《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 16 Blind Spots, Grudges, and Sharp Elbows

• Steve could be pretty thin-skinned when someone prominent criticized the aesthetics of his products. He took great umbrage that Neil would, as Steve put it, “pop off in public like that without coming to talk to us about his technical concerns first.” From that point on he had rebuffed all of Neil’s attempts to smoke the peace pipe.
  有趣

• He had blind spots, grating behavioral habits, and a tendency to give in to emotional impulse that persisted his entire life. These characteristics are often used to make the case that Steve was an “asshole” or a “jerk,” or perhaps simply “binary”—that odd adjective often used to convey the sense that he was half asshole/half genius from birth to death. These aren’t useful, interesting, or enlightening descriptions. What’s more illuminating is to take a look at the specific ways in which Steve failed to do an effective job of tempering some of his weaknesses and antisocial traits, and to consider how, when, and why some of them continued to flare up even during the years of his greatest effectiveness as a leader.
  是的，重要的是学习为何乔布斯没能克服，然后我们自己努力避免问题

• So when Steve spat his expletives about Neil Young, I just laughed. I wasn’t surprised. He could hold on to grudges for decades. Even after Steve had gotten what he wanted from Disney, Eisner remained a curse word to him. Gassée’s “sin” of telling Sculley that Jobs intended to oust him as CEO occurred way back in 1985; a quarter century later, Steve still snarled whenever the Frenchman’s name came up.
  有趣，非常记仇，哈哈哈

• Adobe had done a good job with Flash, which was easy for developers to work with. But it had security holes, and could crash unexpectedly. Adobe had not been as diligent about correcting those problems as Steve would have liked. The iPhone was a brand-new networked-computing platform, and the last thing he wanted was to leave it vulnerable to hacking or security problems, especially in its infancy. So he left the program off the iPhone, and eventually off the iPad as well. Flash had been such a popular piece of software that Apple was deluged with complaints. But Steve was adamant, and in 2010 he issued a lengthy statement with six reasons he had not supported Flash. His reasoning was sound, but his words nonetheless smacked of revenge. Apple’s power was such that Adobe paid a price for its supposed betrayal.
  最终Flash消失了

• Steve’s biggest grudge of his later years was directed toward Google. There were many reasons for Steve to feel personally betrayed when Google introduced Android, the mobile operating system that mimicked many of the features of Apple’s own iOS, in 2008. What really galled him was that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and chairman, had been a board member and a friend for years. Now his company was releasing an able, direct competitor to the product Apple had been working on intensely during Schmidt’s years on the board.

• Even harder for Steve to accept was the fact that Google decided to make Android available to handset manufacturers for free, thus guaranteeing that phones made by Samsung, HTC, LG, and others could undercut Apple in the new marketplace it had created with their cheaper devices. Steve was downright livid. Google was pulling a page from the first chapter of Microsoft’s handbook for dominating the world. Clearly, Steve believed, Google’s intent in offering a free operating system was to propagate a standard across all cellphones and mobile devices, leading to nothing less than a replay of what Gates had done to Apple’s Macintosh with the release of Windows two decades before.
  虽然是免费提供，但有代价是需要Google授权Google Play，本质上也是加上了自己的商业利益

• Determined not to let that happen again, Steve was not content to rely only on great products. In 2011, just months before he died, Apple unleashed a torrent of litigation seeking damages from Samsung, the leading maker of Android-based phones and tablets, and even asking for an injunction to prevent the Korean manufacturer from selling its phones in the United States. Steve didn’t sue Google directly, since the company was getting little direct financial benefit from Android, which was free. But he could go after the device manufacturers. (Apple also sued HTC and Motorola Mobility, a handset maker that Google bought in 2012.) He accused the companies of copying outright many of the key user-interface features of Apple’s iOS, launching a panoply of suits that were not settled until 2014. Apple won a major victory in U.S. courts, but the company still has not actually collected any money from Samsung. Meanwhile, both sides agreed to drop all Android-related lawsuits outside the United States in 2014. It seemed an acknowledgment that the litigation had become an albatross for all involved. Venting Steve’s anger against Google had cost the company at least $60 million in lawyers’ fees. Steve, whose intense focus was a huge competitive advantage, had created a massive legal effort that will likely prove, in the long run, to have been nothing but a distraction.

• Steve would not indulge any laziness, entitlement, or overreaching ambition from members of his core team. He regularly pitted one against another in order to see whose ideas or intelligence would prevail. Everyone had to be in top form, solidly contributing and fully engaged, or they would find themselves subtly marginalized by Steve. His relationships with Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell, among others, demonstrated how quickly Steve could revoke the special insider status that was his to grant.
  做乔布斯的下属与同事，真是挺累的

• “Steve and I had a mutual, genuine respect for each other as business partners. It was genuine,” remembers Anderson. “So if he wants five million or ten million dollars more for this great idea or marketing program, he wouldn’t just haul off and do it. He’d walk down the hall and see me, and use his persuasive powers. ‘Fred, come on, can’t you find room for this?’ You know? That’s the way we worked.”

• Fred had stayed on longer than he had intended, despite feeling a little weary. In fact, he’d thought he was ready to move on or retire as early as 2001. That year, Dell Computer had recruited him. Steve responded by convincing the board to make a onetime special award to Fred of options for one million shares, just to let him know how much he was appreciated. Steve also requested options grants of the same size for Avie, Ruby, and Tim Cook, and smaller amounts for other members of the executive team. It was a gesture that would come back to haunt Steve—and Anderson—but at the time it was welcome and enriching. Anderson stayed on three more years, despite the fact that Steve wouldn’t let him join the board of directors of any other companies. “Steve liked to control you. He liked to have you under his sphere of influence,” says Anderson. Eventually, Steve did let Fred join the boards of 3Com and eBay, and when Fred finally did retire, Steve asked him to join Apple’s own board.
  有趣，说明乔布斯还是认为Fred是个人才，非常有价值

• When Fred’s retirement was announced in June 2004, Ed Woolard, the former Apple chairman, sent him a note thanking him for, among many other things, serving as “Chief Tantrum Controller of Steve.” At the last Top 100 meeting of Apple management that Fred attended as an employee, Steve broke down and cried during a video he showed in Fred’s honor. In his remarks at a going-away party at Cafe Macs, the company commissary, Steve reflected on the warmth everyone felt for Fred. Anderson still keeps two mementos from his retirement in his office at venture capital firm Elevation Partners: a plaque from Steve calling him “The World’s Greatest CFO” and a commissioned caricature portrait signed by all his closest coworkers, including Steve.
  好友爱的退休仪式与退休纪念啊

• Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian were the next members of the “Save Apple” team to depart. Ruby and Avie had been a buddy act of sorts, managing the hardware and software sides of Apple’s whole widget. Says Ruby, “There’s as much of the turnaround team’s DNA in Apple as there is of Steve’s, and you can still see it today.” They had been involved in every key decision at Apple since 1997. And before they left they helped pull off a move that they’d been talking about with Steve and with Tim Cook for years—switching the microprocessors that powered every Apple personal computer from the PowerPC chip to one made by Intel.
  帮助苹果完成到Intel的换芯

• The primary buyers of the PowerPC chip were IBM and Apple. This was a customer base that paled next to Intel’s enormous market for Windows PCs and servers—millions of units a year for the PowerPC versus hundreds and hundreds of millions for Intel. Motorola could not match Intel’s manufacturing prowess. Intel reinvested much of the profit from selling all those processors into building more state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities (called “fabs”), which had come to cost in excess of $1 billion each. The bottom line was that switching to Intel held irresistible price and performance advantages, especially after Steve negotiated yet another sweetheart deal, this time with Intel CEO Paul Otellini.
  在强大的出货量面前，真的很难竞争

• This was the kind of technological excellence Avie and Ruby had helped ensure throughout their time at Apple. Nevertheless, neither one could see an interesting career path forward there, especially now that the iPod and other mobile devices had become Apple’s growth engines. Steve saw Avie and Ruby as, first and foremost, “old-time” computer guys. Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall were early members of the post-PC generation, and seemed destined to be the key leaders of the iPhone hardware and software efforts. The wheel was turning for Avie and Ruby, just as it had for Fred.
  好忧伤啊
  不过从长远来看，技术都有生命周期，那么掌握技术的关键人物，也有生命周期，那么也需要更换

• “Steve kept people in a box,” says Avie. Tevanian had talked to his boss several times about his itch to do something new, and in 2003, Steve had moved him into a role as the company’s “chief software technology officer.” It was unquestionably a promotion, but it turned out to be a job without much of a portfolio. Tevanian found himself with little concrete responsibility. He felt out of the loop, and realized that his new role would not work. “Being a pseudo individual staff person working for Steve doesn’t work, because he already has all the answers. He didn’t like it when I would be in a meeting where he was reviewing a product, and I would have an opinion. He just didn’t like it. And he grew to not like that I could be a senior person like that without having day-to-day responsibilities to deliver something,” he says.

• Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, says that he worried about Tevanian leaving, and urged Steve in 2004 to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. “Steve looked at me,” Cook remembers, “and goes, ‘I agree he’s really smart. But he’s decided he doesn’t want to work. I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.’ ” Another time, shortly after Steve had learned that Tevanian had taken up golf, Steve carped to Cook that something was really amiss. “Golf?!” he thundered incredulously. “Who has time for golf?”
  我觉得乔布斯可以对自己要求苛刻，但不应该对下属的非工作喜好如此苛刻

• Rubinstein, meanwhile, noticed that he too was getting less and less attention after Steve returned from his cancer operation in 2004. “In the beginning at Apple, it was a pleasure because we were all really in it together. I mean, it was really a team, we were partners,” he says. “But once Apple started getting really successful, Steve moved himself to the next level and started separating himself from all of us. It started to become all about him versus about the team. Over time it changed, where you were much less working with Steve and much more working for Steve.”
  但我的感觉是，你作为一个高级管理人员，确实也是应该work for Steve.
  在拯救苹果的初期，乔布斯的工作强度与投入度是不正常的

• Ruby saw himself as CEO material, and envied Cook’s growing role. He also had started clashing with Ive, who had once reported to him but now reported directly to Steve. And he couldn’t stand Tony Fadell, the lead engineer for the iPod. Ruby and Fadell would resent one another for years, long after they’d each left Apple, each claiming responsibility for the iPod’s success, and each demeaning the other’s contribution. (Some wags took to calling Fadell “Tony Baloney.”)
  Ruby与如此多的人关系不好，是不是他自己有问题？

• “It was a great experience,” Ruby says. “I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. It was wonderful in so many dimensions. I mean, it changed my life in so many different ways and I learned a lot from Steve. Steve could be a real jerk, no question about it, but I feel very warmly about him. I really do.”

• Steve had considered himself friends with both men. But that personal level of involvement made their departures personally fraught. Every personable executive must confront this problem, but it was especially tough for Steve. While he had changed over the years, he still didn’t have a natural soft touch when it came to discussing career options with his closest colleagues. So things ended badly with both Avie and Ruby. Steve’s relationship with Avie, who had organized his bachelor party back in 1991, just petered out. His relationship with Ruby, on the other hand, ended with a bang.

• In late 2007 he was hired by Palm Computing, which remained a significant player in the handheld market. Ruby sent Steve an email to give him a heads-up that he was heading to Palm. Steve called him back about four seconds later, according to Ruby, and started saying things that left him flabbergasted. “He couldn’t understand,” Rubinstein remembers. “He said, ‘You’ve got plenty of money, why are you going to Palm?’ I’m like, ‘Steve, what are you talking about? I mean, you’ve got orders of magnitude more money than I have and you’re asking me? Are you joking?’ ”
  4秒后回复，乔布斯也是够快的

• Steve had made an effort to keep Ruby and Avie on board. But the fact that the new jobs he promoted them into turned out to be hollow is an indication of the ambivalence he felt about keeping them. In one critical way, Steve hadn’t changed much. He put the needs of the company ahead of any work relationship. He became even more pragmatic about this kind of thing during his later years. In important ways, his assessment of the team—measured by the same high standards he applied to himself—was clear-headed and brilliant. Losing employees, colleagues, and personal friends was hard on a personal level, for Steve and for everyone else involved in the transitions. But Steve had always believed that when the time came for a change in personnel, a company should move on as quickly as possible. It will soon find that circumstances change, and that it can do just fine without the old heroes.

• Where Steve failed in these transitions is in the aftermath. The departure of Ruby, with whom he’d worked for sixteen years, was characteristic, even though the hardware chief delayed his official resignation in order to better prepare Tony Fadell to succeed him as head of the newly formed iPod group Ruby had put together. When others could no longer match his level of effort and intensity, when they became less important to his plans for Apple, or when they left the company, Steve would lose interest. Steve cared more about the potential buying power of his customers than he cared about propping up departing veterans whose contributions he deemed waning. Avie or Ruby should never have expected anything different. Steve had treated his Apple cofounder, Woz, this way, and others along the way had been dismissed in similar fashion. He prioritized ruthlessly, and when Avie and Ruby tumbled down in the ranks of people who could deliver what he believed Apple needed, he moved on.
  虽然理性，但还是好无情

• Explaining his own 7.5 million options grant, Steve sounded self-pitying. “It wasn’t so much about the money,” he said. “Everybody likes to be recognized by his peers.” He had hoped, he explained, that the board would come forward on its own with an offer of new options, given his success and the fact that a previous grant was underwater. “It would have made me feel better,” he told investigators.

• Talk about tone-deaf. Even allowing for the fact that Steve was not feeling well on the day of his testimony, and that he never imagined his testimony would become public, his words accurately, if unintentionally, reflected a certain callousness that he applied to Anderson and Heinen’s plight. Anderson had resigned from Apple’s board about six months before the SEC came to its decision, when it became clear that the company’s internal investigation would lay the blame for the trouble at his feet, and at Heinen’s. Meanwhile, Steve himself was left untouched by the SEC. “I was hurt,” says Anderson, “because I have tried to live my life as a Boy Scout. The most important things to me are my set of values and how I conduct myself, you know? And everybody that knows me, whether at Apple or anywhere else, will tell you that I have incredibly high ethical standards and that I would never, ever knowingly do anything wrong. I mean, even with people. I always treated people with respect and protected a lot of people from Steve’s idiosyncrasies.”
  这个和乔布斯少分钱给Woz，本质上是一样的事情

• Steve could be tremendously helpful to friends and colleagues in times of need, especially when they or their families needed medical treatment. He could also be cold and insensitive to coworkers when their personal issues obstructed what he saw as the company’s mission, or distracted them from giving Apple their full attention. With a little more empathy, and a little more caring for those who weren’t critical to his cause, Steve could have saved himself, and Apple, from a handful of unnecessary headaches.

• FOR THE REST of his time at Apple, Steve would manage the company with a mix of old-timers and newcomers. Cook and Ive had been with him for years by now, as had communications chief Katie Cotton, and Phil Schiller, the good-natured head of marketing. Sina Tamaddon and Eddy Cue had gradually become part of the core, and Steve promoted Fadell to head up the hardware side of the iPhone project, and Forstall, another former NeXT whiz, to handle the software. Forstall and Fadell could have become the next “Avie and Ruby,” had they not viewed each other as rivals from the very start. They would clash and undercut each other even more than Fadell had banged heads with Ive and Ruby. Steve found himself refereeing disputes that were beginning to threaten the vaunted synergy that had always been Apple’s “secret sauce”—the blending of clever hardware and ingenious software into a single, magical digital widget. In fact, Fadell was such an explosive force that he would leave the company in 2009, and head off to form a new company, called Nest Labs, which makes a thermostat and a smoke detector that work with your home Wi-Fi network. Fadell is not remembered fondly in the Apple executive boardroom. When certain Apple higher-ups speak of him now, they sneer at the designer of “that little thermostat.” The definition of little is relative, of course. In 2014, Google paid $3.2 billion to acquire Fadell’s Nest Labs.
  原来在苹果里面，也是这么多幺蛾子......

• Starting in the mid-2000s, Steve was the informal leader of a group of Silicon Valley CEOs who agreed not to poach senior employees from one another. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a complaint in 2010 against Apple, along with Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, alleging that the companies had entered a series of agreements, recorded formally and informally, to not hire from one another. A class-action lawsuit followed in 2011, filed by an engineer at Lucasfilm on behalf of 64,000 employees of these companies, and others in Silicon Valley. (This lawsuit added Lucasfilm, which like Pixar is now owned by Disney, to the list of companies.) The plaintiffs alleged that the anticompetitive scheme cost workers billions of dollars in unrealized wage gains they might have enjoyed with unrestricted job mobility.
  羡慕老美的工会与法律制度，真是非常保护劳动者

• Emails subpoenaed during the investigation show that Steve was clearly involved. They also show him taking mordant pleasure at the fact that a Google recruiter was fired for poaching an Apple employee, after Steve had complained to Eric Schmidt, who was then CEO of the giant search engine company. When Jobs heard the news, his email reply was a smiley-face icon. Steve was hardly the only CEO to be caught with incriminating emails, but he was the only one shown making light of the personal impact of the collusion. Other chief executives seemed motivated primarily by a desire to not piss off Steve, who had become the most powerful employer in the technology business.

• “I know where Steve’s head was,” he says. “He wasn’t doing anything to hold down salaries. It never came up. He had a simple objective. If we were working together on something—like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said let’s convert the Mac to the Intel processor—well, when we did that we didn’t want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn’t want us poaching theirs. Doesn’t it make sense that you wouldn’t, that it’s an okay thing? I don’t think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad, and I don’t think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees.” It’s a rational argument, insofar as it goes. All CEOs want to keep their best employees at their company. But it ignores the simple fact that making such an agreement with other companies, explicitly or otherwise, is illegal, according to the U.S. government and most antitrust lawyers. Steve, apparently, couldn’t be bothered even with acknowledging those rules.
  这里可以看出来爱因斯坦对乔布斯的影响

• That same attitude hurt Apple in another case it had to settle, in which the government alleged that Apple conspired with book publishers to raise the price of ebooks. As Steve prepared to launch the iPad, he was sure that reading books on the device would be seen as an attractive feature, one that he hoped would create profits for Apple while stealing customers from Amazon. He and Eddy Cue strongly encouraged book publishers to adopt the agency model Apple used on its app and iTunes stores—publishers could set the price of their ebooks, as long as Apple got 30 percent of the sale. Furthermore, they wouldn’t allow their titles to be sold at lower prices elsewhere. In this scenario, prices of ebooks would have risen uniformly from the low, $9.99 price Amazon often charged for new releases. The publishers would have enjoyed smaller profits but would have been able to set higher prices and avoid permitting Amazon to drive book prices down. Here, too, Steve’s emails did nothing to help Apple. His aggressive negotiating notes show that he was fully aware of the impact of getting all the publishers on the same page. Writing to James Murdoch, the son of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, Jobs said that News Corp’s best option, he believed, was to “Throw in with Apple, and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.”
  这一件事上，乔布斯明显没有站在用户那一边，他没有努力将用户侧的支出降低，同时提高体验
  而是选择和书商一起，提高价格，从而让自己有30%的分润

• It’s possible that Steve really didn’t see anything wrong with trying to build solidarity among publishers, because he had done the same thing with record company executives when setting up the iTunes Music Store. Nobody accused him of collusion then, even though he had insisted on setting a price of 99 cents a track. It’s also possible that a variety of assorted corporate safeguards—better legal counsel, better compliance efforts, and so on—could have kept Apple on the right side of the law in both the ebooks case and the labor collusion. But Steve had molded Apple into a tool for turning what unfolded in his imagination into real products, not an organization that conservatively guarded against the downside of his impulses. So the safeguards that did exist weren’t powerful enough to prevent the troubles that arose.
  但作为首席执行官来说，如果他在思考产品的时候，就思考过多的法律、法务的限制，他很可能没法做出伟大的产品
  我们在中国，已经能看到这样的情况（社会主义核心价值观）

• “Steve created a management approach that worked for the type of product that he had been thinking about,” Bill Gates told me after Steve’s death. “You know, if you were going to do hardware and software together, and you’re going to do a few super, super nice designs, and you’re going to do it end-to-end where partnerships aren’t the key thing, where you control that experience totally. He managed a great organization that was purpose-fit to that.” We had been chatting about why so many books had been written promising to reveal how to do business “the Apple way,” or “the Steve Jobs way.” Bill was describing why Steve is a unique managerial case, someone whose model has limited applications. “Maybe you should call your book Don’t Try This at Home,” he said, only half joking. “So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they’re missing is the genius part.” One downside to the Steve Jobs way of running a company, he opined, is that “This is not an organization with checks and controls.”
  最懂你的，果然还是对手
  Facebook也希望控制软件与硬件，我们就看到了这样的失败

• ALL HIS LIFE, Steve had tried to control the narrative about Apple by being the sole employee to tell its story to the public. There was a cost to this choice that didn’t really become apparent until the last years of Steve’s life, when his notoriety and Apple’s success drew attention to Cupertino as never before. Apple became the lightning rod for everything from criticism of the tech industry’s sustainability problems to corporate governance controversies that affected many other companies as well. And its spokesman was a mortally unhealthy man with a desperate impatience to deal with things that really mattered to him, not this broad array of nagging distractions.
  外界的批评也没错
  但对于一个真正想做出好产品的人来说，分散精力在那些不重要的事情上，是一种浪费

• Ever since getting sick in 2004, Steve had kept goals in his head of things he wanted to be alive for. Some were personal, like the school graduations of his kids. Some were corporate, like his desire to live long enough to introduce the iPad tablet computer.
  乔布斯还是幸运地看到了iPad的发布

• When Apple learned of the suicides, it actually responded quickly, pulling together a noteworthy task force to investigate Fox-conn’s factories, and taking other actions that some observers have deemed forward-looking. Again, reasonable people can disagree about the quality of Apple’s response. But what everyone can agree on is that Steve didn’t help matters with some of his public responses to the crisis, including the moment at a tech conference when he said, “Oh, we’re all over this one.” He sounded glib, in the way of any corporate CEO trying to smooth over an inconvenient truth.
  其实在这句话上，我觉得不能苛求太多？可能也还好？

• Heroic narratives aren’t supposed to have chapters like this. In the typical Pixar movie, or in the Disney animations that started getting better and better toward the end of Steve’s life, true emotions are unfrozen, reconciliations are wholly achieved. But Steve’s life wasn’t a movie. It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end.