Mike Slade, who was head of marketing for a time, would occasionally think fondly of his old employer, Microsoft, “which was like the Yankees,” he remembers. “Going to work for NeXT was like being a starting pitcher on the 1998 Florida Marlins, a team that won, like, what—fifty games? In those days, Steve was kind of a forgotten guy. He was like Brian Wilson [after he had walked out on the Beach Boys], someone who had faded, a has-been. He became a pretty irrelevant guy in the high-tech world. Steve was in the wrong business now. He was put on this earth to sell to consumers, not corporate IT managers.”
这位下属的评价中肯，乔布斯热爱且擅长的，确实是将艺术品般的电脑，售卖给普通消费者，而不是企业的IT管理员Eventually it was van Cuylenburg who got run over, figuratively speaking. He had promised to give NeXT a clear strategy, but that’s not what happened. Zeroing in on details, van Cuylenburg found resistance from some employees who felt he was more interested in process than products. Worse yet, he and Steve seemed to often be at odds.
管理层不行，深刻的醒悟
这也是乔布斯回到苹果后，大刀阔斧改革董事会，高层的原因The original dream—that NeXT would create the world’s next great computer—was over. “We got lost in the technology,” Steve would later tell me.
难怪乔布斯后来在苹果说，他学到了比任何人都多的失误In public, Steve tried to portray this shift as a bold bet on the company’s software, especially its NeXTSTEP operating system, which had, he said, “no competitors.” But this time his sophistry was recognized as such by the media—and by those competitors, like Microsoft, who supposedly did not exist.
乔布斯的NeXTSTEP操作系统，是有点东西的Steve did not shut down the entire company. Just as he had never given up on Pixar, he never quite gave up on NeXT. And just as he had at Pixar, he decided to play out two separate end strategies. He halfheartedly pitched the company to Sun (again), Hewlett-Packard, and even Larry Ellison’s Oracle, but nothing ever came through. At the same time, he kept pushing Avie Tevanian and his software team hard. Steve genuinely believed he had the sharpest team of operating system software engineers in the business, and he still hoped that the workstation world might embrace the NeXTSTEP operating system. So the software engineers kept beating the bugs out of it, and porting it to other microprocessor architectures, such as Intel’s Pentium family, or the PowerPC chip from IBM and Motorola. Steve worried deeply about finding a way to repay his investors, who had provided nearly $350 million in working capital. Not making them whole would have mortally wounded his credibility as an entrepreneur if he ever tried to start another computer company. So Steve waited to see where NeXTSTEP—and Avie’s crack team of engineers—would lead him.
如乔布斯后来说的那样，他创造企业并不是为了售卖，是希望打造屹立不倒的文化Business had grown so quickly that sales of WebObjects licenses now generated more revenue than NeXTSTEP. Finally, NeXT could truly say it was generating a small operating profit. Steve even lined up Merrill Lynch to back a potential IPO. Once again, a company of Steve’s had found its footing by transforming into something other than what he had intended.
用乔布斯的话来说，就是connect the dots.Anderson liked the idea that he might help save a great American success story from oblivion. “There was a part of me that said, ‘You know, I’d hate to see that company die,’ ” he remembers. “That’s reason number one. I knew how passionate my wife and I were about their products, and I believed that there was this loyal, passionate customer base that didn’t want Apple to die. What I hoped was that it also translated into a passionate employee base that would fight to save the company, too. But to be honest, I didn’t know that for sure. When I told my wife I’d like to take the Apple job, she looked at me and said, ‘Are you crazy?! You already have a fantastic job.’ ”
作为一名普通外界人士，我也希望苹果能保持创新，继续下去Apple’s troubles were deep indeed and had worsened over many years. John Sculley’s “market-driven” strategy failed to produce any significant technological breakthroughs. Apple’s efforts to do so were only made worse by the CEO’s desire to prove himself to be as much of an innovator as Steve. Most costly of all his misguided efforts was his attempt to carve out a brand-new category of personal computing with a handheld device called the Newton, which was met with widespread ridicule after its highly touted handwriting recognition feature turned out to be prone to absurd malapropisms. It was an expensive failure, made worse by the fact that Sculley decided to open a bunch of Apple retail stores to sell the doomed new device.
Newton的失败，我认为不是在手写识别的准确度上，而是在这个大的产品类目上，它的方向错了
所以Sculley很早就有开苹果零售店的想法The Apple board grew disenchanted with Sculley’s misfires and abruptly dismissed him in 1993. They replaced him with Spindler, the German sales executive whose idea of a strategy was for Apple to ape Bill Gates and license the Macintosh operating system to other manufacturers in a belated attempt to fend off Windows. But this strategy too failed, and the availability of cheap clones tarnished Apple’s mystique as a maker of premium hardware. Spindler, who preserved Sculley’s old “market-driven” approach to product development, also allowed Apple’s product line to swell uncontrollably, as engineers experimented with different bells and whistles in order to target potential markets that they thought warranted entirely new and distinct Macintosh models.
授权软件的做法，确实如描述，会有廉价差体验的发生But Apple’s biggest problem was Microsoft. Bill Gates’s company had become a juggernaut, and with the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 it formally seized the initiative for driving PC innovation from Apple. It even outdid Apple in over-the-top marketing. Gates introduced this landmark version of his industry-standard operating system with a tightly orchestrated, worldwide rollout emceed by Jay Leno from a big white circus tent on the Microsoft campus and beamed by satellite to gatherings in forty-three cities around the world. The fanfare prompted tens of millions of PC users to line up for hours or even days in order to be among the first to be able to buy the software and install it on their machines when it went on sale at midnight on August 24. The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” was the official promotional anthem.
原来当年微软发布Win95，外人也是排队了好几天的，难以置信The problem was that there were so many things Windows 95 could do that Apple’s aging Macintosh System 7 simply couldn’t begin to match. The list included nerdy-sounding features like preemptive multitasking, which allowed several applications to operate simultaneously without interfering with one another, automatic document saving, and most important, much greater speed, stability, and reliability. Microsoft went so far as to hire the graphic designer for the original Macintosh onscreen icons to spiff up Windows’ look and feel. Windows 95 also introduced the “Start” button, which made it much easier for users to deduce how to launch programs and otherwise manage files in a PC. Overnight, Apple’s sales tanked, and inventories of unsold Apple machines and unused components began to pile up. Worse, Apple seemed to have instantly and visibly lost whatever mojo it was that had made it seem cool for nearly two decades. After Windows 95, Apple wouldn’t post consecutive years of sales growth again until 2002.
原来Windows里的Start菜单，是让人避免恐惧，开始尝试用程序和管理文件的，敬佩敬佩，确实比Mac的更加直观些In the previous six months, Apple had swooned from being marginally profitable to posting a loss of nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in the first calendar quarter of 1996. The company soon would be technically in default on hundreds of millions of dollars of bank loans. On his very first day at Apple, Anderson was shocked to learn that Amelio had already asked bankruptcy counsel to stand by. What Fortune 500 CFO in his right mind would want to step into this mess?
Amelio也太搞笑了，确实和视频里看到的他的状态差不多，他可能都不知道自己在干嘛STEVE OBSERVED APPLE’S dire straits from a safe distance, fretting and muttering under his breath and off the record, like an embittered and estranged parent, that the famous company he cofounded might collapse of its own ineptitude. After ten years in exile, he still harbored a strong sense of attachment to his firstborn company and many of its employees. “He loved Apple,” says John Lasseter. “I mean, he loved Apple the whole time. It was painful for him to watch what was happening to it.” Indeed, the reason Steve had held on to one share of Apple stock for the previous decade was to be able to keep getting shareholder information materials and, if the spirit moved him, to be able to attend the annual shareholders meeting. He hadn’t cut the cord completely.
原来留一股的目的是这个，看来我也需要让自己留一股，哈哈哈In 1995, his billionaire friend Larry Ellison had suggested the idea of making a hostile bid to buy the company outright so they could take it private and run it as they saw fit. Ellison had even offered to raise the bulk of the money, so Steve wouldn’t have to risk his own resources (Pixar hadn’t yet gone public). “Steve’s the only one who can save Apple,” he told me. “We’ve talked about it very seriously many, many times, and I’m ready to help him the minute he says the word. I could raise the money in a week.” But Steve had nixed the effort. Despite the allure of Apple, he had made a pragmatic decision. He was in the middle of Pixar’s most critical year, when it released Toy Story and went public. He was trying to salvage NeXT. And Laurene was pregnant with their second child. It had all seemed like too much.
靠谱的哥们Then he would have to get cracking to accomplish two things that might keep the banks at bay: work out a recapitalization plan to raise more money in the public bond markets, and set in place a restructuring plan that would drastically reduce the company’s operating expenses. The word restructuring is a euphemism, of course. The very best way to reduce expenses in a hurry is to lay off employees. Lots and lots of employees.
CFO两扳手：1）找钱；2）省钱裁员Shortly after quitting Apple, Gassée started his own computer company in a huff, bringing along several key Apple employees. His business strategy was reminiscent of Steve’s approach at NeXT. Be Inc. set out to design an entirely new software and hardware architecture for a computer Gassée called the BeBox, which would incorporate an operating system—BeOS—that shared some key attributes of Unix. What made the BeOS and the BeBox computer unique, however, was that they were designed to also be able to use the existing Macintosh OS, and thus operate like a Mac “clone.” The intent, essentially, was to build a computer that could be two machines in one.
好奇怪，为什么要走这样一个奇怪的兼容逻辑Much like NeXT, however, Be hadn’t been able to build much of a market for its hardware, selling only two thousand machines before shutting down that part of its business in 1996, to focus on selling its software as an alternative operating system for Apple’s Macs and clones built by other manufacturers. Gassée felt that becoming a software-only company would position Be to other hardware manufacturers as a potentially attractive acquisition. There seemed to be several potential suitors out there among the seven companies that made Macintosh clones, including Motorola and a maker of Windows-compatible workstations called PowerHouse Systems, which was founded by Steve’s former head of hardware engineering at NeXT, Jon Rubinstein.
这个思路就不大对，创立公司是准备被收购的......
原来Rubinstein也曾经自己创业过“I was looking for an exit sign,” Gassée recalls, “and here came Amelio.” But Gassée made a serious tactical mistake by trying to milk the situation for all it was worth. Amelio offered to buy Be Inc. for about $100 million, which was a reasonable price for a company with its limited track record. But Gassée overreached, rebuffing Amelio’s offer, as well as a counteroffer of $120 million.
贪心让自己失败
乔布斯之前与IBM的谈判，已经失败过一次When I asked Steve what he thought might be going on, he immediately shifted into petulant mode. “Jean-Louis Gassée is evil,” he snapped. “I don’t say that about many people, but he is evil.” Then he made some comment to the effect that whatever Apple had planned, the company should have nothing to do with Gassée or his technology. “We’ve been at this for ten years at NeXT, and the BeOS is shit. It has to be. Operating systems get better with age and the BeOS isn’t old enough or tested enough to be any good.” That didn’t really answer my question, but it sure showed I had gotten his dander up. I asked him to be sure to let me know if he heard anything interesting. Not surprisingly, he didn’t; I didn’t talk to him again until December, when I called to see if I could get some comment from him for a story about Apple’s surprise purchase of NeXT for cash and stock totaling $429 million.
好奇妙哈，原来是这个作者，打电话给乔布斯的STEVE HAD SWUNG into action long before my phone call. Earlier that fall, Avie Tevanian had alerted him to the fact that Apple was looking for an operating system, and Steve immediately met with his investment bankers to determine if it made any sense to try to sell NeXT to Apple. “We felt that we were a generation ahead of everyone else, and now we might have the chance to make that work in a mass-market world,” says Tevanian. While it was public knowledge that the NeXTSTEP OS had been ported to Intel’s PC microprocessors, it wasn’t widely known that Avie and his team had also gotten it running on computers using the PowerPC chip. Avie and his team knew their way around all the major nonproprietary microprocessors, which is more than could be said for Be’s programmers.
Avie Tevanian果然是关键人物呐Steve was playing three games at once as he approached Apple. First, he really wanted to torpedo Gassée. Second, Steve wanted to protect and pay back his investors. Third, he wanted to find suitable next acts for the key people who had stuck with him at NeXT. As Susan Barnes once told me, “If you weren’t good at your job, he owed it to the rest of the team to get rid of you. But if you were good, he owed you his loyalty.” So while the price was important, so was what the acquiring company intended to do with the NeXT technology, and how they would embrace the technologists who built it. Steve knew he had to convince Amelio that the real jewels that Apple would be acquiring were NeXT’s people.
软件行业，最重要的就是软件人才，AI世代，同样会是如此Amelio was an easy mark, and Steve knew it. He saw him as a stuffed shirt who enjoyed the fruits of being CEO but knew little about selling personal computers. So Steve was at his flattering best as he wooed Amelio. In a crisp presentation to the CEO and Ellen Hancock on December 2, he explained that he was willing to do whatever it took to make the deal work, and that he was confident that their good judgment would lead them to NeXT. On December 10, he and Avie made what Amelio himself described as a “dazzling” presentation of the NeXT operating system, during a bake-off against Be at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto.
乔布斯身上很值得学习的一点品质是，他尽一切手段，无论好坏，去把事情做成Avie was guaranteed a central role in the development of Apple’s system software strategy and a spot on Amelio’s senior executive staff. The price was rich, thanks largely to the recent success of WebObjects, and especially compared to what Amelio had offered Gassée: Steve and his investors would get $429 million in cash and Apple stock. “It wasn’t about the money,” says Gassée, who concedes that he asked too much for Be. “It was about bringing Steve back. He had a choice between bringing Steve back or not bringing Steve back, and he made the right choice. They could do things we couldn’t do.”
让竞争对手心服口服，还是很厉害的He was already working on his remarks for MacWorld, and he wanted to see what lines would resonate. But he also wanted to talk about Amelio. “You wouldn’t believe what a bozo Amelio is,” he hissed. What most galled him was that Amelio, he felt, had no clue about selling to walking, breathing people. “All he knows is the chip business, where you can count your customers on one hand,” Steve groused. “They aren’t people, they’re companies, and they buy chips by the tens of thousands.”
有趣，吐槽Amelio不懂得销售“I can’t just walk away from Avie and the others, and say ‘So long, nice knowing you!’ Plus,” he continued, “I can tell that there are still a lot of other really good people at Apple. I just don’t think Amelio is the right guy to lead them.”
本质上还是心里舍不得AppleThe truth is more subtle. Over the previous decade, Steve had learned to act less impulsively. In the past, he had overreached time and again. Now he was willing to walk slowly down a path, and if following his nose led him somewhere better than where he thought he was headed, that’s where he would go. In the months after the sale of NeXT, as he studied Amelio and understood more about the current state of Apple, Steve displayed the more deliberate approach he would bring to the company when he was in charge.
我比较认可这个说法Avie Tevanian was now Amelio’s chief of software engineering, while Jon “Ruby” Rubinstein had been brought in at Steve’s suggestion to run the hardware division. “We didn’t think we were coming to Apple to work for Steve,” says Tevanian. “He just didn’t seem that interested.” Steve repeatedly told them he was reluctant to take on the job, much less lobby for it.
In the weeks after our December chat, Steve and I met a few more times over his kitchen table for a series of off-the-record discussions. Steve described what he was finding at Apple, in the hope that I would push ahead with a story about the sorry state of things in Cupertino. He spoke freely, although he insisted that I disguise any quotes I wanted to use. At one point he rhetorically asked: “Why do I feel like it’s my fiduciary responsibility to see a negative story about my own company?”
好有趣，居然是这样的PR合作，哈哈哈The main answer was that the more he got to know Amelio, the more he realized that Dr. Gil—and his team—could never lead Apple back to any kind of prominence. He was dismayed by so much at the company, and he blamed the board of directors as much as Amelio. He couldn’t believe that any board could ever have envisioned the dour Michael Spindler, “the Diesel,” as an inspirational leader, just as he was dumbfounded that the board had then hired someone like Amelio. He believed that Amelio, who ascended to the CEO position after just one year on the board, had maneuvered himself into the gig by positioning himself as a turnaround expert. “But how can he be a turnaround expert,” Steve asked me, “when he eats his lunch alone in his office, with food served to him on china that looks like it came from Versailles?”
颇有一种我在公司看到的悲怆Once, while talking to a group at a dinner party that included Larry Ellison, Amelio tried to put his company’s problems in perspective for the other guests. “Apple is a boat,” he said. “There’s a hole in the boat, and it’s taking on water. But there’s also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions, so the boat is just standing still. My job is to get everyone rowing in the same direction.” After Amelio walked away, Ellison turned to the person standing next to him and asked, “But what about the hole?” That was one story Steve never got tired of telling.
Steve was unfair to Amelio. Although he did once tell Amelio that arranging the $661 million in new financing was a good move, he gave him little credit for anything else, even though it was Amelio who signed off on the critical restructuring that Anderson was managing. And when Steve did acknowledge that there was some good work going on inside the company, he credited this to employees who had the true “Apple spirit”—the one that he and Woz had instilled years before—and not at all to Amelio.
其实，Amelio做的最正确的决定，就是把乔布斯带回来，他做出这个决定，其它地方也无需再指责他了Steve was greeted with rapturous applause when Amelio finally got around to introducing him. It had been six long years since he had made a corporate strategy presentation to an audience of any meaningful size, and he seized the moment. In contrast to Amelio, he kept his remarks short, cool, and crisp. He promised to “help Gil in any way he asks me to,” and vowed to help make Apple’s products exciting again. Speaking without notes, he calmly worked the front of the stage so people could get a good look at him. He was encouraging and forceful, yet purposefully vague. He didn’t want to make any specific promises; after all, he still wasn’t sure he really wanted to have anything to do with Apple.
优秀的领导力That’s exactly what Steve told me again a couple of weeks after MacWorld. “I know I’ve said it before, but Amelio is a total bozo,” he said. “He is the absolute wrong person to be leading Apple. I don’t know who the right person is, but it definitely is not him.”
With work well under way on Pixar’s next movie, A Bug’s Life, Steve decided to right this wrong. With $130 million of IPO cash in hand, Pixar didn’t need Disney to finance its films. And if it could pay for its own productions, why should it earn a mere 12.5 percent of box-office receipts? Steve decided he wanted to tear up the very deal that had saved the company just five years earlier.
有底气就是不一样，哈哈哈“Nobody in Hollywood wants to take any risk,” he told me a year later. He truly was proud that he and Lawrence Levy had studied Hollywood closely, and had learned enough to understand how Pixar could cut a great deal in an industry that thrived on plundering the “dumb money” of starstruck outsiders. “You can’t go to the library and find a book titled The Business Model for Animation,” Steve explained. “The reason you can’t is because there’s only been one company [Disney] that’s ever done it well, and they were not interested in telling the world how lucrative it was.”
迪斯尼可能要被颠覆，只是大家都不知道是谁会来颠覆，怎么颠覆Steve put in a call to Eisner, and headed to Hollywood to renegotiate. “What we wanted to do with our new deal was far beyond what anybody else [other than Disney] had ever done,” he crowed. “And far more sophisticated, because in Hollywood, there are very few relationships between companies. There are relationships between companies and individuals, like between a major studio and Steven Spielberg, or a small production company like an Amblin and a studio. But there are very few relationships between peer companies. But that’s how we wanted to think about ourselves. In terms of producing animated films, we wanted to think of ourselves as a peer of Disney’s own animation business.”
乔布斯对好莱坞动画的商业、商业模式的思考，也思考的非常深“For us to go in there and say we’d finance half of our films, well, they hadn’t heard that very often,” Steve told me. “Michael appreciated that, and all of a sudden we were no longer a production company, we were a co-financier.” Eisner was offended by Jobs’s temerity, but the terms of the new deal were fair, giving each side half of all profits. On February 24, 1997, a new, five-movie deal was signed. Strand by strand, Steve was wrapping up the remaining loose ends of his decade in the wilderness.
By that time, the director with the most credibility and authority was its chairman, Edgar S. Woolard Jr., who was CEO of DuPont, the chemical giant. The more Woolard learned about Apple’s woes, the more he knew that Amelio didn’t have the right stuff to save the company. “Ed started asking questions, like ‘How’s morale, Fred?’ ” Anderson remembers. “And I’d say, ‘It sucks, Ed.’ ” Anderson hid nothing from the chairman; the strategy was ill-conceived, the company was not going to hit its targets, and Anderson was planning to leave if Amelio stayed on.
苹果这一次如果再摔倒，可就不会再有创始人，来扳回局面了He’d had no qualms about that once he’d decided that the Doctor was a bozo. (In private, he would also call him a “doperino.”) But that didn’t mean he himself was ready to take on the job of running Apple. According to his wife, Laurene, he was still torn about whether to go back. The two of them debated the matter endlessly. She felt that he was the only person who could save the company, and she knew he still loved Apple. She knew, too, that her husband was most fulfilled when he was tackling something gripping and important.
他的妻子，果然懂他Steve didn’t know it at the time, but his indecisiveness was actually a kind of breakthrough. Steve was developing a more nuanced, measured approach to decision making. Steve had grown more comfortable with waiting—not always patiently—to see what developed, rather than jumping impulsively into some new venture where he thought he could once again astound the world. When he needed to—as when the opportunity arose to sell NeXT to Apple—he could strike quickly. But from now on he would act with a piquant combination of quick, committed actions and careful deliberation.
He told Woolard he did not want the job, at least for now, and he offered to help him recruit someone else. Unable to sleep that night, Steve called his friend and confidant Andy Grove at 2 a.m. Steve told Grove that he was torn about whether or not to return as Apple’s CEO, and wound his way through his tortured deliberations. As the conversation dragged on, Grove, who wanted to get back to sleep, broke in and growled, “Steve, look. I don’t give a shit about Apple. Just make up your mind.”
还是非常在乎More important, in his fifteen months there he had gotten to know all the key players, including a few who felt comfortable complaining to him about Amelio. One of those was Apple’s young design chief, a Brit by the name of Jonathan “Jony” Ive, who felt that he was wasting his talent at Apple. He invited Anderson to come by the industrial design lab, which Amelio had not visited. “There was incredible stuff going on there,” remembers Anderson. “That was a big part of how I had come to worry about Amelio and his lack of leadership.” Anderson knew that he himself was not the answer. “I was really good at business and, I’d say, finance and operations, but I wasn’t a product guy. I’m not an engineer,”
正如乔布斯评价Tim Cook的，他也不是一个Product Guy“Even though Steve was not an engineer,” Anderson recalls, “he had this great aesthetic taste and he was a visionary, and he had the power of personality to rally the troops. I came to the conclusion that the only person who could truly lead Apple back to prominence was Steve. He understood the soul of Apple. We needed a spiritual leader that could bring Apple back as a great product and marketing company. And nobody else great, who had those skills, was going to take on Apple at that time. So we had to have Steve.”
来自亲密合作CFO的描述，非常可信When Woolard announced Anderson’s appointment, he also noted that Steve was coming on as “an adviser leading the team.” The terminology was odd, but it proved to be accurate. “Now he really rolled up his sleeves,” says Anderson. The core of the new Apple—Anderson, Tevanian, Rubinstein, Jobs, and Woolard, who led a real search for a new CEO—felt under intense pressure, in large part because MacWorld Expo in Boston was exactly just one month away, on August 6.
原来关键人物是这么几个人Steve understood this. His first move was to insist that the board reprice all employee stock options to $13.81—the closing price on July 7, the day Amelio’s firing was made public. Steve’s signature, not Anderson’s, was at the bottom of the “all hands” memo from management announcing the change. It was a dramatic gesture, because most employees’ options had sunk so deeply underwater that there seemed no hope that they would ever have any value. Overnight, the prospect of someday achieving actual wealth resurfaced for many of the eight thousand Apple employees who had survived the first two rounds of layoffs. (The move did nothing financially for Steve, who had no options.)
Steve’s second big move was to convince Woolard to allow him to replace virtually the entire board of directors—the same one that had just ousted Amelio and brought Steve in to play a big role. Steve felt no gratitude. He was convinced that the group was as much to blame as Amelio for Apple’s woes. He wanted a board that would give him the backing he needed to start making some real changes at Apple. Originally he sought the resignations of everyone except Woolard, but Woolard persuaded him to also keep Gareth Chang, the CEO of Hughes Electronics. The others would be replaced by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former IBM and Chrysler CFO Jerry York, Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, and Steve himself. Steve kept these changes under wraps, however. He wanted to announce the move during the MacWorld keynote speech in Boston, where he’d be able to put his own distinctive spin on the news.
1）股票期权重整普通员工士气； 2）重整董事会，更新管理层“Reaching an agreement with Microsoft was absolutely critical to laying the foundation for Apple to be saved,” recalls Anderson. “But Amelio couldn’t get it done.” If Gates said no to Steve, Apple could have found itself in the same position as NeXT had been back in 1988. Without Microsoft’s applications, which had become the de facto standard tools used in most businesses, Apple, like NeXT, might cease to be relevant.
乔布斯已经在微软那里，栽过一次跟头When Steve called on Gates, he kept things simple. He explained that he would be willing to drop the patent litigation, but for a price. Not only did he want Microsoft to publicly announce a five-year commitment to provide Office for the Mac; he also wanted his powerful rival to publicly, and financially, make clear that this was an endorsement of Apple’s new direction by purchasing $150 million in nonvoting shares. In other words, Steve wasn’t asking for a loan, he was asking Bill to put his money where his mouth was.
“It was classic,” remembers Gates. “I’d been negotiating this deal with Amelio, and Gil wanted six things, most of which were not important. Gil was complicated, and I’d be calling him on the phone, faxing him stuff over the holidays. And then when Steve comes in, he looks at the deal and says, ‘Here are the two things I want, and here’s what you clearly want from us.’ And we had that deal done very quickly.”
谈判和妥协，需要持续锻炼和学习By Steve’s standards, this speech was on the short side, clocking in at just about thirty minutes. He had no products to introduce or demo. Instead, he presented the corporate equivalent of a State of the Union address.
But once he got rolling, his presentation was one of his most concise, and a clear signal that things would change—for the better—at Apple.
Much of his talk was more of a lecture than a presentation, in which he outlined his thinking about what it would take to bring Apple back. He dismissed some of the popular criticisms of Apple, namely that its technology wasn’t relevant, that it couldn’t execute well, and that the company was so disorganized that it couldn’t be managed. “Apple is executing wonderfully well, just on the wrong things,” he quipped. The reason the company seemed in such disarray was that it hadn’t had any real leadership for years. The biggest immediate problem, he added, was that the company’s sales were shrinking. To address that, Apple would need to sharpen its market focus, reassert its brand, and shore up partnerships. “And the place to start is at the top.” That’s when he introduced the new board, describing the strengths of each new director and only then mentioning that he too would join it. He said there would be no chairman named until a new, permanent CEO was hired.
But in short order, he laid out a five-point deal that would prove to the world that “Microsoft will be part of the game with us,” and later adding that “we have to let go of … this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose.”
非常有幸，能看到那些演讲“I watched Bob Dylan as I was growing up, and I watched him never stand still,” Steve would tell me about a year later, in a circuitous attempt to explain why he finally dived back into Apple. “If you look at true artists, if they get really good at something, it occurs to them that they can do this for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful at it to the outside world, but not really successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they’re still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.
真正艺术家，穷其一生都在追求更好“This Apple thing is that way for me. I don’t want to fail, of course. When I was going in I didn’t know how bad it really was, but I still had a lot to think about. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, and for my family, and for my reputation, and all sorts of things. And I finally decided, I don’t really care, this is what I want to do. And if I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.”
乔布斯内心，真是把自己当成艺术家的