For several months, I had been working to set up a joint interview of Steve, Andy Grove, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell. The confab was supposed to kick off the reporting for a book I had in mind. I had what I thought was a snappy title—Founders Keepers—and a plan to describe how a handful of geeky entrepreneurs had evolved into captains of industry; how self-absorbed inventors morphed into self-taught empire builders; how shaggy-haired idealists managed to stay in the saddle even as the companies they created grew rapidly by orders of magnitude, and as their own wealth and influence over the world itself became far more than the stuff of dreams.
好可惜啊，这次采访没有成形During this time, Steve came to visit me in the hospital a couple of times. I was so addled with sedatives and painkillers and my own delirious hallucinations that during one visit I expressed my sincerest regrets at not being able to play saxophone in a Beatles retrospective show he was planning to put on in Las Vegas with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Somehow I had thought he had taken up guitar in order to play the part of John Lennon himself, and he had asked me to be part of the backup band. Unfortunately, I explained to Steve, with my new hearing-loss problem, I’d never be able to pull it off. Apparently, Steve and my wife, Lorna, had a good laugh. At least that’s what she told me later when I had regained my senses. She also said that before leaving, he said, “I’ve told them to give you the VIP treatment here. Call me if you need anything.”
Despite having no interest in working with me on magazine articles, Steve seemed genuinely curious about the book idea. He and I had discussed the project a few times, and in the spring of 2008 I told him I wanted to set up a roundtable discussion of around eight founders, as the centerpiece of my reporting. “That’s way too many people,” he snorted. “Everybody will want their camera time, and nobody will say much of anything honest or real.” Instead, he suggested, “Focus your book on the emergence of the PC. There are four of us, really. Me, Bill, Andy [Grove], and Michael [Dell]. Get us together and we’ll have a good discussion. It will be more focused. We know each other’s weaknesses and strengths. It will make a much better story for you to tell, and we’ll all have to be more honest.”
好有意思，哈哈哈He even offered to help me wrangle the other three, although I told him I didn’t think that was necessary. Just being able to tell them that Steve wanted to do it was enough to get them to readily buy in to the idea. Announcing Steve’s involvement was like waving a magic wand. I got immediate responses from the other three, despite their very tight schedules.
为何乔布斯有如此高的号召力，哈哈哈“I have to tell you, Brent, my health has really gone downhill. I can’t put on any weight. You know me, I’m a vegan, and I’ve even started getting chocolate milk shakes now, eating cheese, anything. But I keep wasting away. You wouldn’t want to see me like this. The others wouldn’t, either. Laurene says I can’t wait any longer. I have to deal with this. And she’s right.”
“Whatever it is, I have to drop everything else and figure it out now. It has to be my only priority. I owe it to my family. I haven’t even told the board or Tim and the others this yet, but I am going to have to take another medical leave. MacWorld is coming up, so I have to announce it before then, because I don’t think I can do that, either.”
Then his tone changed. “I’ve always told you what was happening with my health, because you can relate. So I’m sure you know you can’t tell anyone else about this. It’s just between you and me. That’s why I called. Because I wanted to tell you myself. I wanted you to know that I really wanted to do this with you, too. But I just can’t.”
At first Steve didn’t answer. Then, after a few beats, with a mordant giggle, he said, “Just tell them I’m being an asshole. That’s what they’ll probably be thinking, anyway, so why not just say it?”
I was dumbfounded. “Do you really want me to say that?” I replied, thinking that none of them would buy it for a minute. They knew that Steve wouldn’t have put me up to the whole roundtable thing, only to back out. He could be a jerk, but he wasn’t an asshole. “All I ask is that you just don’t tell them the real reason. Not yet.”I didn’t tell Michael or Andy or Bill anything other than that Steve had to cancel because of a personal conflict that had come up. A month or so later, after Apple had announced Steve’s medical leave for “complex” health-related issues, I saw Bill at his office in Kirkland, Washington. He told me he wanted to get in touch with Steve and wasn’t sure of the best means. It had been a long time since they had spoken. I gave him Steve’s home phone number and his cellphone number, and also the email address and phone number of his assistant Lanita, but not before relating the story of the “asshole” excuse Steve had suggested. Bill loves a smart riposte as much as anyone, so we had a good laugh.
虽然商业上竞争，但盖茨还是非常敬佩乔布斯这位对手And there, sitting alone with him in the bedroom of the Palo Alto house, Tim began to offer his liver to Steve. “I really wanted him to do it,” he remembers. “He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll never let you do that. I’ll never do that!’ ”
“Somebody that’s selfish,” Cook continues, “doesn’t reply like that. I mean, here’s a guy, he’s dying, he’s very close to death because of his liver issue, and here’s someone healthy offering a way out. I said, ‘Steve, I’m perfectly healthy, I’ve been checked out. Here’s the medical report. I can do this and I’m not putting myself at risk, I’ll be fine.’ And he doesn’t even think about it. It was not, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ It was not, ‘I’ll think about it.’ It was not, ‘Oh, the condition I’m in …’ It was, ‘No, I’m not doing that!’ He kind of popped up in bed and said that. And this was during a time when things were just terrible. Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the thirteen years I knew him, and this was one of them.”
慢慢才会懂得，为何乔布斯选择Tim Cook来接班“This picture of him isn’t understood,” says Cook. “I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short.” In saying this, Cook echoed the feeling of many of Steve’s close friends—in interview after interview, they complained that very little of what has been published offers any sense of why they would have worked so long and so hard for Steve. Those former employees share another common thread, too: the idea that they did the very best work of their lives for Steve.
“Steve cared,” Cook continues. “He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him. He wanted everyone to do their best work. He believed that small teams were better than large teams, because you could get a lot more done. And he believed that picking the right person was a hundred times better than picking somebody who was a little short of being right. All of those things are really true. A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance. He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being, and that is totally not understood.
“The Steve that I met in early ’98 was brash and confident and passionate and all of those things. But there was a soft side of him as well, and that soft side became a larger portion of him over the next thirteen years. You’d see that show up in different ways. There were different employees and spouses here that had health issues, and he would go out of his way to turn heaven and earth to make sure they had proper medical attention. He did that in a major way, not in a minor, ‘Call me and get back to me if you need my help’ kind of way.
“He had the courage to admit he was wrong, and to change, a quality which many people at that level, who have accomplished that much, lack. You don’t see many people at that level who will change directions even though they should. He wasn’t beholden to anything except a set of core values. Anything else he could walk away from. He could do it faster than anyone I’d ever seen before. It was an absolute gift. He always changed. Steve had this ability to go through a learning curve quickly, more quickly than anybody I’ve known, about such a wide variety of things.“The Steve I knew was the guy pestering me to have a social life, not because he was being a pest, but because he knew how important family was in his life, and he wanted it for me, too,” continues Cook, who came out publicly as a gay man in 2014. (Steve and others at the company had known this for years, of course.) “One day he calls my mom—he doesn’t even know my mom, she lives in Alabama. He said he was looking for me, but he knows how to find me! And he talked to her about me. There are lots of these things where you saw the very soft or caring or feeling or whatever you want to call it side of him. He had that gene. Someone who’s viewing life only as a transactional relationship with people … doesn’t do that.”
He and Laurene remained in Memphis for two excruciating months, during which things were so touch-and-go that relatives and close friends such as Jony Ive, Mona Simpson, Steve’s lawyer George Riley, and others came to visit and perhaps say goodbye to him. Ive even brought a special present from the Apple design team—a meticulous miniature aluminum replica of the Macbook Pro that would ship in June. The designers had made these nano-models for Steve after every product release. Given the circumstances, this one was special.
看着生命的消逝，好忧伤Steve survived, of course. He later told Bob Iger that he had considered leaving Apple after the operation, to spend more time with his children at home. But, as Eddy Cue says, “Steve really just had two things he cared about in his life, Apple—and to some extent, Pixar—and his family.” He needed both. He returned to work, and just as he had after his 2004 operation, he did so with vigor. He had a new milestone he wanted to achieve before he died: the introduction of the iPad.
By doing so, he ensured that Apple’s tablet device would be a line extension of the iPhone; when his team turned to building the iPad, they maximized an iPhone, rather than opt to minimize an iMac. That meant using ARM-based microprocessors, which are common in smartphones, rather than the more power-hungry Intel chips that drive many computers. That meant adopting the iPhone’s multi-touch screen and virtual keyboard. Perhaps most important of all—and most ironic, given Steve’s initial resistance—the iPad would benefit enormously from the iTunes App Store. The iPad gave software developers a much more powerful target to shoot for than the iPhone, mainly because the larger screen made it possible and practical to do some really cool things that you could not do on a pocket-sized device. Often sold at the same low price points as iPhone apps, these cool new iPad apps seemed like an even better deal as they exploded on those bigger screens. The iPad multiplied the importance of the App Store, and the influence of the new market and business model for software that it had created.
With the one-two punch of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple had completely reshaped the business of making and selling consumer software. Where once upon a time developers had to price their software applications so that they might make a profit from the sale of a few thousand copies, they now could sell into a market of hundreds of millions of people. This tremendous opportunity has led to all kinds of developments that never would have even had a glimmer of a chance in a smaller market. Name what you want to do now, and there is probably an app (or two or three or ten) for that. That wasn’t true in the PC world, because the price points necessary to achieve profitability on a much smaller volume of sales were simply too high.
Looked at in the context of Steve’s career as a technologist, the iPad is not as significant a product as the iPhone. But in some ways, it is the most elegant evocation of some of his enduring goals: to create technology that is a window into the limitless world of information, and to create technology that is so simple and so powerful that it basically disappears. His sense of those essential goals is what distinguished him from the more tech-savvy hobbyists back at the start of his career. His restless desire to reach that goal had betrayed him more than once, causing him to try to leap before the technology was ready even to walk. But by the time he and his team got around to creating the iPad, he had learned enough, finally, to make the technology essentially invisible. A true artist, he’d finally hidden all evidence of his labor.
There was something elegiac about all this, even though Steve often used the first moments of a presentation to update the crowd on Apple. This, after all, was a recitation of the story of his professional life. And the sentimental nature of the event grew when, after a dozen or so minutes, Steve sat down in the leather love seat to demonstrate how easy it was to use an iPad. This was, of course, a concession to his weakened state of health. But it served the product, too. He leaned back, and navigated through a series of things you could do with your fingers on the iPad: send email, surf the Web, open up apps that let you listen to music, watch videos on YouTube, or even make “digital” finger paintings. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop,” he stated, with great satisfaction. His every move was projected on the big screen. Like every other presentation he had ever given, this one was staged with a clear intention: to show that this device was actually an invitation to a new kind of computing, something so natural and relaxed that it would slip right into your daily life with unimaginable ease.
Bob Iger was aware of it. As Iger had expected, Steve had been a meaningful and yet unthreatening member of the Disney board ever since the Pixar sale in 2006. His relationship with Iger had become so strong that Steve had wanted Iger to join the Apple board, which Iger couldn’t do for fiduciary reasons. In fact, because of their friendship, Iger also turned down an invitation from Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt to be on Google’s board. “He told me he’d be jealous,” says Iger, with a wistful grin, although given how Apple’s relationship with Google eventually disintegrated, there was likely more to Steve’s reluctance than mere envy.
“I was at the Four Seasons, and he was at Kona Village. We’d walk together a lot. He had a daily walk that ended at the Four Seasons. We would walk and he’d try to convince me of stuff like, say, that white pineapple is better than yellow pineapple. And we’d sit on benches, and talk about music and the world. That’s where I told him the exciting news that we were looking to build a resort in Hawaii, a nine-hundred-million-dollar resort. I could tell he didn’t like the idea. I said, ‘Why not?’ He said it wasn’t a big enough idea. I said, ‘Nine hundred million dollars, Disney comes to Hawaii, that’s not a big idea? What’s a big idea in your mind?’ He said, ‘Buy Lanai’ [a small island in the state that was eventually purchased by Larry Ellison]. He thought we should build a theme park on the island, have all the visitors brought there by a special Disney transportation service. It was totally impractical.”
又想起了那句，People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.Most often, the two would meet in Burbank, when Steve came down to Disney headquarters for board meetings. Even though Iger was not on the Apple board (he would join it after Steve’s death), Steve would seek his advice about things going on at the company, and walk him through Jony Ive’s design lab whenever he came up to Cupertino. “We would stand at a whiteboard brainstorming,” remembers Iger. “We talked about buying companies. We talked about buying Yahoo! together.” By the time the Disney board meetings came around, Steve had usually been fully briefed by Iger. “We saw eye to eye on most things,” says Iger. “It wasn’t anything preplanned, but when Steve opined, the board generally listened.”
乔布斯发言的时候，其它人要好好听That wasn’t true on everything, but Steve voiced his disagreements in a forceful but civil fashion. Steve hated stock buybacks, when companies purchase their own shares on the public market—a move that is supposed to be both a good investment for the company and a signal of its confidence to big investors. He made a strong case against it at one board meeting, but the company proceeded nonetheless. On the other hand, when Disney was about to enter a joint venture with Carnival Cruise Lines because Iger didn’t think he could get the board’s support to build two new, billion-dollar cruise ships, Steve passionately urged him, and eventually the board, to have Disney build the ships itself. “If this is a good business,” he said, “why are you going to put your brand in someone else’s hands?” Disney built the two new ships on its own.
Steve also helped with Disney’s retail business. In 2008, the company had bought back its stores, after having licensed them to outside operators for years. When the new head of retail first pitched the board on his plans, Steve, who always sat next to Iger, grew restless and started rolling his eyes. At one point during the presentation he just burst out, muttering “Bullshit!” in a way that everyone could hear. Iger kicked him in the shins to try to get him to muzzle himself. Once the presentation had ended, Steve asked the executive two simple questions: “What message are you sending to your customer when they walk through the door? What statement are you making?”
好真实，哈哈哈，一点没变“The guy couldn’t answer the questions,” remembers Iger. “There was silence in the room.” Afterward, Steve told Iger he should fire the executive immediately. But Iger didn’t. “Steve was quick to judge people. That was a fault,” says Iger. “If he got better on that, it wasn’t something I saw. I always found that a shortcoming. I’d say to him, ‘First of all, I haven’t decided about the person, so you’ve got to give me a chance to form my own opinion.’ Or I’d tell him, ‘You’re just flat-out wrong about this person.’ In some cases he was proved right, and in others I was. Either way, I never got an ‘I told you so’ from him.”
论高管内心的阴影，哈哈哈A few weeks later, Iger brought the retail chief and a couple of others up to Cupertino for a daylong brainstorming session with Steve and Apple retail chief Ron Johnson. “He didn’t redesign our stores,” says Iger. “He didn’t even set foot in them, as far as I know. But he did give us a full day of his time, and they helped us come up with a guiding statement about the stores: This is going to be the best twenty or thirty minutes of your kid’s day.”
传达的精神，非常重要Iger remembers the night when it really hit him that Steve was going to pass away, during a 2010 dinner at his home with his wife, Steve, and Laurene. “We all kind of knew there was an inevitability to him dying, not that any of us was willing to truly accept it, believe it, or articulate it,” Iger recalls. “But it was pretty evident. Steve made a toast that night. He said, ‘The two of us did an unbelievable thing, didn’t we? We saved Disney and we saved Pixar.’ He thought that being part of Disney had breathed a whole new life into Pixar. And clearly, Disney has never been the same since. Tears came to his eyes. Our wives had a hard time maintaining dry eyes. It was one of those moments: ‘Hey, look at what we did, my goodness! Wasn’t that cool, wasn’t that really special?’ ”
隔着屏幕都感受到忧伤At Apple, Steve still did everything he could to have people treat him as if he were not sick. “He was working his ass off till the end, in pain,” remembers Eddy Cue. “You could see it in the meetings, he was taking morphine and you could see he was in pain, but he was still interested.”
He did make some adjustments upon his return, most of which were simply extensions of the shifts in priority he’d made after his 2004 operation. He focused on the parts of the ongoing business he cared about most—marketing, design, and the product introductions—and he started to take active steps to ensure that he would leave Apple in good shape after his death. This was a process that had started earlier—Tim Cook says that Steve started thinking of succession and the post-Steve era of the company back in 2004—but everything accelerated now.
策划了将近10年的接班计划，非常了不起He spent some of his time working with Joel Podolny, a professor he had hired away from the Yale School of Management, to develop the curriculum for an executive education program he wanted to create called Apple University. Unlike Pixar University, where all employees can choose from a range of eclectic courses that instruct them in creative arts and skills employed by others at the studio, Apple U. is designed as a place where future leaders of the company can review and dissect momentous decisions in the company’s history. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer, and then bottle, Steve’s decision-making process, and to pass on his aesthetics and marketing methodologies to Apple’s next generation. “Steve cared deeply about the why,” says Cook. “The why of the decision. In the younger days I would see him just do something. But as the days went on he would spend more time with me and with other people explaining why he thought or did something, or why he looked at something in a certain way. This was why he came up with Apple U., so we could train and educate the next generation of leaders by teaching them all we had been through, and how we had made the terrible decisions we made and also how we made the really good ones.”
非常非常棒，相当于让后来者，也能有一个更高的视角，避免再次犯错“I think we have a shot,” Steve told the Cupertino City Council, “at building the best office building in the world.”
乔布斯确实做到了，在他经手的每一件重要事情上，他都做到了最好Steve’s approach to the creation of the campus was driven by the same principles as always. What kind of design would make the new headquarters complex the ideal place for Apple to create its own future? The closer you could get to that ideal, the better for Apple. He wanted to do everything he could to ensure that Apple would remain what he believed it had become—the most important, most vital, and most creative industrial company in the world. “Steve wanted people to love Apple,” says Cook, “not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a very deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn’t write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause.”
“This was a significant common thread we had,” says Cook. “I really love Apple, and I do think Apple is here for a bigger reason. There are very few companies like that on the face of the earth anymore.”
“We had to go to his house when he was sick, because he wasn’t coming in,” says Clow. “But he had the same kind of laser-intense focus. He wanted to talk about the ad or the product or whatever we were doing.” With Clow, Steve didn’t spend much time looking back, or looking into dark corners of the future. “To the end, he tried to will that it [his death] wasn’t going to happen, that he was going to somehow keep going. He really didn’t want to dwell on that.”
They worked hard on that introductory iPad 2 ad. Its stentorian tone and poetic language would bear a striking resemblance to the “Think Different” campaign that signaled the beginning of Apple’s miraculous turnaround after Steve had returned to Cupertino. “This is what we believe, that technology alone is not enough,” were the words they settled on. “Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things. But when technology gets out of the way everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward, that’s when you end up with something like this.” The words accompanied a video showing a single finger manipulating iPad apps with casual ease. “It was the last thing that he blessed as the message that should go out for that particular product,” remembers Clow, “and it came off of Steve’s vision very clearly. It summed up his vision from day one that somehow technology should change people’s lives and make them better. It should be something that everyone uses.”
When Steve presented his plans for the ambitious new Apple corporate campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7, he was visibly hurting, and his voice was weak. Steve seemed to know that it was his last big contribution to the company, and to the community it had always called home. So he steeled himself to spend fifteen minutes walking the council members through the proposal for the building, and about five minutes answering questions. When one councilwoman tried to joke with him that perhaps the city should get free Wi-Fi in return for approving the move, Steve said, “Well, you know, I’m kind of old-fashioned. I believe that we pay taxes, and that the city then gives us services.”
“Steve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated,” Gates says. “I mean, yes, Steve did brilliant work, and if you had to say—you know, leave me out of it—one person who had the most impact on the personal computer industry, particularly from where we sit now, you’d pick Steve Jobs. That’s fair. But the difference between him and the next thousand isn’t like, you know, God was born and he came down from the hill with the tablet.” The two had developed a friendship and a sense of mutual respect despite their differences. “There was none of that need to put the other person down that afternoon,” says Gates. “We just talked about the things we’d done, and where we thought things were headed.” Gates wrote him a final, personal letter just weeks before his death.
对手间的惺惺相惜“Steve had been close to the first group,” says Laurene, referring to the team with Fred Anderson, Avie Tevanian, and Jon Rubinstein that had saved Apple with Steve, “but he loved the last group. I think it was because of the amazing, amazing work they did together.”
On August 11, a Sunday, Steve called Tim Cook and asked him to come over to the house. “He said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ ” remembers Cook. “This was when he was home all the time, and I asked when, and he said, ‘Now.’ So I came right over. He told me he had decided that I should be CEO. I thought then that he thought he was going to live a lot longer when he said this, because we got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as a chairman. I asked him, ‘What do you really not want to do that you’re doing?’
“It was an interesting conversation,” Cook says, with a wistful laugh. “He says, ‘You make all the decisions.’ I go, ‘Wait. Let me ask you a question.’ I tried to pick something that would incite him. So I said, ‘You mean that if I review an ad and I like it, it should just run without your okay?’ And he laughed, and said, ‘Well, I hope you’d at least ask me!’ I asked him two or three times, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ because I saw him getting better at that point in time. I went over there often during the week, and sometimes on the weekends. Every time I saw him he seemed to be getting better. He felt that way as well. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”
突然开始明白，为何乔布斯如此注重广告，注重品牌Cook had been the obvious candidate for years. He had already run the company twice, during Steve’s medical leaves in 2004 and 2009. And Steve preferred an internal replacement. “If you believe that it’s important to understand Apple’s culture deeply, you wind up clicking to an internal candidate,” explains Cook. “If I were leaving this afternoon I’d recommend an inside candidate, because I don’t think there’s any way somebody could come in and understand the complexity of what we do and really get the culture in that deep way. And I think Steve knew that it also needed to be somebody that believed in the Beatles concept. Apple would not be served well to have a CEO that wanted to, or felt like they needed to, replace him precisely. I don’t think there is such a person, but you could envision people trying. He knew that I would never be so dumb as to do that, or even feel that I needed to do that.”
其实这个道理，和日本非常谨慎外来移民，是一样的道理
文化不是一天两天的，需要内心深深理解与认知Steve had discussed the subject with Cook for years, so none of this came as a surprise. And they had talked often about the fate of Apple after Steve’s death. As Cook puts it, “He didn’t want us asking, ‘What would Steve do?’ He abhorred the way the Disney culture stagnated after Walt Disney’s death, and he was determined for that not to happen at Apple.”
创始人的余晖还能再支持多少年？Eight weeks after Steve told Cook he was making him CEO, things took a sudden turn for the worse. “I watched a movie with him the Friday before he passed away,” Cook remembers. “We watched Remember the Titans [a sentimental football story about an underdog]. I was so surprised he wanted to watch that movie. I was like, Are you sure? Steve was not interested in sports at all. And we watched and we talked about a number of things and I left thinking that he was pretty happy. And then all of a sudden things went to hell that weekend.”
John Lasseter got a call from Laurene, who told him he should come quickly for one last visit. “We just hung out in that study they had turned into a bedroom for him. We talked all about Pixar, all the things at Disney, and stuff like that. And then I kinda looked at him and he said, ‘Yeah I need to get a nap now.’ I got up to go, and then I stopped, and I looked at him and came back. I gave him a big hug, and a kiss, and I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.’
“He’s special,” says Lasseter. “It’s funny, there’s a little group of people who were very close to Steve up until the very end. And we all miss him very much. I was at Laurene’s birthday party [in November 2013], her fiftieth birthday, in San Francisco. I got there a bit early, and Tim came in. He came over and we started talking, and of course we started talking about Steve. I said, ‘Do you miss him? I really miss Steve.’ And I showed him this,” says Lasseter, pointing to the favorites list on his iPhone. “I still have Steve’s number on my phone. I said, ‘I’ll never be able to take that out.’ And Tim took out his iPhone and showed me—he still had Steve’s number in his phone, too.”
未曾舍得拿掉的号码，好忧伤“LIFE SHOULD BE about renewal and growth,” says Jim Collins. “Most great leaders don’t start out that way, they grow into it. And that’s what Steve did. I don’t see it as a success story, but a growth story. I wish I could have seen Steve Jobs 3.0. Seeing him from age fifty-five to seventy-five would have been fascinating. If you’re in good health at that age, 3.0 should be the best. But we don’t get to see that.”
“There are three things you need to be considered a truly great company,” Collins continues, switching gears to Apple. “Number one, you have to deliver superior financial results. Number two, you have to make a distinctive impact, to the point where if you didn’t exist you couldn’t be easily replaced. Number three, the company must have lasting endurance, beyond multiple generations of technology, markets, and cycles, and it must demonstrate the ability to do this beyond a single leader. Apple has numbers one and two. Steve was racing the clock [to help it get number three]. Whether it has lasting endurance is the final check, something we won’t know for some time. There are lots of good people there, and maybe they’ll get it.”
STEVE DIED ON Tuesday, October 5, 2011. There were three services after his death. He was buried on October 8, with some three dozen people attending, including four Apple employees—Tim Cook, Katie Cotton, Eddy Cue, and Jony Ive—along with board members Bill Campbell and Al Gore, Bob Iger, John Doerr, Ed Catmull, Mike Slade, Lee Clow, the four children and Laurene and some members of her extended family, his sisters Patty and Mona Simpson. They gathered at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, and walked on tatami mats to, and then around, Steve’s coffin. Several of the mourners spoke, and some read poetry. After the ceremony the group repaired to John Doerr’s house to reminisce.
On October 17, several hundred people attended a memorial service at the Memorial Church on Stanford University’s campus. The iPhone 4S had been introduced two days earlier, in the company’s first public event after Steve’s death, with presale orders that exceeded those of any previous model. The memorial service was an invitation-only event, and the guests ranged from his closest friends and family to the Clintons, Bono, Rahm Emanuel, Stephen Fry, Larry Page, Rupert Murdoch, and John Warnock, the Adobe cofounder. Bono and the Edge from U2 performed Steve’s favorite Dylan song, “Every Grain of Sand”; Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; and Mona Simpson read a moving tribute about Steve on his deathbed. Larry Ellison and Jony Ive also made remarks. Steve’s daughter Erin lit the candles at the beginning of the service, while the other children all spoke: Reed read his own thoughts, Lisa read a poem, and Eve read the text of “Think Different.” It was, despite the number of people there, a deeply intimate and emotional event, which opened with Yo-Yo Ma playing the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Laurene’s own remarks about Steve were especially poignant:
好忧伤Steve and I met here, at Stanford, the second week I lived in California. He came here to give a talk, and afterwards we found each other in the parking lot. We talked until four in the morning. He proposed with a fistful of freshly picked wildflowers on a rainy New Year’s Day. I said yes. Of course I said yes. We built our lives together.
He shaped how I came to view the world. We were both strong-minded, but he had a fully formed aesthetic and I did not. It is hard enough to see what is already there, to remove the many impediments to a clear view of reality, but Steve’s gift was even greater: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked, and he set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom. For this reason, he possessed an uncannily large sense of possibility—an epic sense of possibility.
Steve’s love of beauty—and his impatience with ugliness—pervaded our lives. Early on in our marriage we had long dinners with Mona and Richie. I remember a particularly wide-ranging discussion that lasted late into the night. As we were driving home, Steve launched into a devastating critique of the restaurant’s sconces. Mona agreed with his assessment. Richie and I looked at each other, whispering, “Is a sconce a light fixture?” No object was too small or insignificant to be exempt from Steve’s examination of the meaning, and the quality, of its form. He looked at things, and then he created things, from the standpoint of perfection.
That could be an unforgiving standpoint, but over time I came to see its reasons, to understand Steve’s unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself.
He felt deeply that California was the only place he could live. It’s the slanting evening light on the hills, the palette, the fundamental beauty. In his very soul, Steve was a Californian. He required the liberty it afforded, the clean slate. He worked under the influence, and the inspiration, of the sublimity of the place. He needed to be refreshed by the primal rhythms of the natural world—the land, the hills, the oaks, the orchards. California’s spirit of newness invigorated him, and ratified his own spirit. Its scale is contagious: such natural grandeur is the perfect setting for thinking big. And he did think big. He was the most unfettered thinker I have ever known. It was a deep pleasure, and a lot of fun, to think alongside him.
Like my children, I lost my father when I was young. It was not what I wanted for myself; it is not what I wanted for them. But the sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.
写的好有真情实感！Had I gone to the reception after the memorial service in the Rodin Sculpture Garden of the Cantor Arts Center, a short stroll from the Stanford Chapel, I would have received a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book The Autobiography of a Yogi, which was handed to each guest, in brown paper wrapping. I also would have walked into a who’s who of Silicon Valley, a gathering of the men, and a smattering of women, who had started the PC and Internet revolutions. John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, and Michael Dell were there, and the younger generation was represented by Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang and Marc Andreessen. But the core members from Apple’s birth were there, too; Woz, Regis McKenna, Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and others. Lee Clow and James Vincent were there, as were NeXT veterans such as Susan Barnes and Mike Slade. The latter came with Bill Gates in tow.
“When Bill had gone to visit Steve at his house in May,” says Slade, “he got to know Steve’s youngest daughter, Evie, because both she and Bill’s daughter, Jennifer, do horse showing. After we got to this reception I kind of ditched Bill because I knew more people there than he does. I kind of felt bad, but I was like, oh, whatever, he’s a big boy. Half an hour goes by and I’ve lost track of him. So I went to find him. In the middle of the sculpture garden they had set up these really long couches in a rectangle where the family was. Laurene was there, and the kids were there. And that’s where Bill was, over on a couch, talking to Evie about horses. He just sat there and had been talking to her for a half an hour. He didn’t talk to anybody else.”
Bill也是个性情中人，知道要多陪陪朋友的女儿
他自己时间宝贵，却没有和任何其他人说话，没有socialTHE LAST MEMORIAL service occurred at the Apple campus in Cupertino, on October 20. Nearly ten thousand people gathered on the lawn within the ellipse formed by the campus’s main buildings. Every Apple retail outlet around the globe had been closed for the occasion, with the store employees gathered to watch video of the event streamed live to them over Apple’s virtual network. Tim Cook was the first speaker. Coldplay and Norah Jones, whose music had been featured in Apple television advertisements, played short sets for the crowd. But two speakers provided the highlights: Jony Ive and Bill Campbell, the Apple board member who had been a close adviser of Steve for many, many years.
看这些文字，仍然会感受到忧伤“Steve changed,” said Campbell. “Yes, he had been charismatic and passionate and brilliant. But I watched him become a great manager. He saw things others couldn’t see. He dismissed as arrogant the tech leaders in the world who thought we were all stupid because we couldn’t use these devices. He said, ‘We’re stupid if they can’t use these devices.’ ” And then Campbell went on to address the Steve he had known personally. “In the last seven and a half years, as he became more vulnerable, he made sure that those he loved, those who were closest to him, knew it. To those people he exuded the phenomenal warmth and humor he shared. He was a true friend.”
Speaking later, Ive too talked about friendship. “He was my closest and most loyal friend. We worked together for fifteen years,” said the Brit, “and he still laughed at the way I said ‘aluminium.’ ” But mostly Ive talked about work, the pleasures of work, and the pleasures of working specifically with Steve. “Steve loved ideas and loved making stuff, and he treated the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence. He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished. His was a victory for beauty, for purity, and, as he would say, for giving a damn.”
The ceremony, which anyone can watch these days on their iMac or iPhone or iPad, or on their Samsung Galaxy or Microsoft Surface if they prefer, was both sober and rousing. “Look right, look left, look ahead of you and behind you,” said Campbell. “You’re it. Results counted. You’re the people who made this happen.” It was an event that celebrated the past, and that also made clear, as Steve would have, that there was much still to be done. “We won’t keep you too long,” said Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, as they launched into a song to close the ceremony. “We know Steve would want you to get back to work.”
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