What the world did see was an effective and visionary leader at the height of his powers. These were complicated years for Apple, but Steve handled almost every challenge in exactly the manner he wanted. He had fallen into leadership at such a young age, but he was comfortable in that role now, and justifiably sure of his capacity to guide Apple’s tens of thousands of employees to the goals he set for them. During these years, he would ensure the company’s continued success in personal computers by engineering a deft switch to a new kind of microprocessor; ruthlessly and successfully managing some major transitions in his executive team; and optimizing and building upon the efficiency and ambition of the company’s product development “treadmill,” as Tim Cook describes it. This is also when he delivered what is likely to be remembered as the most notable product of his life, the iPhone, and then improved even that by pivoting once again into a strategy he personally had not wanted to pursue, thereby transforming the application software business in an almost Gatesian fashion.
These are the years when he got almost everything right. They are also the years that show most completely how he had changed, and that manifest the prolifically creative person and the genuine business genius he had become. “I am who I am,” Steve liked to say. This was most true during the last seven years of his life.
我就是我，谁有如此这般的勇气和胆量？ I am who I amAFTER HIS FORAY into music, Steve knew that even he had underestimated the potential of a digital hub of Apple products linked to a computer. As the world of computers subsumed the world of consumer electronics, Apple steadily improved the experience of enjoying and managing music, photos, and videos on personal electronic devices, making the various technologies coherent in a way that no other company came close to matching. Apple promised to provide a simple and yet magical (to use one of Steve’s favorite adjectives) encounter with technology at every stage, as opposed to the disjointed and geeky mess that served mainly to confuse consumers when they tried to coordinate products from different companies. Purchasing music or computers from Apple online was almost too easy, while shopping in the company’s gleaming glass emporiums, staffed with all those smart young men and women and the whiz kids at the Genius Bar, could be a form of entertainment in itself. Apple was even starting to do a pretty good job of tying it all together via Wi-Fi, although this was the trickiest link in the continuum. Steve embraced the marketing adage that every single moment a consumer encounters a brand—whether as a buyer, a user, a store visitor, a passerby seeing a billboard, or someone simply watching an ad on TV—is an experience that adds either credits or debits to the brand’s “account” in his imagination. The “Apple experience” was an unprecedented merger of marketing and technology excellence that made customers want to come back for more.
THE FIRST TIME Steve ever railed on to me about “the stupid carriers” was back in 1997. That’s how long he had been thinking about a phone, even though he swore again and again that he’d never do business with “those bozos.” I once said to him, “Steve, methinks you doth protest too much! You sure seem to be thinking about this a lot.” He didn’t laugh. He just got angrier. “Yeah, I do think a lot about what a crock of shit it is,” he ranted, “that our only choice if we want to get into the phone handset business is to work with one of the goddamn telecom carriers.” When Steve agreed to launch the ROKR, Motorola was the one that dealt primarily with the carriers. The disappointing experience reinforced Steve’s belief that the carriers always stiffed handset makers. Nevertheless, the carriers held the keys to a market he couldn’t ignore. By 2004, worldwide unit sales of cellphone handsets already had topped 500 million units a year, dwarfing unit sales of PCs and iPods and PDAs combined. And they were growing.
所以看似是2005年才启动iPhone的开发，但其实脑海里的思考，远在1997年之前就已经开始Cue and Jobs knew there was one big obstacle to negotiating a successful deal: Steve wanted Apple to have complete control over the handset. Since the phone was also going to be a top-notch iPod, and an Internet client, and a serious computing device, the user experience would be critical to its success. The multi-touch interface on the iPhone would be utterly different from anything consumers had experienced before. Furthermore, if websites were going to display at a big enough size for consumers young and old, the screen would have to take up virtually the entire front surface of the phone. All of this was doable, Steve thought—but only if the carriers kept their hands off his design. Finally, Steve knew the team would go through a few designs before getting it perfect; Apple needed the freedom to experiment without anyone second-guessing its engineers. So any carrier that committed to a deal would have to do so without knowing all of the specifics of what kind of phone Apple would finally deliver.
“We actually knew Verizon better than we knew ATT Wireless in 2004. In 2006, after SBC acquired ATT.) “We knew Verizon because we had consulted them when we did the deal with Motorola for the ROKR, even though they didn’t end up selling the phone. When we went back to them to talk about our own phone, they were pretty tough. They thought cellular was their playground. Sort of like, ‘You’re gonna play our game by our rules.’ And they were pretty powerful. So when you looked at what we wanted to do, it didn’t match well, because they said, ‘Whaddya mean, you’re gonna control the phone’s UI?’ ”
ATT],” says Cue, “we spent four hours with Ralph de la Vega and Glenn Lurie in a room in the Four Seasons. And right off we really liked them. You could tell they were hungrier and wanted to show what they were capable of. So we started a relationship that same day.”
Steve regaled the ATT had to look forward to, he explained—being the carrier for all these kinds of new activities. And Steve had learned something else along the way, he told them. He knew that once you made this kind of powerful technology available to the world, it would take off in ways you couldn’t predict, in ways that even he couldn’t predict. Surely those developments, too, would drive usage of the AT&T wireless network.
好厉害的Vision
而且如此早期就看到的YouTube的机会点，可能真的只有Gates的Vision，能够和乔布斯相比This was why Steve had one other demand above and beyond having total control of the design and manufacture and sales price of the phone. If Apple’s phone was going to be an instrument that drove consumption of wireless data, Steve felt that his company also should be compensated for bringing the carrier the extra business. So if AT&T wanted the right to be the initial, exclusive carrier for the iPhone, it would have to pay Apple a sales commission for the added data traffic the iPhone would inevitably foster. In other words, Steve wanted a piece of the carrier’s action. After all, Apple kept 30 percent of the take on anything sold in the iTunes Music Store. So why not do the same thing with phone data carriage fees?
哇，好厉害的商业判断技巧！！！All in all, his demands were every bit as bold as the vision he painted. But ATT gave Apple unprecedented freedom to produce, almost sight unseen, whatever phone Steve and his wizards wanted to make. It allowed Apple to set the price for the new phones, which AT&T could not change or discount. And, last but not least, the Cupertino company would receive up to about 10 percent of the data carriage revenues a user generated each month, for the duration of that customer’s iPhone service contract. These were terms no handset maker had ever received. Never had a carrier shared its fees with a telephone manufacturer.
STEVE WAS DEEPLY focused during these years. He had pared his life down so that he could be as expansive as possible in very specific aspects of his work. The dividing lines were clear. Family mattered. A small group of friends mattered. Work mattered, and the people who mattered most at work were the ones who could abet, rather than stifle, his single-minded pursuit of what he defined as the company’s mission. Nothing else mattered.
真正专注在重要的事情与东西上“When we visited Pixar with the first model of the iMac, it was a revelation, because I didn’t know Steve very well, even then,” says Jony. “But to hear his introduction of me to the whole of Pixar, I realized that he really understood what I was trying to achieve at an emotional level. At some level, he knew what I was trying to articulate.”
As Steve spoke, it became clear to Jony that he had an even more sophisticated and intuitive sense than Jony did of why the unusual new design made sense. This was before the product had been announced or shown to anyone else outside Apple. “He could do that,” Ive continues. “He could refine and describe ideas so much better than anyone else could. I think very quickly he understood that I had a specific proficiency in terms of having good taste and understanding of aesthetics and form. But one of my problems is that I’m not always as articulate as I would like to be. I can feel things intuitively, and Steve could sense the full meaning of what I was getting at. So I didn’t have to justify it explicitly. And then what would happen was I would then see him articulate those ideas but in a way that I was completely incapable of doing. And that’s what was so amazing. I learned, I got better at it, but obviously I was never ever in his league.”
But integrating these faster cycles into the company’s routine was a deeply satisfying challenge, Jony contends. “I’ve always thought there are a number of things that you have achieved at the end of a project,” he says. “There’s the object, the actual product itself, and then there’s all that you learned. What you learned is as tangible as the product itself, but much more valuable because that’s your future. You can see where that goes and demand more of yourself, being so unreasonable in what you expect of yourself and what we expect of each other, that it yields these even more amazing results, not just in the product but in what you’ve learned.”
过程本身也是一种收获，并且这种收获是可以持续到将来的Ive believes that the lessons gained from each successive product development cycle fueled Steve’s unquenchable restlessness. Each product somehow fell short, which meant that the next version not only could be better but had to be better. Looking at their work this way, Steve turned the incremental development of products into an ongoing and impossible quest for perfection. What got left out of each product merely served as the basis for the next, improved edition. Steve always wanted to look forward, and the completion of a device was just one more call to the future.
禅宗的思想Ive, like Cook and Laurene, believes Steve came back from his 2004 cancer operation more focused than ever. “I remember walking and us both being in tears very, very early on, wondering whether he would see Reed graduate,” he says. “At one level there was a daily ‘What did they say? What did the tests show?’ conversation.” But Ive doesn’t think cancer is what motivated Steve during the incredibly productive end of his life. “I think it’s hard to maintain a singular focus in reaction to an illness that lasts many, many years,” he continues. “There were other things beside his illness that motivated him to focus more intensely on his work. Things like selling product in very high volume for the first time in the company’s history. I’m talking about selling tens or hundreds of millions of units of a single product. That was a huge change for Apple.
“I remember a conversation in which we talked about how do we define our metrics for feeling like we have really succeeded? We both agreed clearly it’s not about share price. Is it about number of computers we sell? No, because that would still suggest that Windows was more successful. Once again, it all came back to whether we felt really proud of what we collectively had designed and built. Were we proud of that?
“There was definitely pride, in that the numbers reflected that we were doing good work. But also I think Steve felt a vindication. This is important. It wasn’t a vindication of ‘I’m right’ or ‘I told you so.’ It was a vindication that restored his sense of faith in humanity. Given the choice, people do discern and value quality more than we give them credit for. That was a really big deal for all of us because it actually made you feel very connected to the whole world and all of humanity, and not like you’re marginalized and just making a niche product.
“There were many things that overlapped or aligned to make Steve much more sharply focused than before,” he concludes. “One was his illness, but one was an unprecedented momentum as a business that none of us had ever felt before. Feeling that momentum was as important as his illness to his creativity and success, because the excitement was still fresh.”
果然还是Jony更加了解乔布斯，说出来的感受，非常非常贴切By the time the two got around to focusing on the iPhone, Steve had become closer to Jony than anyone he had ever worked with. “The bond became so strong between us,” says Ive. “We could just be honest and straightforward and not have to articulate precisely why this is a good idea or why this is a valuable idea. And we also were honest enough to be able to say ‘Nah, that’s a terrible idea,’ without worrying about each other’s feelings so much.”
The truth was simpler than that. Steve prioritized ruthlessly, in just about every aspect of his life. To maintain his focus, Steve made clear decisions about what mattered and what didn’t. His time and friendship and discussions with Jony mattered, even at the expense of other relationships. It proved to be a relationship that was as expansive as Steve’s ambition.
生命里的优先级管理，其实就是自己的时间花费，如何度过自己的一生，选择和谁度过自己的一生“The main reason we were close and worked in the way we did was that it was a collaboration that was based on more than just the traditional view of design,” Ive says. “We both perceived objects in our environment, and people, and organizational structures intuitively in the same way. Beauty can be conceptual, it can be symbolic, it can stand as testament to progress and what humankind has managed to achieve in the last fifteen years. In that sense, it could represent progress, or it could be something as trivial as the machined face on a screw. That’s why we got on well, ’cause we both thought that way. If my contribution was simply to the shapes of things, we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. It makes no sense that the CEO of a company this size would spend nearly every lunchtime and big chunks of the afternoon with somebody who just was preoccupied with form.
“Honestly, some of the loveliest, strongest, most precious memories are those of talking at a level that was very abstract. He and I could talk philosophically about aspects of design in ways we wouldn’t with other people. I would get self-conscious if I had to talk in such philosophical terms before a group of engineers, who are brilliantly creative, but when you go on and on about the integrity and meaning of what they are building, well, that’s just not their focus. There were times when Steve and I would talk about these things and I could see in people’s eyes that they’re thinking, Oh, there they go again.
“But then we also talked about the very particular. I would say to him ‘Look. This is how we’re designing this bracket.’ Then I’d watch him take his glasses off, because he couldn’t see for shit, and I’d watch him just enjoy the beauty of all that’s inside. Even things like those special screws.”
旁人确实听不懂，哈哈哈
过于真实Steve had never liked to “pre-introduce” a product in this way (with the exception of major operating system upgrades). There was always the possibility that the software or the screen or something else might wig out during the demo, and he also worried about tipping his hand too early in a highly competitive business. But Steve had three good reasons for pre-announcing the iPhone. The first was that he had to finally show AT&T something. The company had seen nothing for years—no mock-ups, no prototypes—and it had a clause in its deal that allowed it to pull out if Apple failed to meet certain development milestones. That was unlikely to happen, but he couldn’t take any chances. Second, as Lee Clow observed, Steve was P. T. Barnum incarnate. He loved the element of surprise when he debuted a product. While Apple had remained poker-faced on the subject of a phone for nearly three years, he wasn’t sure he could preserve a cone of silence for another few months. The iPhone would need to be tested by employees out in the real world, and sooner or later one would be spotted. He preferred to control the message. Finally, the January MacWorld confab was by far the best showcase for Steve; not only did he own the forum, but his announcement would upstage anything coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where other handset makers would be showing off their wares. He wanted to steal their headlines.
原来有这么多的考量
1）给ATT看到干货； 2）可能无法再保密更久，还不如自己演示；3）在自己的舞台上抢别人的头条；4）非常渴望赶紧展示给世界There was one other reason to make the announcement early, on the very best stage available: Steve and his team knew, in their bones, that the iPhone was something truly special. They were eager to show the world. Eddy Cue recalls: “iPhone was the culmination of everything for Steve, and of everything I had learned. It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, ‘In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.’ Because you could feel it. You just knew that this was huge.”
Why wasn’t Apple allowing software developers to build applications for the iPhone? After all, it was as powerful a computing device as an early Mac or PC, wasn’t it? I mentioned that Google Maps and the YouTube video-viewing app both demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to “open up” the iPhone to third-party software developers. “We had to help them build those apps, you know,” Steve said. “So we know what went into them.” Then he said he was concerned about how third-party apps could be vetted and policed, to make sure there would be no chance of software viruses infecting the phones. “We want to understand better how apps affect the network, too, before we throw things wide open,” he added. “We don’t want to create a monster.” He also suggested that if developers really wanted to create custom applications for the device, they could always design special websites that would perform the computing tasks on Web servers, with the phone acting simply as a terminal.
John Doerr had never had direct business dealings with Apple, but he knew all the main players there and was tapped into everything in Silicon Valley. Steve had first showed him an iPhone several months before they shipped. Doerr immediately asked Steve the very same question: Why wasn’t he allowing third-party applications? “At the end of that conversation, I said, ‘Look, I disagree with you,’ ” Doerr recalls. “ ‘And if you ever do decide you want to put applications on it, I’d like to form a fund to encourage people to build them. I think there’s a big opportunity there.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll call you back if we change our mind.’ ”
优秀的投资人，总是非常敏锐，能一眼看到机会Apple and AT&T sold about 1.5 million units in the first quarter the iPhone was on sale, but they probably could have sold many more. Between its cellular woes and the absence of more applications like the ones supplied by Apple and Google, the iPhone proved to be a tougher sell than many would have imagined. People had expected something that would support video games and reference books and fancy calculators and word processors and financial spreadsheets right out of the box. The phone they got couldn’t yet do that.
In the fall of 2007, Doerr got a phone call. “From out of the blue, Steve said, ‘I think we should talk. Come on down to Cupertino and tell me about this fund idea that you have.’ So I went to work, and we hastily pulled some materials together and proposed something we called the iFund. I told him we’d commit fifty million dollars to it. Scott Forstall, the Apple guy then in charge of the iPhone operating system, was in the meeting. He said, ‘Come on, John, fifty million dollars? Surely, you could do a hundred.’ So we bumped it up to one hundred million.”
原来机会是这么来的In November, just over four months after shipping its first iPhone, Apple revealed that it would make available a software development kit for anyone who wanted to develop apps. “That’s when we knew Steve had finally come to see the light,” Gassée says. “Suddenly, that was all anyone was talking about in the Valley and in the VC community. Hundreds of little guys signed up, and the race was on. Then they announced the App Store. And then they released the iPhone 3G [the second version, which shipped in July 2008, and had better wireless and a faster microprocessor]. It was only then that the iPhone was truly finished, that it had all its basics, all its organs. It needed to grow, to muscle up, but it was complete as a child is complete.”
令人振奋的16年，2006-2023！
AI时代，我相信会有更多的机会点！IN THE EIGHT years since that January 2007 MacWorld, Apple has sold more than a half billion iPhones. It is the most successful, most profitable consumer electronics product ever, by just about any measure—units sold, dollars of profit generated, number of global carriers that sell it, the number of apps written for it. When you think of it, who sells a half billion of anything costing hundreds of dollars? Sure, Procter & Gamble sells billions of tubes of toothpaste and Gillette sells billions of razor blades. But those don’t come with two-year service contracts that can effectively drive the price of ownership to nearly $1,000 over the life of the product.
确实，想清楚这一点后，再去思考为什么巴菲特持有苹果股票，也就没那么奇怪了Google understood this, and within eighteen months developed Android, a free knockoff of the iPhone’s operating system software that powered phones made by the likes of Samsung, LG, HTC, and later an upstart Chinese handset maker named Xiaomi.
原来Google在18个月后，就开发出了Android，行动力非常高Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape who has become a highly successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, calls the introduction of the iPhone a seminal event that “flipped the polarity” of what makes Silicon Valley go. Once upon a time, wealthy entities like the military and big corporations drove technological change. They were the only ones who could afford machines with leading-edge components. No more. Now it’s consumers like you and me who lead the way. “The scale economics are gigantic, since these are being sold in such volume,” says Andreessen, whose shaved head looks like an artillery shell, and who talks like a machine gun spraying clipped, staccato bursts of forward-thinking analysis. “We’re talking eventually billions of these things. As a result of that, the smartphone supply chain is becoming the supply chain for the entire computing industry. So the components going into the iPhone [like Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and especially the cellular microprocessors based on a design by ARM Holdings, a British firm] are going to take over computing. By end of decade, even servers will be ARM-based, because the scale economics will be so great that anything else will not be able to compete.”
原来Marc Andreessen在这么多年前，就已经能够看到ARM可能因为规模经济，而最终会替代Intel，成为服务器端的霸主In other words, Steve had just turned the computer industry on its head. The iPhone marked the emergence of a new form of computing that was more intimate than what had been called personal computing. “My theory about the turnaround of Apple is that what they have accomplished is relatively underappreciated,” says Andreessen. “Mac, iPhone, and iPad are all Unix supercomputers packaged into a consumer form factor. That’s basically what they did. That’s the part that nobody talks about, because everybody’s so design-obsessed.” He leans forward to drive home his point. “That iPhone sitting in your pocket is the exact equivalent of a Cray XMP supercomputer from twenty years ago that used to cost ten million dollars. It’s got the same operating system software, the same processing speed, the same data storage, compressed down to a six-hundred-dollar device. That is the breakthrough Steve achieved. That’s what these phones really are!”
好厉害的Insight
我非常认同Marc Andreessen，许多人认为苹果厉害在硬件设计，但其实皇冠在操作系统
1，公司是否能正面推动经济、社会或者文化发 展？ 如果做不到，BG可能就不会再往下看了。比如军火、赌博类公司再便宜，BG不会去看。 2，公司销售额在5年之内能否翻倍？ 为什么要讨论销售额？因为BG关注公司成长，销售额是比较简单直观的指标，而利润可有一些方法调节。所以，BG主要先关注销售额，再看现金流。 3，公司5年之后会怎么样？ 这是未来5到10年或者5到15年的中间维度，一是看公司的成长空间究竟还有多大，二是考虑5年之后，公司的短期估值会不会下降，会不会变得成熟。 4，公司的竞争优势到底是什么？随着时间会变 强还是变弱？ BG认为，如果公司的竞争优势是不断变弱的，将来在更远期挣回现金流的可能性就更低了。 5，公司是否有非常独特的文化？文化是否能够进化？ 毕竟要投资这么长时间，对创始人和公司管理文化是非常关注的。特别喜欢创始人领导的公司，而不是说创始人什么都不干，创始人在做房地产，找了一些人在做新公司，要尽量避免这样的公司。 谈到进化在BG看来，大部分公司都会有大公司病，需要看它怎么能维持比较灵活的管理，变大之后还能够保持非常快速的成长，比如亚马逊的day one文化（注：就是始终处在 创业启动状态，充满迷茫和压力，但是充满创造力和颠覆思想 ）。 6，公司过去的回报率怎么样？ 一方面是考虑到公司的ROE（净资产收益率），二是考虑公司的Margins（利润），看它的过去是不是值得投资，如果每年ROE都不到10个点，可能长期来看也没什么意思。 7，ROE能不能随着时间增长？ 有些公司一开始没有盈利，一直在烧钱，5年之后说不定ROE会到20%或者更高，它是一个动态过程。这样的公司BG也会投资，包括一些早期项目，很多公司都是没有盈利的。 8，公司怎么分配资本？ 资本现金流无非就是5种方法：再投资、收购、还债、分红、回购股份，要看公司在某个阶段的资本分配是不是最优的。 如果公司明明可以发展更多，结果乱分红了；或者是明明到了特别成熟的时候，还不愿意分红，都是错误的分配资本。 9，公司怎样才能长成5倍？ BG关注的是怎样，而不是能不能。这会强迫BG每个人去设想一些未来的可能性，包括公司现在的底层架构能不能够延伸到更多的业务。 比如，早期的亚马逊或者是阿里，连一个概念都没有，BG会考虑这个公司有没有这种机遇，以后去扩展到可触及的市场。 10，市场对公司有哪些误解，哪些事...