《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 11 Do Your Level Best

• As a mass-market consumer electronics device, the iPod would eventually be sold, of course, all the usual places: Best Buy, Circuit City, big-box department stores, and even the computer retailers like CompUSA. Steve disdained all these outlets. His obsession with his products continued well after they’d been manufactured. The tacky, low-margin hustle of these chains ran completely against the minimalist aesthetic of his products and the clean exuberance of his marketing. There was only one place where he really enjoyed seeing his products sold to the public: his own Apple stores, which had debuted four months ahead of the iPod.
  觉得那些喧嚣、嘈杂的零售渠道，配不上自己极美的产品

• Going back as far as the debut of the Mac, Steve had always groused about the way Apple computers were sold in its resellers’ stores. The way his computers were displayed and sold represented the very worst of what could go wrong when things weren’t done his way. The salespeople, always interested in quick turnover, seemed to make little effort to understand what was special about a Mac, and had less incentive to do so after IBM and its clones became dominant. Even at NeXT, Steve had talked to Susan Barnes about creating a different kind of computer store, one in which his high-end productions could be shown off to discerning customers.
  念念不忘，必有回响

• O’Connor asked Eddy Cue, who was then an IT technician in the human resources division, to sketch out an initial version of what the store might look like from a programmer’s perspective. “I don’t think Niall thought I was his best person,” says Cue, “but he did think I could deal with Steve, for some reason.” Cue, who had never met Steve and knew little about e-commerce or retailing, sought advice from a number of people, including head of sales Mitch Mandich. “Give him your best ideas,” Mandich told him, “but it won’t matter because we’ll never do it. It would piss off the channels [the stores and distributors that had traditionally sold Apple’s computers].”
  需要做非常多的准备

• Despite his gruff initial reaction, Steve asked the others in the room about Cue’s proposal, and about the basic idea of selling direct to customers online. The executives around the table started to talk about all the problems they could foresee with an online store—tying customized purchases into a manufacturing system that had been built to create computers with standardized configurations; not having any research indicating that customers actually wanted to buy computers this way; and, most worrisome, the potential for alienating Apple’s existing retail partners, like Best Buy and CompUSA. Mandich, who was senior enough to know that an interesting discussion was developing, kept silent. Finally, one of the senior guys opposing the idea spoke up. “Steve,” he asked, “isn’t this all pointless? You’re not going to do this—the channel will hate it.” Cue, who didn’t know any better, turned to him immediately. “The channel?” he exclaimed. “We lost two billion dollars last year! Who gives a fuck about the channel?” Steve perked up. “You,” he said, pointing at the senior exec, “are wrong. And you,” he continued, looking at Cue, “are right.”
  杀伐果断

• The online store went up on April 28, 1998. As Cue prepared to drive home that evening, he walked past Steve’s office to tell him they’d sold more than a million dollars’ worth of computers in just six hours. “That’s great,” said Steve. “Imagine what we could do if we had real stores.” Nothing would ever be enough, Cue realized. He liked the challenge.
  在中国因为淘宝京东发展足够快，所以对于苹果的在线商店这个事情，并没有太多的兴趣或者触动点

• STEVE LOVED GREAT stores. When on vacation in Italy or France, he would insist that Laurene join him in visiting Valentino, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Hermès, Prada, and the like. Wearing the ragged cutoff jeans and Birkenstocks of a bohemian American tourist out for a long day of informal sightseeing, Steve would squire Laurene around exclusive shopping districts. After strolling into one of these bastions of fashion, he and his striking blond wife would head in completely different directions. While Laurene browsed distractedly, Steve would buttonhole the salesclerks and bombard them with questions: Why had they chosen to devote so little space to their merchandise? How did people flow through the store? He’d look at the stores’ interior architecture, wondering how the interplay of wood, arches, stairways, and natural and unnatural light helped set a mood that was conducive to spending outrageous sums of money. To Steve, these stores were pulling off something he had never been able to manage: they sold a lifestyle product at an absurdly high margin by presenting it in a beautiful and yet informative way. The presentation itself helped justify the higher prices a customer was asked to pay. The dreary aisles and dull salesmen of Circuit City and CompUSA were making no such argument for Apple.
  赶紧记笔记
  1）乔布斯爱去逛夏威夷，京都，欧洲（上面提到意大利和法国）
  2）Valentino, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Hermès, Prada，奢侈品灵感来源
  3）度假中也持续在学习
  4）售卖的是一种生活方式：they sold a lifestyle product at an absurdly high margin by presenting it in a beautiful and yet informative way. The presentation itself helped justify the higher prices a customer was asked to pay.

• “The Mac is unique,” Steve told me many years later. “The trick was to get it in front of people somewhere where they could see what makes it different and better, and to have salespeople who had something to say about it. We thought if we didn’t do that, we’d go broke.”

• He then moved up the ranks at Target before making his mark by commissioning the architect Michael Graves to design a teapot exclusively for the department store. Graves had designed a teapot for the Italian appliance icon Alessi in 1984 that was still a global bestseller a decade later, and Johnson wondered, “Why are beautiful objects not available to everyday people, but only to the well-to-do?” It was a question that could have popped full-form out of the brain of Steve Jobs.
  普通人也应该有机会，享受到非常美妙的物件

• “I looked at it as a chance to work with one of the greatest creators ever,” Johnson told a group of Stanford MBA candidates during a 2014 interview, “but my friends in the Valley all thought that I was nuts. ‘You’re leaving Tar-jzeh [the Francofied pronunciation that both mocked and trumpeted the chain’s high-end position] and going to that loser company?” It was the year 2000, when Apple was still seen as a marginal player in the market for personal computers.
  非常真实

• “The first time we met,” Johnson said, “we talked for two or three hours about all kinds of things. Steve was a very, very private guy. He had grown up fast, and he was only best friends with a handful of people. He told me, ‘I want to be good friends, because once you know how I think we only have to talk once or twice a week. Then when you want to do something you can do it and not feel that you have to ask permission.’ ”
  确实，告知下属自己的真实想法，然后尽情发挥下属的创造力和主动性，自己就不需要太多的微观管理

• For some time, Johnson was the only retailer employed by Apple. For weeks after his arrival, he sat in on the executive team meetings and mulled over what would make for the ideal store. The key was the customer experience, and as Johnson pondered this, every idea he came up with was counterintuitive. Stores that sell to a customer once every few years generally opt for cheap real estate in remote locations; but the ideal store, for customers and for a brand looking to make its mark, would be right at the center of things. Telephone support should be fine for such occasional customers, but face-to-face interaction is what people really want, especially with computers, which are a lot harder to understand than, say, a raincoat. Salespeople are motivated by commissions, but customers don’t want to feel pressured into buying something they don’t want. Johnson came up with almost a dozen of these ideas, each of which went against the heart of traditional retailing practice. According to Johnson, Steve supported all of his most far-reaching thoughts. “ ‘If you think something through hard enough,’ Steve would say, ‘you’ll get to the inevitable answer,’ ” remembers Johnson.
  确实，如果你思考的足够深入，正确的答案应该是显而易见的

• By late 2000, Jobs and Johnson had a prototype they liked. But on a Tuesday morning in October, Johnson woke up with an epiphany: the layout of the stores, which revolved around areas selling particular product lines, was all wrong. Steve and the executive team had been discussing one subject endlessly in their Monday-morning meetings: the digital hub. Johnson realized that the stores should be laid out to match that concept, with an area built around music, and another built around movies, and so on. It was, once again, a counterintuitive thought—and yet it was also, once again, a thought that would serve customers better than the more common approach that Apple had been on the verge of embracing. That morning, Johnson joined Steve for a previously scheduled review of the prototype. On the car ride over to the prototype hangar, Johnson told Steve that he thought they’d gotten it all wrong. “Do you know how big a change this is,” Steve roared. “I don’t have time for this. I don’t want you to say a word to anyone about this. I don’t know what I think of this.” They sat for the rest of the short ride in silence.

• When they arrived at the hangar, Steve spoke to the assembled group: “Well,” he said, “Ron thinks we’ve designed our stores all wrong.” Johnson waited to hear where this line of thought would go. “And he’s right,” said Steve, “so I’m going to leave now and you should just do what he’s going to tell you to do.” And Jobs turned around and left.
  Later that day, after he’d returned to the Apple campus, Johnson went to see Steve. “You know,” Steve told him, “you reminded me of something I learned at Pixar. On almost every film they make, something turns out to be not quite right. And they have an amazing willingness to turn around and do it again, till they do get it right. They have always had a willingness to not be governed by the release date. It’s not about how fast you do something, it’s about doing your level best.”
  有努力做到做好的勇气

• One critic after another pointed to the fact that Gateway, perhaps the most marketing-savvy of all the Wintel PC makers, had recently shut down its own chain of more than one hundred retail stores because of poor sales. But just as Jobs had no use for typical market research when formulating product strategy, he dismissed Gateway’s misadventure as irrelevant. “When we started opening stores, everyone thought we were crazy,” he told me. “But that was because the point of sale had lost its ability to communicate with the customer. Everybody else was selling computers that were the same thing—take off the bezel or company nameplate and it’s the same box made in Taiwan. With so little differentiation, there was nothing for the salespeople to explain except the price, so they didn’t have to be very sophisticated, and those stores had tremendous turnover in their sales force.”

• The Apple stores fared fairly well from the beginning, but primarily as havens for those who already loved Apple and its high-priced gear. Early traffic patterns revealed just how deeply the company needed a transformative new product. Basically, Apple had a demographic problem—adolescents and young adults didn’t think the company or its products were as cool as their parents did. Part of the reason was that Apple’s iMacs and iBooks, as beautiful and compelling as they were, were still too pricey for kids to buy on their own: only their baby boomer parents could afford to write a check or whip out a credit card and bring one home. At the stores, Apple had nothing of its own to sell that appealed directly to the Generation X- and Y-ers.
  非常有趣诶，现在苹果商店里，也没啥是年轻人自己动动手就能承担的东西了

• “The people who work in our stores are the key,” Steve said. “And our turnover is very low for retail. So our power is in our people.”
  乔布斯在意的，一直都是人

• Jobs pushed Johnson to be increasingly audacious with the architecture of the stores, which eventually led to iconic features like the cube of glass in front of the GM building in midtown Manhattan. “Steve was the best delegator I ever met,” Johnson said at Stanford. “He was so clear about what he wanted that it gave you great freedom.”
  产品经理，需要非常清晰知道自己到底想要什么

• In 2002, long after the offending ads had ceased running, Disney CEO Michael Eisner complained in a hearing before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that Apple was guilty of openly touting illegal behavior. “They are selling the computer with the encouragement of the advertising that they can rip, mix, and burn,” he said. “In other words, they can create a theft and distribute it to all of their friends if they buy this particular computer.”
  捅刀子的人来了

• In fact, Steve was so attuned to the piracy issue that he knew the issue might help him sell his next big music idea—the iTunes Music Store. Steve believed, with some justification, that iTunes was a more elegant form of digital music management than anything else on the market. And he knew that an iTunes music store, if properly designed, could give the consumers such a fluid and simple way to buy music that they would stop stealing tracks via Napster and the like, which were cumbersome applications that opened up a person’s computer to all manner of potential security issues.

• Inside, he would need to have his engineers customize Apple’s digital compression and distribution technology in a way that would solve problems the music industry couldn’t handle on its own. More expedient options, like buying an existing online retail music distribution website and “Apple-izing” it to get a running start, wouldn’t work because such sites didn’t yet exist. Nor did it make any sense to simply grant a license to the music labels to promote, sell, and deliver music directly to iTunes users, given how technologically inept the companies had shown themselves to be with their repeated, compromised efforts to sell their wares online. Sony Music, for example, made a hash of its early stab at selling digital music that would play only on players made by its parent, Sony Electronics. Not only did it offer very little music from the other big record companies, but Sony also made the tracks it sold unplayable on personal computers, which was where the lion’s share of consumers played digital tracks at that time.
  正是因为有如此多的没有做好的地方，才让做好他们，变得非常有机会

• Selling music online was a complicated challenge. Apple’s engineers needed to adapt iTunes so the music could be bought and organized easily, so charges could be recorded and billed appropriately, and so purchased tracks were encrypted to prevent buyers from copying and sharing purchased music indiscriminately. This last bit, a measure that would protect the labels from further piracy, was actually the most straightforward. Software companies had been working to address such security problems for more than a decade, and had developed all manner of digital locks and online verification tricks to protect their own software.
  非常make sense, 在唱片公司还没想明白怎么数字化、保密音乐的时候，软件行业已经防盗版非常非常久了

• Napster’s own traffic had demonstrated this new consumer behavior. When music fans could download whatever music they wanted, they liked to cherry-pick their favorite tunes, rather than get an entire album. This was a complete reversal of what happened to the music business in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the recording industry all but did away with the single and focused instead on albums that commanded a much higher unit price. Many artists embraced the change and recorded “concept” albums, such as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s Tommy, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. But labels abused the concept and regularly released albums with just one or two strong tracks, knowing that committed buyers would spend $10 to $15 on the whole album just to get those tracks.
  用户行为的变化，非常有趣

• Steve knew that there was no turning back from the “Napster effect.” Now that listeners had the option, they would nearly always choose singles over the albums padded with forgettable tracks. Steve thought singles should sell for 99 cents, which more or less represented the imputed value of a track on an album, since the average conventional CD in the 1990s had a dozen or more tracks and sold for about $15. The price also appealed to Steve’s nostalgic streak, since it was the same price that he and others our age had paid for the 45 rpm singles we’d purchased in the 1960s.
  怀旧风的定价

• There was one problem with Steve’s idea, however. Historically, Visa and MasterCard charged 15 cents, plus around 1.5 percent of the transaction value for a single purchase; while American Express charged 20 cents plus 3.5 percent of the transaction value. That’s not such a big deal when the sale price is in the tens or hundreds of dollars, but when a single song costs just 99 cents, a transaction fee of 17 to 24 cents would be ruinous.

• These kinds of intricate answers delighted Steve. When Apple took on a major project, he wasn’t just concerned with the design and marketing. He wanted to know everything about the project, and he expected his employees to attack every conceivable problem—from design and engineering to seemingly mundane tasks such as packaging and billing—with creativity. Steve told me he was just as proud of the microtransaction solution as he was of the redesigned iPod models he would introduce in conjunction with the opening of the online store.
  对解决问题，感到自豪

• Cue’s team made another crucial decision: Apple would build the iTunes digital “storefront” right into the iTunes application, rather than create a public website to serve as its music retail site. If you look for “www.itunes.com” online, you come to an Apple.com marketing page for iTunes, which describes its many wonders but doesn’t allow you to buy music. The only way to get to the store is via the iTunes application, which at that time was available only for Macintosh computers. This appealed to Steve for several reasons. It gave Apple control of all the technology behind the store, and it cemented a direct commercial relationship with customers. The simple transaction of buying a song, and of handing over a credit card number to Apple in order to so, became part of what Steve had begun calling “the Apple experience.” As a great marketer, Steve understood that every interaction a customer had with Apple could increase or decrease his or her respect for the company. As he put it, a corporation “could accumulate or withdraw credits” from its reputation, which is why he worked so hard to ensure that every single interaction a customer might have with Apple—from using a Mac to calling customer support to buying a single from the iTunes store and then getting billed for it—was excellent. Steve had told me back in 1998 that the only reason for companies to exist was to build products; he was now using his company to build more than just products. Apple was now creating a holistic customer experience. Everything the company did, from technology development to the design of its stores, offline and on, was in service of that customer experience. Apple’s broad-based, intense focus on this was far ahead of its time, and would have wide cultural implications. After seeing and experiencing the uniform excellence of Apple’s products and service, customers would increasingly demand the same from other companies. Apple redefined the word “quality” and forced other companies to wrestle with the higher expectations of their customers.

• There was another key short-term benefit to building the iTunes store into the iTunes application: the limited reach of the iTunes store would be reassuring to the nervous music industry executives Steve had to woo. Half a million iPods had been sold, enough to create a meaningful niche but not nearly enough to affect the broader economics of the entire music industry. After all, Mac users accounted for a measly 4 percent of all personal computer users. For once, that minuscule market share was a competitive advantage. Since online sales of digital music represented a fearsome change to the label chiefs, Steve went to them with a simple, seemingly safe proposition: Why don’t you experiment with selling music downloads, to gauge demand and learn the customer and marketing dynamics, in my safe and tiny “walled garden”?
  原来有时候市场份额小，也是一种优势
  我现在突然发现，其实乔布斯后院的花园和他想打造的苹果产品，是非常像的，本质上是一个东西

• Steve’s negotiating challenge was considerable. He needed every leader of the big five labels—Universal, EMI, Sony, BMG, and Warner—to sign on. He was probably right in presuming that any online store that couldn’t claim a huge selection across every major label was doomed to fail. And he was charging a stiff price in return for his end-to-end solution: 30 percent of every sale made on the iTunes Music Store.
  非常深的洞察，确实要每一家唱片公司都上船，才有的玩

• Fortunately for Steve, he quickly found an ally: Roger Ames, the head of Warner Music, whom he knew through an executive at AOL named Barry Schuler. Ames, an unpretentious realist in a business that was then still floating on the fumes of past profits and successes, saw clearly what Warner could accomplish on its own technologically: “Absolutely nothing,” he says. “We didn’t have any real technologists at Warner. It’s a record company, not a tech company!”
  好幸运啊，有一个同盟

• The reluctance of the record company executives was palpable and understandable. Some still denied that digital distribution of music was inevitable, while the more pragmatic feared that they would lose pricing power over their own products by ceding distribution to an outside industry that they didn’t quite understand or trust. Steve listened to them, and modified the store and the digital protections on singles to their liking. He knew he couldn’t just impose a solution on the industry.
  发行权交给外部渠道，会导致自己丧失定价权，更重要的是，丧失自己与客户的联系渠道

• Steve also knew how to get what he wanted, and he negotiated with both carrot and stick. While he worked with the studio chiefs and led them to see that he truly did have a safe and complete solution designed for them by the very best technologists, he was also sure to remind them that the digital onslaught they were trying to ignore was inevitable and irrepressible. If they were worried about losing control, well, he invited them to just wait and see what might be wrought by the smarter, sneakier successors to Napster!
  萝卜与大棒

• Furthermore, everything in Lack’s decades of experience as a media executive at NBC and other places told him that iPod sales would soar if Apple could offer a full-service music store, and that the company would probably even sell millions more Macs as a result.
  高管的直觉！！！

• Years later, Lack still bemoaned the weakness he thought the music studios had displayed in their negotiations with Steve. “The iPod was empty without the music,” Lack has said. “I felt strongly that without a dual revenue stream [in which Apple had to give a cut of iPod sales back to the recording companies] the music business was going to struggle. If they’d stuck together, there was a chance they could have gotten somewhere. It’s my greatest regret.”