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《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 14 A Safe Haven for Pixar


  • Iger had big news to share: The following day, March 13, Disney would announce that he would become the next CEO of Disney, replacing Michael Eisner. Eisner had been CEO since 1984, and had followed a great first decade with a second one that can only be described as mediocre and turbulent. By the end, he had disappointed shareholders and alienated just about every stakeholder who had a vested interest in the company. One of those was Pixar’s CEO, who disliked Eisner so much that he had publicly announced that the company would find a new distributor once its existing contract with Disney ended in 2006.

  • “Steve,” said Iger, “before you read it in the paper tomorrow, I’m calling to let you know I’m going to be named the next CEO of the company. I don’t fully know what that’s going to mean in terms of Disney and Pixar, but I’m calling to tell you I’d like to figure out a way to keep this relationship alive.”

  • There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Iger had pondered this call for several days. He knew that fixing the mess at Disney Animation was the most crucial task facing him as CEO, and he had already decided that keeping Pixar was the key to any solution. From what he’d heard, Steve thought of him as a mere extension of Eisner—and frankly, Iger, who had always been a good company man, had given him little reason to think otherwise. He’d been quoted in the press defending Disney’s position in the tortuous Pixar negotiations, and he’d never spent any real time with Steve. But now there was this long pause, and Iger was beginning to hope that, just maybe, Steve was conflicted. “Well,” he finally heard from the other end, “I think I owe you the right to prove that you’re different. If you want to come up and talk about that, then that’s what we should do.”

  • The bricks were manufactured by a single beehive kiln in Washington State, one that Steve’s supplier had reopened solely for the purpose of manufacturing bricks with the specific shades that Steve demanded. A couple of times, when Steve visited the construction site and saw the wall going up with a randomness that he deemed unpleasing, he had asked workers to tear down the wall. Eventually, the construction team figured out an algorithm of sorts to ensure that the bricks were distributed in a “perfectly” random pattern.
    不满意就拆除重做,永远要追求最好
    看上去随机,但并不是真正随机

  • My editors chose not to, in part because the building is not so much a jaw-dropping architectural statement. Its greatest beauty is that it is perfectly suited for its function. “It wasn’t that he was lovingly crafting a beautiful building,” says Ed Catmull. “It’s a higher thing. He was lovingly crafting a place to work in. That’s an important distinction.”
    创造一个能让创意涌现的工作场所,是乔布斯的热情所在

  • Steve’s initial design for the building was minimalist, based mostly on his particular aesthetic taste and his own ideas about how a great building can shape a great office culture. “His theory was very simple,” says John Lasseter. “He believed in the unplanned meeting, in people running into people. He knew how everybody works at Pixar, where you’re one-on-one with your computer. He had the theory of this big atrium that would be able to house the whole company for a company meeting, and that would have everything that gets you out of your office and into that center spine. It would draw you to the center, or have you crossing it, many times a day.” Steve was so set on this idea that he originally proposed that there be no bathrooms in the building’s two wings—there would be just one men’s restroom and one women’s restroom, in the central atrium. Catmull, the most masterful of the many people who had to figure out ways to manage Steve’s idiosyncratic excesses, patiently steered Steve clear of this particularly absurd example of his occasional advocacy of unrealistic means designed to achieve laudable ends. (Steve compromised and allowed bathrooms upstairs as well as in the atrium.)

  • Lasseter and Catmull also resisted the idea of a minimalist, glass-and-steel headquarters. It didn’t fit with either their industrial neighborhood or the rich, colorful, fantastical work being done by Pixar employees. “Pixar is warmer than Apple or NeXT,” says Lasseter. “We’re not about the technology, we’re about the stories and the characters and the human warmth.” They voiced their concern to Tom Carlisle and Craig Paine, the architects Steve had hired for the job. Carlisle and Paine hired a photographer to shoot the brickwork of the lofts in the surrounding neighborhood, and in San Francisco. Then, at the end of one of the days when Steve was working from Pixar’s Point Richmond headquarters, they laid dozens of those photos out on the table of a conference room. “He walked in and I remember him looking at all these beautiful photographs, all the details, and he walked around and around,” remembers Lasseter. “Then he looked at me and he goes, ‘I get it, I get it, you guys are right. John, you’re right.’ He got it, and he became a giant advocate for that look.”
    乔布斯最终还是在苹果实现了他的钢和玻璃的梦想

  • Steve signed the wallpaper: “This is why we built this building, Steve Jobs.”

  • “We called it Steve’s movie,” says Catmull. “This was a labor of love.” Adds Lasseter: “It took the same budget, and the same amount of time as one of our movies, and he was the director. We love it.”

  • “One of the things we lost when Steve died was an external hammer,” says Catmull. “At some point in every film, the director gets lost in the forest. So once or twice a film, I might call Steve up and say, ‘Steve, I think we’ve got a problem.’ That’s all I would say. You never try to tell Steve what to think. I wouldn’t prep him.”

  • “Steve never said anything that hadn’t already been said by one of the other brain trust members, because they’re all really good at the storytelling,” Catmull continues. “But there is something about his presence, and he was so articulate, that he could take the same thing said by somebody else and just cut right through it. He was very careful about how he went about this. Steve would preface it by saying, ‘I’m not a filmmaker, you can ignore everything I say.’ He literally said that every time. He would then just say what he thought the problem was. Right? Only the fact that it was articulate was the gut punch. He didn’t tell them to do anything, he just told them what he thought.

  • “Sometimes,” Catmull says, “if it were a big enough of a gut punch he’d go for a walk with the director. Steve was this incredibly intelligent, strong-willed person who made things happen, but at the same time he enabled people. He was always big on going for walks with people. So he would take the director out on a walk, where you talked more slowly, you think through things … just talking, just a friendly back-and-forth talking. His goal was just to help them make a better movie. It always made it easier for the director to move forward. It wasn’t ever like ‘Oh, you screwed up.’ It was ‘What are we gonna do to move forward?’ The past can be a lesson, but the past is gone. He believed that.”
    难怪乔布斯临死送的最后一本书是禅者的初心

  • This kind of one-on-one mentoring was something Steve learned over time. “Early on, if somebody didn’t measure up Steve wouldn’t hide it,” says Catmull. “That kind of behavior wasn’t something I ever saw during his last ten years. Instead, he would take you off in private, and turn what could have been an embarrassing thing into something that actually became very productive and bonding. He learned; he had taken the mistakes that he made, internalized and processed them, and made some changes.”

  • Steve was more relaxed at Pixar than he was at Apple. “He never tried to make us like Apple,” says Catmull, “or to run us the same way.” Andy Dreyfus, a designer at Pixar who had previously worked at Apple and CKS Group, says that whenever he and his boss Tom Suiter wanted to present something to Steve, they tried to meet him at Pixar. “We were always happy when we had a Friday meeting with Steve,” Dreyfus recalls, “because Friday was the day he was at Pixar, and he was always in a good mood there.”
    老板的周五心灵休息日,哈哈哈

  • Week after week, year after year, Pixar provided Steve with a series of uncomplicated highs. He attended the Oscars regularly, as Pixar accumulated more and more honors. He loved showing friends preview reels from unfinished movies. “Steve was our biggest fan. Every time we did an internal reel, he would want a copy,” remembers Lasseter. “And I’d find out from people I knew, he’s showing it to every neighbor at his house. Hey, everybody—come see this! He loved it. He was like a kid.”

  • After delivering Monsters Inc. in 2002, Pixar was free to start negotiations with any studio for a new distribution pact. Catmull and Lasseter wanted to continue with Disney, since the company owned the rights to all the Pixar characters they’d created, and since Pixar’s films had done so well with Disney as distributor. Steve hoped Eisner would call to open negotiations, but Eisner chose to wait him out. He believed he would be able to negotiate a better deal after the release of Finding Nemo. He’d seen two previews at Pixar, and, as he wrote Disney’s board of directors, in a memo that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, “It’s okay, but nowhere near as good as their previous films.” Eisner, of course, was dead wrong. Finding Nemo became one of Pixar’s most beloved films and grossed $868 million around the world.
    难怪乔布斯称他Evil

  • Now Steve laid out a set of aggressive terms: in return for distributing Pixar movies, Disney would get 7.5 percent of the box-office gross—and nothing else. It would have no ownership of the new characters. No ownership of the films. No DVD rights. At the same time, Steve went public with his dissatisfaction with Disney, harping on the creative excellence of Pixar versus the forgettable disasters that were being released by Disney Animation: Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range.
    这个条款好侮辱迪斯尼!

  • The negotiations caused Catmull and Lasseter no end of distress. “He had stayed at the negotiating table with Disney largely for me,” says Lasseter, “because of how much I cared about the characters we had created.” As the months dragged on, things just seemed to get worse and worse. Steve believed that Eisner leaked his demands to the press in an effort to make him seem greedy. In early January 2004, things seemed to reach an endpoint: Jobs told Lasseter and Catmull that Pixar would no longer negotiate with Disney. He would not work with Eisner. Not now. Not ever. “It was the worst day of my life,” says Lasseter, who, besides facing the loss of all his old characters, was now facing the prospect that Cars, which he was just finishing up, would also belong to Disney, and to a CEO who had visited Pixar just twice since the original deal was signed. Lasseter cried as he, Catmull, and Jobs announced the impasse to the Pixar staff, and he swore that the company would never again make a movie without owning the characters.
    可恶,中途泄漏条款

  • Steve watched all this unfold with glee, especially since his threat to take Pixar elsewhere had helped undermine Eisner. He had never had anything against Disney, after all; it was just Eisner he couldn’t stand.

  • When Steve returned from his postoperative convalescence in the fall of 2004, he told Catmull and Lasseter that he wanted to find a way to ensure that Pixar would be in good shape even if he wasn’t around. It wasn’t that he feared an imminent death. But as he pondered a future in which he might have to further pare down his responsibilities, he knew that Pixar would survive without him more easily than Apple. It wouldn’t be easy. Steve always believed that he, Catmull, and Lasseter worked like a three-man version of the Beatles, complementing one another’s strengths while making up for individual weaknesses. The prospect of operating without Steve made Catmull nervous. “He wasn’t a [film] director, or anything like that. It wasn’t so much the creative side that would be hurt,” says Catmull. “But I’m not really a public CEO kind of person. It’s just not who I am. So if he goes, then we are actually missing a key component.”
    乔布斯判断还是很准确的,皮克斯没他还是能很好地生存,但苹果没有他会失去灵魂

  • Pixar seemed to have three options: find a new distributor and enter into an unproven relationship; build its own distribution arm, which would have entailed a massive investment of money and people to create a service that neither Catmull nor Lasseter really wanted to manage; or stay with Disney—which in fact was not an option so long as Eisner was CEO. The choices seemed even more dire given that the first two scenarios would mean that Disney, not Pixar, would own the characters from all the movies that Lasseter and his team had created under the old contract.
    皮克斯本质上是制作公司,和音乐唱片公司是一样的,他们擅长制作故事、发现优秀的创意,但分发或者广告不是他们的擅长
    而迪斯尼,不仅仅是制作,还非常善于分发、运营、商业化
    这其实和当今的游戏行业非常像,你需要制作出很好的游戏,还需要成功发行、运营、商业化,持续给它生命力

  • Disney had the theme parks, where Pixar characters lived on in new ways. It had the proven distribution network that had successfully launched every Pixar movie. And its name was still magical for Catmull and Lasseter, who grew up dreaming of joining the great animators from Disney’s fabled past. “I knew right from the very beginning that Steve’s long-term game plan was to sell to Disney,” says Catmull, even though Steve never overtly acknowledged this to him. “I never had any question about it. He was doing all this stuff, and playing these games, but I knew that was the long-term game plan.”

  • For three years, Steve displayed remarkable patience as he waited out Eisner. His public attitude put pressure on the Disney CEO, since his directors couldn’t see any way to secure Pixar with him still at the helm. But behind the scenes, Steve made sure that his public ire did nothing to harm the working relationship between the companies. “We were working hard to maintain a good relationship with Disney,” Catmull remembers. “When Eisner was going through his war with Roy Disney, a book was being written, [Disney War, by James B. Stewart, which was eventually published in January 2006]. Steve said, ‘Whatever we do, we don’t talk. We don’t know what’s going to happen, so they get nothing from us for the book.’ So there is nothing that came from us, because Steve didn’t want any ill will towards us at Disney.
    商业好残酷

  • “With things like this,” Catmull adds, “you connect a few dots and you figure, okay, I know what this means. And then the war finally comes to an end, and they bring in Bob Iger.”
    高级商业教程
    向乔布斯学习

  • One month after their first phone call, he called Steve with an idea: What if there were a way for consumers to have access to view all kinds of TV episodes, both current and past, on Macs or PCs or other kinds of devices? Couldn’t Apple do for the television industry what it had done for the music industry, and become, in essence, the retail outlet for TV? Iger said he knew the idea was fraught with complexity, but that he would love the opportunity to discuss it with Steve.
    原来串媒体播放这个点子,Iger也有贡献

  • At one point they considered having Disney sell back to Pixar the right to make sequels, in return for a 10 percent equity stake in Pixar. But Iger called it off. “It was a one-sided deal,” he remembers. “I’d get an announcement that the relationship is continuing, but the actual relationship wouldn’t have been good for Disney’s bottom line. We wouldn’t own the intellectual property, we’d have basically a silent ownership in Pixar, and we’d have done nothing to fix Disney Animation.”

  • A few weeks later, Steve visited Iger at Disney’s headquarters in Burbank. “I’ve got something to show you,” he told Iger, and pulled one of the first video iPods out of his pocket. “Would you really consider putting your TV shows on this?” he asked. “I’m up for that,” Iger replied without missing a beat. He secured the deal even faster than Steve had won Bill Gates’s investment in Apple back in 1997. Iger became CEO on October 1, and by October 5 Apple had a deal to sell downloads of Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Grey’s Anatomy episodes from the iTunes store for viewing on iPods. The two made the announcement on the stage of an Apple event a week later. “He was blown away that, one, I would even do this,” says Iger. “Two, that we could make a deal in five days without Disney lawyering it to death. Three, that I would have, I don’t know, the presence to go on his stage with Steve Jobs, even though Disney had been the mortal enemy in some ways.”

  • That October, Iger also asked his board of directors to allow him to explore the outright purchase of Pixar. As he recalls it, “This was my first meeting as CEO, and I hadn’t been the absolute choice of everyone in the room. I looked around and they were all a little taken aback. A third didn’t know what to say, a third were really intrigued, and a third thought this was ridiculous, but since it’s never going to happen anyway, let him go ahead.” A couple of days after the MacWorld event, Iger called Steve. “I said, ‘I’ve got a crazy idea. Maybe Disney should just buy Pixar outright.’ Steve paused, and then he said, ‘That might not be the craziest idea in the world. And anyway, I like crazy ideas. Let me think about it!’ He called me back a couple of days later.”

  • Iger and Steve were now speaking just about every day, and their relationship was building into one of mutual respect. Iger was pleasantly surprised by Steve’s honesty—his primary source on the Apple CEO had been Michael Eisner, who had painted a somewhat less than flattering picture. Steve, meanwhile, began to realize that Iger was smart, as well as straightforward, a combination that Steve appreciated, according to Catmull. Iger was a welcome change from Eisner, who Steve had found plenty smart but deeply political and evasive. At the very beginning of the negotiation, Iger simply laid his cards on the table. “My wife told me that the average tenure of a CEO is three and a half years,” he told Steve. “Mine will be less unless I fix Animation, and getting there goes through you. I’ve got a problem; you’ve got a solution. Let’s get this done.”
    好直接的对话

  • Steve asked Lasseter and Catmull to come visit him at his home in Palo Alto. When they showed up, he wasted no time dropping his bomb. “I’m thinking about selling Pixar to Disney,” he explained, before laying out the reasons he was now considering such a move. He revealed that, as part of the deal, the two of them would have to run Disney Animation as well as Pixar. “If you guys say no, we’re not going to do it. But the only thing I ask of you is that you get to know Bob Iger.”
    乔布斯作风还是挺挺兄弟的,卖NeXT是否让Avie能当老大,卖Pixar又能让Catmull当老大

  • “We sat and talked until the wee hours,” Lasseter remembers. “We talked about the importance of Disney Animation, the importance of bringing it back. I told him all I could see was the risk of dividing my time, and he said, ‘Well, I look at it the other way. I see it as giving you a bigger canvas because I think you can handle it.’

  • Just as Steve had, Lasseter and Catmull grew comfortable with Iger, and as they talked over the deal with Steve they came to see other benefits. Being part of Disney would mean that Pixar would be protected in ways it couldn’t as a stand-alone public company. “Our board,” says Lasseter, “did amazing due diligence. They told us that having one hit per year for a decade going forward was already built in to our valuation. And since the shareholders, whom the board represented, would always want growth, eventually that one-movie-per-year model was not going to cut it. We would have to start making television shows, or many more movies a year.” It did seem, he decided, that the best way for Pixar to cement into place the way of life it loved was to sell itself to the company it had battled for so long.

  • Iger did his own personal due diligence, of course. One day he flew up to Pixar, for a series of one-on-one meetings with the directors of Pixar’s next few movies. “We had only had one movie, Cars, left to distribute,” he recalls, “and people within Disney had spent months pooh-poohing the idea for the next movie, about a rat in a restaurant in Paris. So I go up to Emeryville, and for six or seven hours the directors pitch me every single upcoming movie. I see a couple of movies that they didn’t wind up making [one called Newt, and the other an unnamed Lee Unkrich project about dogs in a New York City apartment building]. I also see work in progress from Ratatouille, Up, Wall-E. Disney hadn’t seen any of this, and I went back to my guys—including Alan Braverman, the general counsel—and told them that it wasn’t even close. The richness of the creativity, the quality of the people, was so obvious. We had to do this deal.”

  • With Lasseter and Catmull feeling more comfortable, Steve homed in on the final details of a deal. He didn’t overreach by demanding an exorbitant premium over Pixar’s market value. Believing that Pixar might someday be purchased, investors had already overvalued Pixar with a very high market capitalization of around $5.9 billion. Steve and Iger settled on a price of $7.4 billion. They agreed that Pixar and Disney would get equal billing on every film. They even agreed to a side deal that Catmull and Lasseter had proposed: To ensure that Disney wouldn’t change the culture of Pixar, Iger agreed that his company would never change or cancel any of seventy-five items on a list of Pixar cultural touchstones that Lasseter drew up. The list protected the cereal bar in the dining room, the annual paper airplane contest, the employee car show, the right of animators to do whatever they like to their office spaces, and so on.
    公司估值,成绩

  • Iger knew that the price he had paid could not be justified by any conventional reasoning. “There wasn’t an analysis in the world that would make the deal pencil out,” he says. But he argued to the Disney board of directors that the deal had more potential than could be captured by the numbers: if Catmull and Lasseter could revive Disney Animation, and if both studios, rather than Pixar alone, were creating memorable characters, the ancillary revenue from theme parks, merchandise, and other divisions could soar. “All the way back to Walt’s time,” says Iger, “Disney has been most successful in terms of its bottom line and its reputation when animation has been strong.”

  • Iger also knew that many so-called experts thought he was nuts for inviting Steve Jobs to join the board of directors as Disney’s biggest shareholder. “Many people who were deeply involved in the process told me that bringing Steve in as the biggest shareholder was the dumbest thing I could do,” Iger remembers. “I won’t name names, but one of the investment bankers we used told me that. He said, ‘You’re a brand-new CEO who’s going to try to run Disney. Jobs is going to be in your life at a level that will drive you crazy. You don’t have the clout to fight that. If you want to run this company in an unfettered way, don’t do this.’ ” Iger trusted his gut. “Steve and I had talked about the fact that he was going to take all stock, and hold it. I knew there was some risk in letting him into the tent. On the other hand, I had a good relationship with him, and I felt I could benefit from having Steve Jobs around. And if for some reason it didn’t work out for me, Disney would still have Steve Jobs and that would be a great thing.”

  • Like many others, Bill Gates was astounded by what Steve had been able to negotiate. “When he has the upper hand, he’s good at using time,” says Gates. “You know, he would wait people out. Just look at how much of the resulting company ends up being owned by this fairly small—and yes, very high tech, very brilliant—animation studio. They end up owning a very substantial percentage of the entire Disney-ABC-ESPN entity. It’s owned by a little animation studio! That took three rounds of negotiations, and by the time the acquisition is being done, Disney is just flat on its back saying, ‘Take me.’ Because of the political dynamics of Disney at the time, they needed that win, and Steve knew they needed it.”
    把握时机

  • Selling Pixar to Disney was a singular triumph. Steve had gotten Lasseter and Catmull the corporate parent they needed for their unique institution to thrive for decades. He’d even put the two of them in a position to revive the greatest animation studio of all time, Disney. And he’d done all this by developing, in the space of less than a year, a trusting relationship, in fact a friendship, with the man who’d been the go-to executive for one of the two people he most detested. Compare this with the wary antipathy Steve displayed during the NeXT/IBM negotiations, and you realize just how much Steve had changed over the intervening years.
    如果乔布斯自己不生病,他应该不会愿意卖掉迪斯尼

  • He says, “I’m telling you because I’m giving you a chance to back out of the deal.”
    So I look at my watch, and we’ve got thirty minutes. In thirty minutes we’re going to make this announcement. We’ve got television crews, we’ve got the board votes, we’ve got investment bankers. The wheels are turning. And I’m thinking, We’re in this post Sarbanes-Oxley world, and Enron, and fiduciary responsibility, and he is going to be our largest shareholder, and I’m now being asked to bury a secret. He told me only two people know this. Laurene and his doctor. He told me, “My kids don’t know. Not even the Apple board knows. Nobody knows, and you can’t tell anybody.”

  • I have to make a decision sitting on this bench with him whether I can even go through with this deal. I don’t even know. So I took a chance, and I said, “You’re our largest shareholder, but I don’t think that makes this matter. You’re not material to this deal. We’re buying Pixar, we’re not buying you. We’re going to hype the fact that you become the largest shareholder, but that’s not how you value the deal. You value the deal on the assets of Pixar.”

  • The two men walked back into the building, the one that Catmull and Lasseter would name the Steve Jobs Building after his death. Iger had just sworn himself to secrecy, but he felt he had to tell Braverman. He felt he needed a second opinion. Braverman quickly agreed that Disney could go ahead with the deal. Steve went off to find Lasseter and Catmull and brought them into his office. He put his arms around the two of them. As Catmull explains, “He looked at us and said, ‘Are you guys good with this? If you say no, I’ll send them away right now.’ And we both said we were okay, and Steve just started weeping. We just held each other for the longest time. He loved this company.”
    乔布斯可能是因为自己没法更长久陪伴这家公司,而哭泣吧

  • “The problem was that Ed and I had gone through this three-month journey of getting to know Bob Iger, doing our due diligence, and eventually realizing this was the right decision to do,” Lasseter recalls. “But everybody else in the company was in the same place we had been when Steve first mentioned the idea to us, of ‘How can you do this?’ Standing up in front of them in that moment was very hard. This gasp went through the crowd, like, ‘Oh my God.’ I’ll never forget [A Bug’s Life producer] Katherine Sarafian sitting down right in the front, just weeping when Steve said it.”

  • Before the deal had been announced, Steve had talked to Laurene about revealing his secret to Iger. They both felt that it was the right thing to do, given the magnitude of the sale. Their discussions had revolved around a single question: Could Steve really trust Iger to keep the secret? Steve told her they could. “I love that guy,” he told Laurene.

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产品随想 | 陪读《乔布斯传》:1-17章

乔布斯经典照片集 坐在麗莎電腦旁。他說:「毕加索曾說:「好的藝術家懂得模仿,佛大的藝術家善於偷取。」因此,窃取偉大的點子沒有什麼好羞耻的。 與蓋茲在電話中達成協議:「比爾,謝謝你支持蘋果。因為你的支持,世界將變得更美好。」 1997年蘋果在波士頓舉行的麥金塔世界大會,蓋茲透過衛星連線在巨大的螢幕上出現。質伯斯說:「我真是笨死了,竟然讓蓋兹以這種方式現身。他讓我看起來好沙小。」 ──时刻自省 前言 The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. 只有那些瘋狂到以為自己可以改變世界的人, 才能改變這個世界。 這麼些年來,賈伯斯說起話來的認真與專注態度,著實打動不少人。我們一直保持連絡,即使在他被逐出蘋果之後,我們還有來往。每次他有新產品要推出時,像 NeXT 電腦或皮克斯 (Pixar)的電影,他就會來找我。他常帶我去曼哈頓下城一家壽司店用餐,講起他的產品,渾身散發出光和熱,眉飛色舞的說這是他登峰造極之作。我喜歡這個人。 ──对自己产品深深的爱 他的堅持教我疑惑。人人都知道賈伯斯不道餘力捍衛隱私, 而且我不知道他是否看過我寫的任何一本傳記。我還是不敢立刻答應,只說或許再等等。然而到了 2009年,我接到他太太蘿琳. 鮑威爾打來的電話。她直截了當說:「如果你還想為史帝夫寫傳,最好趕快動筆。」這是他第二次因病向公司請長假。我坦言他早在2004 年得知自己罹患胰臟癌的時候就曾主動邀我寫傳,但我當時對他罹癌的事一無所知。蘿琳解釋說,他們盡量保密,因此當時根本沒幾個人知道。他是在動手術的前夕打電話給我的。 ──和Make Something Wonderful对照起来看 他還說,自從他回到蘋果重新掌權,這十二年來是他創造新產品的高峰期,但他還有更重要的目標,也就是效法惠普的惠立和普克(David Packard),締造一家創新動力無限的公司,進而超越惠普。 ──苹果公司才是乔布斯最得意的产品 他說:「我一直認為,自己是個偏向人文的孩子,但我也喜歡電子的東西。後來,我讀到寶麗來(Polaroid)創辦人蘭德 (Edwin Land)曾說過,一個人能站在人文和科學的交會口,兼容贯通,才是真正的人才。在那當下,我决定要當這樣的人。」他似乎在暗示我,這可以做為傳...

产品随想 | 周刊 第85期:e-Residency与数字游民

  David Shambaugh   https://www.google.com/search?q=David+Shambaugh 中国问题研究专家,著作极多 郭玉闪   https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/郭玉闪?useskin=vector 中国公共知识分子 我只想好好观影   github.com/BetterWorld-Liuser/autoMovies 刘煜辉:中国资本市场灵魂出窍 最有活力的公司几乎不在A股   https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/marketresearch/2017-06-23/doc-ifyhmtek7705574.shtml 回看17年的专家讲话,还是挺有水平的,挺多都认可 纽约文化沙龙   https://www.youtube.com/@user-cu2hl5tf6y/videos 视频质量出奇的高,推荐 透视中国政治by吴国光、程晓农 备忘下,貌似评价挺好的一本书 CAPI China Chair Wu Guoguang (吴国光 / 吳國光)   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIt1szHhnm_Hso3jGUbfGpnEAbsPOuEVV 因为热爱中国,我们越要看懂中国 AI Canon   https://a16z.com/2023/05/25/ai-canon/ in this post, we’re sharing a curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI. We call it the “AI Canon” because these papers, blog posts, courses, and guides have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years. 希望中国的投資機構,也能有更多的分享與輸出,提升整個社會的認知 Cantonese Font 粵語字體   https://visual-fonts.com/zh/...

Steve Jobs at 44, By Michael Krantz, 1999

Differences and Similarities Between Apple and Pixar Apple turns out many products--a dozen a year; if you count all the minor ones, probably a hundred. Pixar is striving to turn out one a year. But the converse of that is that Pixar's products will still be used fifty years from now, whereas I don't think you'll be using any product Apple brings to market this year fifty years from now. Pixar is making art for the ages. Kids will be watching Toy Story in the future. And Apple is much more of a constant race to continually improve things and stay ahead of the competition.  His Role At Pixar At Pixar my job is to help build the studio and recruit people and help create a situation where they can do the best work of their lives. And to some degree it's the same at Apple. But at Pixar, I don't direct the movies, whereas at Apple probably, if I had to pick a role out of a film production, I'd be the director. So it...

2018各行业应届生薪资不完全样本往期汇总-职场红领巾

文章来源自职场红领巾公众号2018.4.21日推送,在此表示感谢 产品岗 百度商业产品 14K*14 拼多多产品管培 12K*14 今日头条产品 16K*18 头条PM整个Package接近300K/年 美团产品Offer 14K*16 base上海 百度产品研究生 11.5K*14.6 base 上海 京东产品17K*13 百度产品 220K/年 网易 产品培训生 硕士 15K*18 SP base杭州 不知名互联网公司校招PM 12K*15 base北京 技术岗 微软 软件工程师 本科 260K/年 蚂蚁金服算法工程师 20K*16 拼多多开发本科400K/年 商汤科技本科技术岗 14K/月 税前 海康威视研究院 算法工程师 220K/年 微信算法岗 SP 360K/年 的package 今日头条 程序员 研究生 10K/月 base北京 滴滴程序员 16K*16 亚马逊 小四年经验 研发 50K/月 Facebook应届毕业生  软件开发工程师   打包 115k$/年(30%-40%税) base湾区 京东算法 普通Offer 234K/年 运营岗 滴滴北京运营岗 硕士 12K*15 奖金另算 网易游戏运营 150K/年 左右 网易运营 8K*13(奖金0~3个月) 网易新闻运营8K/月 腾讯游戏运营 本科6K/月 上海京东时尚本科8K/月 京东运营岗 11K/月 base北京亦庄总部 今日头条 渠道营销运营 6K/月(加房补) 网易考拉 活动运营 13K*16 OFO城市运营管培13K*14 爱范儿运营 8K/月 滴滴长三角某二线城市运营管培生 薪资 7.6K*13 +每个月40%绩效 货车帮 数据运营 12K/月 卡宾电商 管培 10K/月 含浮动绩效 曹操专车 运营管培生  加各种补贴税前5.4K/月  base杭州 京东金融海龟回来8K/月 北京蓝港互动...

巴菲特致股东信-1975年

 笔记: 华盛顿邮报已成为伯克希尔第一重仓股 翻译: 雪球:https://xueqiu.com/6217262310/131409324 备份:https://archive.ph/4hgK3 原文: To the Stockholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: Last year, when discussing the prospects for 1975, we stated “the outlook for 1975 is not encouraging.” This forecast proved to be distressingly accurate. Our operating earnings for 1975 were $6,713,592, or $6.85 per share, producing a return on beginning shareholders ’ equity of 7.6%. This is the lowest return on equity experienced since 1967. Furthermore, as explained later in this letter, a large segment of these earnings resulted from Federal income tax refunds which will not be available to assist performance in 1976. On balance, however, current trends indicate a somewhat brighter 1976. Operations and prospects will be discussed in greater detail below, under specific industry titles. Our expectation is that significantly better results in textiles, earnings added from recent acquisitio...

Interview with Steve Jobs, WGBH, 1990

Interviewer: what is it about this machine? Why is this machine so interesting? Why has it been so influential? Jobs: Ah ahm, I'll give you my point of view on it. I remember reading a magazine article a long time ago ah when I was ah twelve years ago maybe, in I think it was Scientific American . I'm not sure. And the article ahm proposed to measure the efficiency of locomotion for ah lots of species on planet earth to see which species was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B. Ah and they measured the kilocalories that each one expended. So ah they ranked them all and I remember that ahm...ah the Condor, Condor was the most efficient at [CLEARS THROAT] getting from point A to point B. And humankind, the crown of creation came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down...

Steve Jobs: Rolling Stone’s 2003 Interview

  When Steve Jobs cruises into the airy reception area on the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, California, on a recent morning, nobody pays much attention to him, even though he’s the company’s CEO. He’s wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and running shoes. Tall and a little gawky, Jobs has a fast, loping walk, like a wolf in a hurry. These days Jobs seems eager to distance himself from his barefoot youth – who was that crazy kid who once called the computer “a bicycle for the mind”? – and driven to prove himself as a clear-thinking Silicon Valley capitalist. Jobs punches the elevator button to the fourth floor, where his small office is located. For a man who is as responsible as anyone for the wonder and chaos of Silicon Valley, Jobs’ view of it all is surprisingly modest: shrubby treetops extending out toward San Francisco Bay, the distant whoosh of the freeway below. There is nothing modest, however, about Apple’s recent accomplishments. In the past few months,...

产品随想 | 周刊 第67期:静水铭室

Products Design Scenes #77   https://walling.app/TGE6qnCacxmwEV3d2lg2/design-scenes-77efbc88e4bbaeefbc89 非常不错的产品/设计周报 静水铭室   https://liuliu.me/ 静水可铭,丰山须镂。 - Silent Water and Curved Mountain 不错的中英博客 Classic HCI Demos   https://jackrusher.com/classic-ux/ A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002. 经典老演示Demo health-code-index   https://github.com/ilovexjp/health-code-index 健康码模拟 - 索引 EnergyStar   https://github.com/imbushuo/EnergyStar EnergyStar is a terrible* Windows application that leverages Windows EcoQoS API to throttle any inactive user process and background applications to improve system thermal and battery life, similar to the process management strategy on modern Apple macOS releases. 中共政治精英数据库   https://chinadatalab.ucsd.edu/elites/ Victor Shih/史宗瀚维护的一个履历库 Tribler   https://github.com/Tribler/tribler Privacy enhanced BitTorrent client with P2P content discovery 在美国执法区会有帮助 nuclear   https://github....

Steve Jobs: `There's Sanity Returning', 1998

Nobody can doubt the charisma of Steven P. Jobs. The interim CEO of Apple Computer Inc., who returned to the company last July after his ignominious 1985 ouster, has brought back his legendary vision, impatience, and infectious passion for the Macintosh. Jobs spoke to Business Week Correspondent Andy Reinhardt in Apple's stark, fourth-floor boardroom, just after the company rolled out its new software strategy on May 11. Note: This is an extended, online-only version of the Q&A that appears in the May 25, 1998, issue of Business Week. Q: Now that you've introduced the new, bold-looking iMac, are you going to do some radically different products? A: There's a lot of talk about such things -- about handhelds, set-top boxes. A lot of computer companies have been searching for a consumer product. My view is that the personal computer has been the most successful consumer product of the last 10 years. What we have to do, what the industry stopp...