10,000 on a fully tricked-out NeXT computer system, versus $2,500 for a Mac or $5,000 for a low-end Sun workstation. The game was already over, but few of us knew it.
STEVE’S MOST IMPORTANT and direct competitors were not fooled by the glitzy debut. The folks at Sun Microsystems laughed off the introduction. CEO Scott McNealy, a brash Detroiter who played hockey in his spare time, thought that Steve’s fancy fonts and magnesium case were wasted on the hard-core buyers of workstations. “We give them what they want,” he told me, “and they don’t really care how pretty the icons are.”
这位CEO的思路，倒是和盖茨一样，这也是为啥如此多没有品味产品的原因If Steve had started NeXT with a clear mind and even an ounce of humility, Sun is the company he would have acknowledged as his most dangerous competitor—and potentially his best role model. McNealy, one of four cofounders who started the company in 1982, had become CEO in 1984. He was only three months older than Steve but seemed far more seasoned. His father had once been the CEO of American Motors, the now-defunct automaker that is remembered primarily for offbeat car models like the Nash Rambler and the AMC Pacer. At night, as a child, Scott would pore through his father’s briefcase when he wasn’t looking. As an adolescent, and later as a college student, he became what he called a “factory rat,” spending time on the plant floor learning firsthand about the complexities of auto manufacturing, and about the dynamics of corporations that manage large numbers of people. A child of privilege, he went to Detroit’s most prestigious private schools, and then on to Harvard for a business degree, finishing up with a Stanford MBA.
但是世界最终还是更多地记住了乔布斯，而不是McNealySun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously.
这也是后来乔布斯说财富500客户难争取，更喜欢去做consumer electronics的原因Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company. McNealy was focused, budget conscious, and opportunistic. Steve’s goals were muddled, and he was a spendthrift who was slow off the mark. McNealy had thrown in with his cofounders at Sun to sell a lot of machines, serve his customers, and make a lot of money. Steve had founded NeXT because he was furious at John Sculley and Apple, because he desperately needed a second act, and because he thought it was his responsibility—and birthright—to keep astounding the world. There had been a market to be attacked when Steve founded NeXT; McNealy’s success proved it. But Steve was still young and immature, and didn’t think there was anyone else in the computer business who really mattered. He was looking in the mirror while McNealy had been looking out the window to learn what the world really needed.
Gates rebuffed Steve again and again and again, with venom. “Develop for it?” he told InfoWorld. “I’ll piss on it.” Microsoft software was already on its way to defining the industry standard in nearly all aspects of computing, so Gates’s reluctance to support NeXT with custom versions of its application software effectively marginalized the company.
现在AI时代，也会有这样的问题出来Gates didn’t let up after the Davies Hall showcase. “In the grand scope of things,” he said, “most of these features are truly trivial.” A year later, he said of the NeXT computer, “If you want black, I’ll get you a can of paint.” To this day Gates remembers the moment he definitively told Jobs that Microsoft absolutely would not develop software for NeXT. “He wasn’t livid,” Gates told me recently. “He was deflated. He was at a loss for words, which wasn’t typical. He knew what I was saying might be right. And it wasn’t a particularly pretty picture in terms of what it meant for big black cubes changing the world.”
当盖茨说重要的时候，需要多思考，再想想
当盖茨说微不足道的时候，那么很有可能是对的，真的无足轻重The basic agreement between the companies was that IBM would license the right to use the NeXTSTEP operating system as a graphical interface in return for $60 million—a pittance for IBM, but critical operating capital for NeXT, which was burning through its investors’ cash as the years dragged on. Many people believed that the arrangement might have broader implications, an impression that Steve did nothing to dispel. IBM had an existing deal with Microsoft to jointly develop a new operating system for future PCs called OS/2. By announcing the deal with NeXT, IBM seemed to be indicating that it was not comfortable with Microsoft as its sole key partner. (Indeed, within a few months of the NeXT announcement, it became clear that IBM and Microsoft were having serious issues working together.) The tantalizing possibility was that Steve’s operating system might eventually power not only workstations but also the personal computers of Apple’s most feared competitor. If that ever happened, Steve’s comeback would be complete.
惊心动魄，这段里的故事，如果真的成真，那么*UNIX将会成为PC的事实标准，也就没后来的微软什么事了But Steve never seemed to quite know how to play his cards with IBM. He displayed an unsettled and juvenile mix of hubris and uncertainty. Jobs could be bold and strong, as when he secured IBM’s promised investment before any Big Blue exec had even laid eyes on the NeXTSTEP operating system. But he could also be just plain rude: Walking in late to one meeting with a suite of IBMers who had flown out to NeXT, Steve interrupted the proceedings with the dismissive pronouncement: “Your UI [user interface] sucks.” Dan’l Lewin, who would meet with Steve to carefully plot their strategy before every IBM meeting, never knew what to expect from his boss. Sometimes Steve would completely undermine the groundwork the two had carefully laid. “I’d sit there and literally kick him under the table,” Lewin recalls. “There was one meeting, for example, where he went in and actually told them, ‘I really don’t understand why you guys would want to help us.’ ”
为什么会这样？这里发生的故事情节，我真的不大懂Psychologically and emotionally, signing on with IBM was every bit as complicated for Steve as begging Bill Gates to support his computer. Steve had always envisioned NeXTSTEP as the backbone of his own spectacular computer. He wanted to be the hero, not a secondary partner to a more powerful computer company. If IBM had exploited his operating system, and sold a lot of computers running their version of NeXTSTEP, the glory would have been theirs, not his.
But Lowe retired in 1990, and James Cannavino replaced him. Cannavino logically assumed IBM could use NeXT’s 2.0 version of NeXTSTEP on its machines. But Steve, who hadn’t even met Cannavino, held up IBM for more money, leading to another round of protracted negotiations. He overplayed his hand. Cannavino stopped taking Steve’s calls and just abandoned the project, although there was never any real announcement that it was over. It was a minor disappointment for IBM, ending its “Plan B” fantasy of creating a real alternative to Microsoft’s new Windows graphical operating system for PCs. But it was a fatal blow to NeXT, ending its last real chance to achieve the kind of scale that would have turned it into, as Steve had said in 1985, “the world’s next great computer company.”
作为备胎，应该有备胎应该有的谦虚，哈哈哈“You’re going to go through every penny, the way you’re headed,” said the now former head of sales. At the time NeXT still had some $120 million in cash. “This company is just not going to happen. You may own 51 percent of it, or 58, whatever it is, but more than half the company worked for me. And I’ve been fighting with you because I believe in what I know we need to do to run this business. If you want to succeed, you need to listen to your people. Otherwise you’re doomed.”
Managing Steve’s finances when he had little fiscal discipline and no checks on his spendthrift ways had grown wearying. “It was classic: his visionary optimism versus my reality,” says Barnes. “He always felt that we were going to turn the next corner. And I would always tell him that there was nothing in the business model to indicate that that was so.”
商业管理真是从失败里学出来的
乔布斯也不是一开始就成功When Barnes resigned, Steve immediately and without warning cut off her phone and email access. A year later, Rich Page quit the company, and Barnes’s husband, Bud Tribble, picked up the phone to ask Scott McNealy at Sun if he could use a highly seasoned software engineer. A few days later Tribble went to work for the company that was everything NeXT should have been. Just six years after those heady brainstorming days at the old Woodside house, the renegades had all departed, leaving their rock star behind.
真是好可惜，输给了SUN
不过也是好事，如果赢了，可能就没有后来的APPLE
Link: 1) https://www.zhengmianshang.me/cowboybebop/ 2) https://share.dmhy.org/topics/view/499861_MGRT_Cowboy_Bebop_BDrip_1080p_CB_20.html 3) https://futaacg.com/detail-554a3c442d0b65167485c344c9b47b3319d0be34.html