At a trade conference on October 6, 1997, exactly three weeks after Steve announced that he was taking on the title of iCEO, Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of his eponymous build-to-order PC clone business, was asked what he would do if he were put in charge of Apple Computer. “What would I do?” brayed the CEO, who was a decade younger than Steve. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.” Steve shot back an email: “CEOs are supposed to have class,” he wrote. But just a year and a half earlier he had told me pretty much the same thing: “Apple ain’t worth anything like the price of its stock,” he’d said.
CEO应该有教养，哈哈哈
我骂可以，Dell骂不行Yet here in the fall of 1997, facing a corporate mess that would have challenged the world’s greatest managers, Steve slowly started to show what he had learned in the eleven years since he was last at Apple. He had developed some discipline as he salvaged NeXT and negotiated a deal and an IPO for Pixar. He had learned the value of patience and had absorbed from Ed Catmull some proven managerial principles for leading a company loaded with creative talent. He had seen the long, slow, and twisting build of a great product, as John Lasseter and his crew followed their instincts for good and for bad, bit by bit, until their little idea of making a movie about playthings turned into the masterpiece of Toy Story. He had taken all this to heart, in a way no one could have predicted and he could not have explained. Now, decision by careful decision, he would start to combine this new understanding with his old talents, and shape a slow, careful comeback for Apple.
But the deepest reason demand had softened was that Apple’s products were stale, expensive, and increasingly irrelevant. Lacking the technological advantage of a state-of-the-art operating system, Spindler and Amelio had allowed Apple’s marketing teams to order up all kinds of different models of the Macintosh, in hopes that computers with specialized features would appeal to particular customer niches. The effort was a fiasco, littering the market with a confusing and redundant array of slightly different Macs, each requiring unique parts and assembly methods, each promoted with its own inconsistent and frequently conflicting marketing message.
学习一系列失败的方法，让自己不要陷进去THAT PHONE CALL to Clow was the beginning of Steve’s first big move as iCEO. Steve decided Apple needed an advertising campaign to reaffirm Apple’s old core values: creativity and the power of the individual. It needed to be something radically unlike the meek and confused product advertising that Apple had been offering consumers for years. Instead, this campaign would celebrate the company—not the company as it was that summer of 1997, but the company Steve imagined Apple should be. On the surface, it seemed an outrageous and perhaps spendthrift goal, given the company’s losses and layoffs. But Steve was insistent. And that’s why Clow made the journey north from TBWA\Chiat\Day’s offices in the Venice section of Los Angeles to Apple headquarters in Cupertino.
Technically, Steve made Clow compete for the Apple account with two other agencies. “But he basically told me that it was ours, if I could deliver what he wanted,” remembers Clow. He had several advantages over his competitors. First, of course, he had created the most memorable ad in Apple history (and arguably in the history of advertising), the “1984” Super Bowl spot for the original Mac. Second, he and Steve had a good rapport. They were both middle-class kids with limited formal educations, and they both abhorred the conventional patterns of corporate behavior. While Steve had by now given up the open-toed-sandals look for jeans and a standard T-shirt, Clow came to work in Hawaiian shirts and zipped around the offices on a skateboard. Furthermore, Clow admired Steve’s brilliance and was unafraid of his temper. “I grew up working for Jay Chiat,” he remembers, “and Jay could let loose some tantrums of his own. He was just as ferocious as Steve. But their goals were both the same. Extraordinary work, at any cost. And like Steve, Jay wouldn’t get in your way as you tried to achieve that. Both of them understood that you were going to fail a lot.”
这位也非常懂他的客户When the time came for Clow to present his work, he and his team had “Think Different” ready. Steve hesitated briefly when shown the first boards for the campaign, which paired the phrase with photos of noteworthy creative mavericks. His worry? That any campaign celebrating individual genius would suffer from the idea that Steve was simply out to celebrate his own creative genius. But he went with Chiat\Day anyway. “His decisiveness was so different from the crew that had been there,” Clow remembers. “No sending things off to some marketing exec somewhere for approval, no vetting by some committee. In the old regime, you never knew who was making the decision. With Steve it was totally different. It was him and me. You don’t get that at any companies—no CEO gets involved the way he does.”
CEO深入细节In the morning, Steve called Clow to tell him they had to run Dreyfuss’s version. “If we go with mine,” Steve said, “it’ll become about me. And this can’t be about me. It’s about the company.” It was not the decision of an egomaniac, of someone only out for himself. “Which is why,” Clow remembers, “he’s the real genius and I’m just the ad guy.”
So on the day of the broadcast, it was Dreyfuss’s voice behind a slide show of portraits of Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Martha Graham, Miles Davis, Frank Lloyd Wright, Amelia Earhart, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas Edison.
The campaign, which played out in posters, billboards, TV spots, and print ads, received unanimous critical praise. The brilliance of “Think Different” is that it celebrated a counterculture philosophy in a way that allowed almost everyone to feel part of the celebration. Its message was the advertising equivalent of an ideal Apple product—bold and aspirational and accessible all at the same time. It was heartfelt. The language, which Steve worked on along with Clow and others at TBWA\Chiat\Day, focused outward, defining the quality of an Apple buyer, rather than of a particular machine itself. There’s no computer mentioned, in fact. Just “tools,” created for the creative. The campaign’s clarity and simplicity stood out prominently from the morass of other computer advertising and reminded people of the fresh spirit so many had once loved about Apple. The $100 million campaign began the polishing up of Apple’s image, a necessary task that would take years.
这两句点评我非常喜欢，很贴切
The brilliance of “Think Different” is that it celebrated a counterculture philosophy in a way that allowed almost everyone to feel part of the celebration.Think Different started a process of bringing pride back to Apple’s employees. Billboards and posters went up across the Cupertino campus. Steve’s narrated version was featured in a video promoting the whole campaign inside the company, and later, after Apple won the Emmy Award for the best television ad campaign for 1998, the company gave a fifty-page commemorative book to all its employees. “Our audience was the employees as much as anyone else,” says Clow. Inspiring them was challenging, especially when Steve was shuttering divisions of the company and laying off thousands of workers. But Think Different gave the surviving employees a sense that they might see better days ahead, for the first time in years.
好日子还在前面这个用语，乔布斯在辞职CEO时候也用过Out went the contracts that licensed the MacOS to the clone manufacturers. Steve hated the idea of having his operating system in the hands of others, and he had refused to sign on as iCEO without the promise that he could shut down the clones. This was the most expensive of the many decisions Steve made in the course of stabilizing the company. To avoid the litigation that would naturally arise from Apple abrogating the contracts, the company had to pay the clonemakers to disappear quietly. The most successful of these was Power Computing, which had commandeered a 10 percent share of the market for MacOS-compatible computers. Apple paid $110 million in cash and stock to acquire the company and hire some of its engineers.
好昂贵
也幸亏有这些Clone，才可能有现在的黑苹果Cook spoke quietly, with a soft Alabama drawl, but he may have been the toughest executive at Apple. Cook’s work drew no public attention, but it was crucial to trimming the company. In the nine months after he arrived, Apple reduced its inventory from $400 million worth of unsold, unwanted Macs down to $78 million. Cook was responsible for perhaps the most dramatic example of Steve’s hurry to rid himself of the burdens of Apple’s recent past: the bulldozing of tens of thousands of unsold Macs into a landfill in early 1998.
乔布斯也是厉害的，在一艘下沉的船里，居然邀请到了CookSteve told me that being a father made firing people much harder than it had been. “I still do it,” he said, “because that’s my job. But when I look at people when this happens, I also think of them as being five years old, kind of like I look at my kids. And I think that that could be me coming home to tell my wife and kids that I just got laid off. Or that it could be one of my kids in twenty years. I never took it so personally before.”
But if he had perhaps grown more sensitive, he had also grown more focused. As Steve pushed through the downsizing, Anderson discerned a profound difference between the iCEO and his predecessors: Steve kept the greater needs of the company first and foremost, whatever the cost. Sometimes his ability to do so could seem almost cruel, as when, in 1998, he decided that 3,600 layoffs wasn’t enough and ordered 400 more people to be let go. But he was determined to lead a company staffed by the best people possible—he wanted Apple’s staff to brim with the exceptionalism he had witnessed at Pixar. “When I returned to Apple, I was blown away by the fact that a third of the people there really were A to A-plus people—the kind you’d do anything to hire,” he told me. “Despite Apple’s troubles, they’d stayed, which was the miracle. That was the good karma of Apple. It was carried through by those people deciding to stay through it all. Another third were very good—you know, the really solid kind of people every company needs. And then there was another third who were unfortunate. I don’t know whether they’d ever been good or not, but it was time for them to leave. Unfortunately, a lot of those people were in management. Not only were they not doing the right things, but they were instructing everybody else to do the wrong things, too.” Steve’s narrow determination was critical: the core team could unite around Steve, knowing that he would do absolutely whatever it would take to turn this company around. He was all in, and working as hard as anyone. “It was pretty bleak those first six months,” he told me later. “I was running on vapor.”
人才观Still, even though Steve had been disciplined about cutting the company down to its proper size, nobody could really be sure that he was the man to lead Apple forward. Despite ostentatiously declining to receive a salary, Steve was an expensive, unproven bet. Some $450 million of Apple’s $816 million loss for 1997 could be attributed to the acquisitions of NeXT and to the purchase and liquidation of Power Computing. One way to understand that number is to realize that Apple had paid out more than a half billion dollars for two acquisitions whose asset value, mere months after the deals were concluded, was just one-fifth that number. A more revealing way to think of it is that Apple had shelled out more than a half billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs.
失败的代价非常高昂，这里就是一个5亿美金的失败教训A FEW MONTHS before Steve came back to Apple, I asked him what he thought Apple’s top priority should be. Should it be a new operating system, now that Avie Tevanian was there to create it? “Not at all,” he replied, with a forcefulness I hadn’t been expecting. “What Apple needs more than anything is to ship a great new product, not necessarily some new technology. The trouble is, I don’t think they even know how to make a great product anymore.” He paused as if he realized how damning that statement sounded, and abruptly added, “That doesn’t mean they can’t.”
This time, Steve didn’t immediately set out to solve everything with the introduction of some groundbreaking new machine. This was a big change from what he’d attempted at NeXT and at Apple the first time around. Instead, he laid out a plan in broad strokes for the company’s entire product line. Before Steve would ask his engineers to come up with a particular new product, he wanted to be sure they understood how it would fit into Apple’s overall plan. He wanted everyone working from the same playbook, and he wanted that game plan to be crystal clear. He couldn’t afford any of the strategic confusion that had hampered the development of the NeXT computer.
先是产品线大纲The key was to simplify Apple’s ambitions so that the company could sharply focus its substantial engineering talent and brand equity on a few key products and broad markets. To understand why Steve could pare down Apple’s offerings so drastically in 1997, it helps to think of personal computers as protean devices that can be programmed to be any of a number of tools—a word processor, a supercalculator, a digital easel, a searchable library of research materials, an inventory control system, a tutor, you name it. There’s no need for the machine to have a different physical form to perform each different service. All it needs is powerful, adaptable software within. And in the mid-1990s, the capability of software was expanding faster than ever, thanks to the advent of local area networks and the burgeoning Internet. When software can link you to other people, and to databases housed on other computers far away from yours, it becomes much more powerful than an application that is limited strictly to whatever is stored on your own personal computer.
即：对于用户来说，他无需再持有多个物理设备来满足不同需求，他只需要持有1个强大可编程/易变的物理终端，通过里面搭载的不同软件，就可以满足不同场景的需求，这是产品线缩减的底层逻辑
Mobile Phone的普及也说明这一点，大部分人都是普通人，都是获取/消费信息的，所以于他们而言，一个Phone已经足够
那些创造内容/创造信息的人，才需要更多好用的生产力设备，比如PC, PAD等等What the quadrant strategy wasn’t is equally important. It was not an effort to solve all problems with one insanely great machine. Steve had been twice burned by that strategy. He had developed enough cautious wisdom to see that breakthroughs were not the solution now. Apple’s customers—past, present, and potential—would first have to be shown that the company would survive, that it knew how to consistently produce and deliver distinctive products, and that it could reliably turn a profit. Only after that was accomplished—and Steve was the first to admit that it would take several years—could he think about how to exploit emerging technologies to break new ground again.
Steve ran the new Apple through a remarkably strong, remarkably motivated core group, consisting of Anderson, Cook, Rubinstein, and Tevanian, as well as sales head Mitch Mandich from NeXT; marketing chief Phil Schiller, a former Apple guy whom Steve brought back from Adobe; and Sina Tamaddon, a software guy from NeXT who also engineered several key deals. This group—minus Mandich, who would leave in 2000, and with the eventual addition of design chief Jony Ive—would drive operations at the company well through the mid-2000s. Given Steve’s volatile reputation and track record as a manager, it’s remarkable that they remained together for so many years.
电脑行业的关键人物
团队的配置是：CEO-产品，CFO, COO, 硬件VP，软件VP，销售，Marketing，CDOSteve didn’t do the kinds of things that leaders often do to cement a strong group. He didn’t take the guys out to dinner. “We had good relationships within the senior executive team,” remembers Tevanian, “but we built them ourselves. It wasn’t through Steve. I can count on one hand the times, in the eight years that I was there, that we went to dinner together, mostly to an Indian restaurant nearby.”
通过创造伟大的产品，来团结团队，而不是靠吃饭Steve didn’t give his team much formal feedback. “During the U.S. versus Microsoft antitrust case,” says Tevanian, “Microsoft subpoenaed all my personnel records at Apple. So I’m sitting down with our lawyer, George Riley, and he says, ‘I’ve gotten your file from HR.’ He pulls it out and there’s one piece of paper in it, something meaningless. He’s like, ‘Avie, where is your file? Where’s your annual reviews and all that?’ I told him that I’d never had an annual review!”
“Steve didn’t believe in reviews,” remembers Jon Rubinstein. “He disliked all that formality. His feeling was, ‘I give you feedback all the time, so what do you need a review for?’ At one point I hired an executive coach so I could do three-sixty reviews with my own team. He was a really good guy, and I tried to get Steve to talk to him, but he wouldn’t. In fact, he asked me, ‘What do you need that for? That’s a waste of time!”
非常有意思！！！原来是这样的管理风格But by the mid-nineties, playing up his celebrity held little appeal to Jobs. While he craved recognition for the quality of his work, he didn’t desire fame in and of itself. He directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets, including Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times. Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.
更专注在产品，让产品本身说话
乔布斯帮你选择靠谱刊物，哈哈哈Steve and I talked many times about his reluctance to share the spotlight with the others on his team, since I asked repeatedly to speak with them and was largely unsuccessful. Sometimes he’d aver that he didn’t want anyone to know who was doing great work at Apple, since he didn’t want them to get recruited by other companies. That was disingenuous, since Silicon Valley was an incestuous place where tech talent was tracked as closely as the stock market. What was true was that Steve didn’t think anyone else could tell the story of his product, or his company, as well as he could. Steve was a great performer in any setting, and he considered most interviews to be just another performance. He was a terrific extemporaneous thinker and talker, always confident that he could make the most of an opportunity to promote the company. He cared intensely about the look of any article he participated in, because he thought that photography and typography and a stylish layout helped convey the import of whatever message he wanted to get across.
确实，讲故事，讲产品这块，乔布斯是最好的
现在苹果那帮人，根本不行Steve made sure in his own way that they knew he thought they were outstanding as well. Sometimes he’d ask one of them to join him on a long walk, whether around the Apple campus or near his home in Palo Alto. “Those walks mattered,” Ruby remembers. “You’d think to yourself, ‘Steve is a rock star,’ so getting quality time felt like an honor in some ways.” Steve also compensated his key employees richly, arranging lucrative long-term contracts loaded with stock options for everyone in the inner circle. “He was really good at surrounding himself with really good people and motivating them both philosophically and financially. You have to have the right mix. You have to provide just enough financial motivation in there so that people don’t just say, ‘Fuck you, I’m not taking this anymore.’ ”
把我看笑了，和乔布斯一起散步，确实是一个荣幸！！！Steve also understood that the personal satisfaction of accomplishing something insanely great was the best motivation of all for a group as talented as his. “You had to believe that it was going to take some time; that you weren’t going to wake up tomorrow morning and it was all going to be fixed,” Tevanian once told me. “And that two years, three years down the road you were going to look back and say, ‘Gee, we got through it.’ If you didn’t believe that, you were sunk. Because there was a lot of pain along the way, there were a lot of people saying it’s going to fail, it’s not going to work, this is wrong with it, that’s wrong with it, finding a million things wrong. But you just had to know that if you kept your head down, kept working, kept trying to do the right things, it would work out.” Saving Apple was an accomplishment everyone on the team would take pride in for the rest of their lives.
“When it was tough,” Avie adds, “he’d think carefully about all the decisions. He’d think through the impact of everything very carefully.”
“People want to paint him like he’s Michelangelo, you know?” says Slade. “But he was a real nervous Nelly, like an old-fashioned, tiny, old, small businessman saying, ‘Shall I cut another nickel off it?’ Like a junk merchant.”
Every Monday morning at nine o’clock, he convened the executive team (the ET, as it came to be known) in a conference room located in Building 1 of the Apple campus. Attendance was required. Referring to an agenda he himself had written up and distributed, he’d go around the table, asking specific questions about projects under development and getting updates from the team. Each person was expected to be fully prepared for any question he might ask about their area of responsibility.
With Steve, says Ed Catmull, “The past can be a lesson, but the past is gone. His question was always, ‘What are we going to do moving forward?’ ”
永远在制造更好，更伟大产品的路上“The reason you sugarcoat things is that you don’t want anyone to think you’re an asshole. So, that’s vanity,” explains Jony Ive
Whenever he felt abused, he would tell himself that someone who sugarcoats his true opinions “might not really even be all that concerned about the other person’s feelings. He just doesn’t want to appear to be a jerk. But if he really cared about the work he would be less vain, and would talk directly about the work. That’s the way Steve was. That’s why he’d say ‘That’s shit!’ But then the next day or the day after, he also would just as likely come back saying, ‘Jony, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you showed me, and I think it’s very interesting after all. Let’s talk about it some more.’ ”
Steve put it this way: “You hire people who are better than you are at certain things, and then make sure they know that they need to tell you when you’re wrong. The executive teams at Apple and Pixar are constantly arguing with each other. Everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves at Pixar. Everybody’s totally straight with what they think, and the same is beginning to happen at Apple.” His inner circle understood that Steve’s acerbic criticism wasn’t personal.
From 850 miles up the Pacific Coast, Bill Gates watched with great interest as the limping company he had helped with that $150 million investment and a commitment to make software for the Mac struggled to survive. “It was a much more mature group,” he observes. “With the Mac team or even at NeXT, when Steve went on a jag everybody just scattered into their own corner. But this Apple management team would push back and coalesce as a group. When Steve would pull any one individual out of the pack and say, ‘Your work is such shit and you’re such an idiot,’ the pack had to decide, okay, are we going to let this one go or do we really like this guy. And they could go to Steve afterwards and say, ‘Hey, come on, there aren’t that many people we can hire that are near as good as that guy, go back and apologize.’ And he would, even though his intensity was still just incredible.
“That is a really crack team that has gone through hell, and bonded with each other in toughness,” Gates continues, falling into the present tense. “I mean, you can point to everybody on that team and say, okay, he earned his pay, he earned his pay, he earned his pay. There’s no weakness in that team, nor is there a backup plan or a forward-looking alternative team. It’s just this one team.”
One day I asked him if he had come to enjoy the process of building companies, now that he was trying to do so for a third time. “Uh, no,” he started, as if I were a fool. But if he didn’t enjoy building companies, he sure had a thoughtful and convincing way of describing why he kept doing it. “The only purpose, for me, in building a company is so that that company can make products. One is a means to the other. Over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products.
“The company is one of the most amazing inventions of humans, this abstract construct that’s incredibly powerful. Even so, for me, it’s about the products. It’s about working together with really fun, smart, creative people and making wonderful things. It’s not about the money. What a company is, then, is a group of people who can make more than just the next big thing. It’s a talent, it’s a capability, it’s a culture, it’s a point of view, and it’s a way of working together to make the next thing, and the next one, and the next one.” A talent, a capability, a culture, and a point of view: the Apple he was in the midst of re-creating would have all these things, as would the products it would create.
But Apple didn’t have any great software applications ready to unveil, and Steve had no desire to offer any hardware that had been in the Amelio pipeline. He needed something new, and it had to have enough of his DNA to signal that serious changes were afoot. The personal computer business had been bereft of creativity and excitement for so long that it was now simply known as the “box” business. Steve needed a lot more than just another box.
There he became an admirer of Dieter Rams, the legendary onetime chief of design for Braun, the German small appliance maker, who in the 1970s was one of the pioneers of what is now called sustainable design, and who railed against the industrial practice of planned obsolescence. Rams, who still designs furniture for a Danish company called Vitsœ, had become known for his “Ten Principles of Good Design.”
人类如此优秀，让每一代人都有机会，站在上一代人的肩膀上“That very first time we met, he had already started to talk about reengaging Harmut Esslinger [the founder of Frog Design, who had designed the first Mac],” Ive says. “He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me. And he should have done that, based on the products that we were shipping at the time, which weren’t very good at all.”
Steve was impressed. “You know Jony. He’s kind of a cherub,” Steve told me in late 1997. “I liked him right away. And I could tell after that first meeting that Amelio had wasted his talent.”
But he quickly saw that Steve and Amelio couldn’t have been more different. “Amelio described himself as the turnaround king,” Ive remembers. “So he was focused on turnaround, which is mainly about not losing money. The way you don’t lose money is you don’t spend it. But Steve’s focus was completely different, and it never changed. It was exactly the same focus from the first time I met him to right to the very end: the product. We trust if we do a good job and the product’s good, people will like it. And we trust that if they like it, they’ll buy it. If we’re competent operationally, we will make money.” It was that simple. So Jony decided not to leave Apple, a choice that would lead to the closest and most fruitful creative collaboration of Steve’s entire career, even more symbiotic than his original partnership with Steve Wozniak.
Besides, he told me one day, “I just don’t like television. Apple will never make a TV again.”
但乔布斯没有说whyTHERE WAS ONE thing that especially intrigued Steve at the Design Lab: the odd texture and eerie translucence of the eMate’s plastic shell. That detail became a seed idea for the iMac, the first product of the new Steve Jobs era at Apple.
所以eMate最大的贡献是，让乔布斯看到了透明塑料外壳，这也太惨了，哈哈哈哈Two other decisions—one technological, one driven by marketing—also made the iMac stand out from that crowd of putty-colored rectangular slabs. Steve and Jon Rubinstein opted for developing a CD-ROM drive for loading software, rather than a standard floppy disk drive, despite the fact that most people at the time still stored their data on floppy disks. You could buy a separate, external floppy disk drive to plug into the iMac, but Steve reasoned that most software would soon be delivered on CD-ROM optical discs—a technology that was already fast displacing vinyl and tape cassettes as the primary medium for recorded music. He also felt certain that within a year or two, recordable CD-ROM drives would render floppy disk drives redundant. As he had before, he was betting that users would accept a slightly uncomfortable move into the future, one that would force them to convert their data to a new format. This time he got it right.
Steve’s other noteworthy decision was to slot the letter i in before Mac. The iMac was built to be plugged into the Internet, via sockets that could handle either a phone line or, for those lucky enough to have access, a connection to a full-fledged Ethernet network. It sported a built-in telephone modem as standard equipment, while most computer makers sold those only as an optional add-on. Steve had foreseen that buyers would see this “Internet” Mac as a forward-looking computer with an eye toward the future of personal computing, which was clearly going to revolve around the Internet. But the i did more than that. The i was personal, in that this was “my” computer, and even, perhaps, an expression of who “I” am. And what a bold expression it was, fresh and transparent and different. It seemed like the kind of computer that an individual who could “think different” would use.
The iMac’s radical design sent exactly the kind of reassuring, friendly, and differentiating message that Steve wanted to send. With one product, Apple had reinforced its position as the “personal” computer company. The iMac was a vivid reminder that personal computers are tools for people, and that they should both reflect and amplify an individual’s own personality.
“When we did the first iMac,” he later told me, “there was such resistance in hardware engineering. A lot of people thought it wasn’t a Mac, that it would fail. But the minute that everybody saw it succeed in the marketplace, a lot of the people started to turn around and go, ‘Okay, this design stuff is important I guess.’ They felt the thrill of success again.”
Here, too, Steve avoided a mistake Apple had made the first time around. He didn’t claim that the Power Mac was the computer for all businesses, and in so doing try to push Wintel-based PCs out of the market. Instead, he targeted the Power Macs at the new, more entrepreneurial class of small businesses emerging with the rise of the Internet economy: engineers, architects, publishers, advertising agencies, website designers, and so on. This was a world that could tolerate and even celebrate “Think Different,” while the dominant class of big corporations looked on fearfully at the radical and potentially undermining change the Internet seemed to promise.
非常make sense, 假如我是世界500强的IT，我也不希望我的电脑设施经常在变，最好是10年都不要有啥大变化“When we returned to Apple,” Steve told me around this time, “our industry was in a coma. There was not a lot of innovation. At Apple we’re working hard to get that innovation kickstarted again. The rest of the PC industry reminds one of Detroit in the seventies. Their cars were boats on wheels. Since then, Chrysler innovated by inventing the mini-van and popularizing the Jeep, and Ford got itself back in the game with its Taurus. Near-death experiences can help one see more clearly sometimes.”
A costlier failure was a pet project that Ruby and Steve worked on together and argued about endlessly, the so-called Power Mac “Cube,” which was introduced in 2000. Harking back to the design of the NeXTcube, but one-eighth the size, Apple’s G4 Cube was such a stunning, clean design that it too wound up in the Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately, it didn’t wind up in many homes or offices.
也不算失败，算是为后来的Mac Mini打底子了And for once, he allowed them significant authority—Apple was simply too big for him to make all the decisions himself. Gradually, the organization developed in a way that allowed him to get the details he needed without micromanaging those areas of the company where he added a lot less. He primarily managed through his inner circle (although he convened meetings of the top one hundred people from time to time), and the Monday morning executive team meeting became the linchpin of the week. His attempt to delegate worked well, for the most part. In matters of finance, for instance, “I would get him involved when I needed him,” remembers Anderson. Steve was trying to keep his fingers on the pulse of a growing company without stifling it.
Their Mondays would begin with the executive management team meeting. After that the two would usually go eat in the cafeteria, and later venture into the Design Lab. Slade tried to participate in their discussions. “Jony would say stuff like, ‘Steve, I’m not sure the design language and the way it’s joining with this is quite right. What do you think?’ ” says Slade, laughing. “And I’m going, ‘Yeah, it’s cool. Can I have a Coke now?’ They’d ask me, ‘Do you think we’ve got the right degree of opacity,’ and all I can think is, ‘Why am I here?’ ” Of course, Slade knew more than he’ll admit. But his sense of humor and realism appealed to Steve. Steve didn’t allow himself to relax with his inner circle the way he would with Slade. “Slade was the court jester,” says Ruby, who also became good friends with Slade over the years.
还不大明白这个人的角色是啥While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.
This experience of “porting” NeXT OS to other machines would pay off in two ways for Apple. For starters, Tevanian and his crew walked in the door at Cupertino with the code base and the know-how to support the troubled company no matter which microprocessor would be at the core of future Macintoshes. Apple had already switched Macintosh microprocessors once before, and Steve wanted the flexibility to do so again if it made sense. Since his old NeXT programmers had learned the technological idiosyncrasies of several computing platforms, they could help him make a much more objective decision when it came time to switch again. Technologically agnostic, they would push for the architecture that would get the most out of their operating system—in other words, the one that would help them build the best whole widget possible. This was an ace up Steve’s sleeve, one he would play to great effect several years down the road.
MacOS最厉害之处在于她与底层芯片的架构是解藕的，意味着可以非常灵活变换底层芯片
确实是乔布斯手里的王牌The challenges in developing any new operating system are many and varied, and even though OS X was essentially a modified version of a proven, existing operating system, the “Apple-ization” of it was still an enormous job. Steve understood this, and he didn’t create unreasonable deadlines for his programmers. Instead, he oversaw them with a mix of patience and impatience that allowed him to be forceful and yet respectful. What eventually resulted was an operating system that mixed the best of Steve’s intuitive understanding of the needs of regular people with deep, robust, and flexible code written by some of the greatest programmers in the world. It preserved the winsome onscreen personality that had made Apple customers so loyal through thick and thin.
Steve was particularly obsessed with the operating system’s look and feel. In the afternoon OS X meetings that Slade would attend with Steve, each of Avie’s direct reports would be admitted into a locked conference room to demonstrate the latest developments on whatever aspect of OS X they were handling. “We went over OS X again and again,” remembers Slade, “pixel by pixel, feature by feature, screen by screen. Should the genie effect look like this? How big should the dock icons magnify? What’s the type style? Why does this dial look the way it does? Every week, the agenda was to get Steve to approve the look and feel of each item.
用着MacOS，深深庆幸当年是乔布斯在把关“There is nothing in the operating system that he didn’t approve,” continues Slade. “It was the opposite of how things were done at Microsoft, where they relied on these five-hundred-page specs [documents laying out in detail every feature to be created by the software developers]. We had specs, too, but Steve never looked at them. He just looked at the product.”
正常人，谁看说明书Steve believed that Apple’s consumers would adapt more easily than conventional wisdom suggested, since they were far more enthusiastic about their Macs than Microsoft’s customers were about their PCs. He believed they would be quite willing to make a big leap to a new operating system, even if it also required eventually buying all-new hardware and software. And he was right. Over the next decade, in its quest to keep the OS lean and modern, Apple would slowly stop supporting for a variety of carryover features from previous generations of hardware and software that were dearly beloved by a sometimes-vocal minority. Most Mac customers figured the trade-offs involved in a steadily improving computer platform were worth it, however.
Still, Steve and Avie did everything they could to make the transition to OS X as benign as possible for customers. One thing they exploited was a new way of delivering software updates. With more and more computers constantly connected to the Web, Apple could update users’ software frequently by delivering improvements, modifications, and bug fixes directly over the Internet. This applied not just to operating system software but to all manner of applications, and made sense both for the customers and for the software developers, who by nature love to continue tweaking their work once it is “finished.” Avie and his team were among the first mainstream operating system developers to take full advantage of this capability, and their approach would change the expectations of hundreds of millions of people, from corporate IT managers all the way down to the individual smartphone user who wants the very latest version of his favorite game.
在线更新的方式！！！Indeed, when Apple first released OS X in September 2000, the company called it a “public beta” version, implying that it was a work in progress. The price was $29.95—about a fifth of what was typically charged for a significant operating system upgrade. It was shrewd marketing, because it implied that early adopters would effectively be putting OS X through a shakedown cruise, and thus some bugs and glitches were to be expected. It also gave Apple a test period during which it could work out how to manage those online software upgrades. And during that period Avie’s team used the Internet to provide numerous updates that improved the software. This way of maintaining and fixing software would quickly become the industry norm. It also transformed customers’ expectations: no longer would they be willing to wait months for their software providers to fix a problem.
原来操作系统更新、软件更新的方式，也是乔布斯改变的Given the breathing room that the success of the iMac had bought them, the UNIX core upon which they built their system, and their own coding expertise, Avie and his programmers had been able to shoot for the moon. So when OS X was finally ready to go, it could make the Mac do things no PC had ever been able to do. Users reveled in the obvious cosmetic improvements, like the ability to have video continue to play even as you used a mouse to move a window around the screen.
那些感动人心的细节设计，真心不错With OS X, then, Apple finally had a genuinely industrial-strength computing framework. Macs crashed far less than Wintel PCs. A single haywire program wouldn’t take down the whole system. The machines seemed almost immune to software viruses. And its basic file system was easy to navigate and gave users the choice of three different ways to view and locate files in a list format. Under the hood, OS X was the state-of-the-art software foundation for everything Steve would want to create in the years ahead.
Most important, Steve had visibly changed for the better as a leader and as a manager. Over the three and a half years since his return, he had come to recognize that taking this more incremental approach to computer development can result in the kind of equilibrium that allows you to build a business designed to thrive over the long haul.
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