产品随想
本书写于2009年
introduction
In ten years Jobs has hardly made a single misstep, except one big one: he overlooked Napster and the digital music revolution in 2000. When customers wanted CD burners, Apple was making iMacs with DVD drives and promoting them as video editing machines. “I felt like a dope,” he told Fortune magazine.
也不用苛求乔布斯做对每一件事The workplace was long ago revolutionized by computers, and Microsoft owns it. There’s no way Apple is going to wrest control. But the home is a different matter. Entertainment and communication are going digital. People are communicating by cell phone, instant message, and e-mail, while music and movies are increasingly delivered online. Apple is in a good position to sweep up. All the traits, all the instincts that made him a bad fit for the business world are perfect for the world of consumer devices. The obsession with industrial design, the mastery of advertising, and insistence on crafting seamless user experiences are key when selling high tech to the masses.
Apple has become the perfect vehicle to realize Jobs’s long-held dreams: developing easy-to-use technology for individuals. He’s made—and remade—Apple in his own image. “Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives,” Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist, told me.9 Few corporations are such close mirror images of their founders. “Apple had always reflected the best and worst of Steve’s character,” said Gil Amelio, the CEO whom Jobs replaced. “[Former CEOs] John Sculley, Michael Spindler, and I kept the place going but did not significantly alter the identity of the company. Though I have a lot to be angry about in my relationship with Steve Jobs, I recognize that much about the Apple I loved is tuned to his personality.”10
这话写的真好，“Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives,”Jobs runs Apple with a unique blend of uncompromising artistry and superb business chops. He’s more of an artist than a businessman, but has the brilliant ability to capitalize on his creations. In some ways he’s like Edwin Land, the scientist-industrialist who invented the Polaroid instant camera. Land is one of Jobs’s heroes. Land made business decisions based on what was right as a scientist and as a supporter of civil and feminist rights, rather than as a hardheaded businessman. Jobs also has in himself a bit of Henry Ford, another hero. Ford was a technology democratizer whose mass-production techniques brought automobiles to the masses. There’s a streak of a modern-day Medici—Jobs is a patron of the arts whose sponsorship of designer Jonathan Ive has ushered in a Renaissance for industrial design.
这段写的真好，建议全文背诵He’s an elitist who thinks most people are bozos. But he makes gadgets so easy to use that a bozo can master them.
He’s a mercurial obsessive with a filthy temper who has forged a string of productive partnerships with creative, world-class collaborators: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive, and Pixar director John Lasseter.
He’s a cultural elitist who makes animated movies for kids; an aesthete and antimaterialist who pumps mass-market products out of Asian factories. He promotes them with an unrivaled mastery of the crassest medium, advertising.
He’s an autocrat who has remade a big, dysfunctional corporation into a tight, disciplined ship that executes on his demanding product schedules.Jobs’s charm and charisma produce the best product introductions in the industry, a unique blend of theater and infomercial His magnetic personality has also enabled him to negotiate superb contracts with Disney, the record labels, and ATT signed up for the iPhone without even laying eyes on a prototype.
But where some see control freakery, others see a desire to craft a seamless, end-to-end user experience. Instead of perfectionism, there’s the pursuit of excellence. And instead of screaming abuse, there’s the passion to make a dent in the universe.
Chapter 1 Focus: How Saying “No” Saved Apple
“I’m looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that ‘vision thing’ and I’m not afraid to start from the beginning.”
Apple’s top staff were summoned to an early-morning meeting at company HQ. In shuffled the then-current CEO, Gilbert Amelio, who’d been in charge for about eighteen months. He had patched up the company but had failed to reignite its inventive soul. “It’s time for me to go,” he said, and quietly left the room. Before anyone could react, Steve Jobs entered the room, looking like a bum. He was wearing shorts and sneakers and several days’ worth of stubble. He plonked himself into a chair and slowly started to spin. “Tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he said. Before anyone could reply, he burst out: “It’s the products. The products SUCK! There’s no sex in them anymore.”
一针见血，产品问题Apple’s management reasoned that these “clone” machines would grow the overall Mac market. But it didn’t work. The Mac market remained relatively flat, and the clone makers simply took sales away from Apple. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 95, was taking off like a rocket. Critics charged that Windows 95 was Microsoft’s most shameful rip-off of the Mac operating system yet. But Microsoft’s customers didn’t care. It made Windows PCs a good-enough facsimile of the Mac, and cheap, utilitarian Windows 95 machines flew off the shelves, while Apple’s overpriced, incompatible machines did not.
授权MacOS给其他制造商，必然会抢占苹果自己的市场
因为其他制造商，显然会制作更便宜的替代品
Mac里最有价值的，并不是硬件，而是MacOSApple lost $1.6 billion, its market share plummeted from 10 percent to 3 percent, and the stock collapsed. Amelio laid off thousands of workers, but he was raking in about $7 million in salary and benefits, and was sitting on $26 million in stock, according to the New York Times. He lavishly refurbished Apple’s executive offices and, it was soon revealed, negotiated a golden parachute worth about $7 million. The New York Times called Amelio’s Apple a “kleptocracy.”
这是苹果会死的方式之一“His people had spent a lot of time thinking about key issues like networking and the world of the internet—much more so than anything else around. Better than anything Apple had done, better than NT, and potentially better than what Sun had,” Amelio wrote.
During negotiations, Jobs was very low key. He didn’t oversell. It was “a refreshingly honest approach, especially for Steve Jobs,” Amelio said. “I was relieved he wasn’t coming on like a high-speed train. There were places in the presentation to think and question and discuss.”
The pair hammered out the deal over a cup of tea in Jobs’s kitchen at his house in Palo Alto. The first question was the price, which was based on the stock price. The second question concerned the stock options held by his NeXT employees. Amelio was impressed that he was watching out for his staff. Stock options have traditionally been one of the most important forms of compensation in Silicon Valley, and Jobs has used them many times to recruit and retain key staff.
“I was hooked in by Steve’s energy and enthusiasm,” Amelio said. “I do remember how animated he is on his feet, how his full mental abilities materialize when he’s up and moving, how he becomes more expressive. We headed back for the house with a deal wrapped up.”
需要带有激情地工作Jobs was tiring of cranking out technology products that were quickly obsolete. He wanted to make things that were longer lasting. A good movie, for example. Good storytelling lasts for decades. In 1997, Jobs told Time:
“I don’t think you’ll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years. [But] Snow White has sold 28 million copies, and it’s a 60-year-old production. People don’t read Herodotus or Ho mer to their kids anymore, but everybody watches movies. These are our myths today. Disney puts those myths into our culture, and hopefully Pixar will, too.”
作者这里有误，乔布斯并没有厌倦PC会过时，在他心里，他将PC当成一个一辈子追逐、打磨的产品，因为技术在持续迭代，所以他可以做的越来越好“He had never intended that the deal would include his giving Apple any more than some portion of his attention,”9 Amelio wrote. Earlier in his book, Amelio noted that Jobs wanted to be paid in cash for the purchase of NeXT; he didn’t want any Apple stock. But Amelio insisted on paying a large portion in shares because he didn’t want Jobs walking away. He wanted Jobs committed to Apple, to have “some skin in the game,” as he put it.
Amelio has accused Jobs several times of engineering his dismissal so that he, Jobs, could take over, but presents no direct evidence. It’s more comforting for Amelio to blame his dismissal on maneuvering by Jobs than on the more straightforward explanation that Apple’s board had lost confidence in him.
“What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products,” Jobs would later say. “It was amazing. And I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out. If I couldn’t figure this out . . . how could our customers figure this out?”
“When I joined Apple in 1993 it was wonderful,” Norman said to me in a telephone interview. “You could do creative, innovative things. But it was chaotic. You can’t do that in an organization. You need a few creative people, and the rest get the work done.”12 According to Norman, Apple’s engineers were rewarded for being imaginative and inventive, not for the difficult job of knuckling down and making things work. They would invent all day, but rarely did what they were told. As an executive, this would drive Norman crazy. Orders would be handed down, but incredibly, six months later nothing had happened. “It was ridiculous,” he said.
这才是放飞自我John Warnock, of Adobe, one of Apple’s biggest software partners, said that changed quickly when Jobs returned. “He comes in with a very strong will and you sign up or get out of the way,” Warnock said. “You have to run Apple that way—very direct, very forceful. You can’t do it casually. When Steve attacks a problem, he attacks it with a vengeance. I think he mellowed during the NeXT years and he’s not so mellow anymore.”
“He needed to do a review of pretty much everything that was going on,” said Jim Oliver, who was Jobs’s assistant for several months after Jobs returned to the company. “He talked to all the product groups. He wanted to know the scope and size of the research groups. He was saying, ‘Everything needs to be justified. Do we really need a corporate library?’ ”
Jobs set up shop in a big conference room and called in the product teams one by one. As soon as everyone had convened, he went straight to work. “No introductions, absolutely not,” Peter Hoddie recalled. Hoddie is a hotshot programmer who went on to become the chief architect of Apple’s QuickTime multimedia software. “Someone started taking notes. Steve said, ‘You don’t need to take notes. If it’s important, you’ll remember it.’ ”
The engineers and programmers explained in detail what they were working on. They described their products in depth, explaining how they worked, how they were sold, and what they planned to do next. Jobs listened carefully and asked a lot of questions. He was deeply engaged. At the end of the presentations, he would sometimes ask hypothetical questions: “If money were no object, what would you do?”
这种假设性问题，很考验人的思考
也考验人是否真的喜欢自己所做的东西Jobs’s review took several weeks. It was calm and methodical. There were none of the outbursts for which Jobs is infamous. “Steve said the company has to focus, and each individual group has to do the same,” Oliver said. “It was quite formal. It was very calm. He’d say, ‘Apple is in serious financial straits and we can’t afford to do anything extra.’ He was fairly gentle about it, but firm.”
几本关于乔布斯的书，各自拼凑出了故事的细节“If Apple is going to survive, we’ve got to cut more,” Oliver recalled Jobs saying. “There were no screaming matches. There was no calling people idiots. It was simply, ‘We’ve got to focus and do things we can be good at.’” Several times Oliver saw Jobs draw a simple chart of Apple’s annual revenues on a whiteboard. The chart showed the sharp decline, from $12 billion a year to $10 billion, and then $7 billion. Jobs explained that Apple couldn’t be a profitable $12 billion company, or a profitable $10 billion company, but it could be a profitable $6 billion company.
现在中国的互联网公司，也需要认清估值大大降低的现实Jobs resolved a long-running and damaging patent lawsuit with Microsoft. In return for dropping charges that Microsoft ripped off the Mac with Windows, Jobs persuaded Gates to keep developing the all-important Office suite for the Mac. Without Office, the Mac was doomed. Jobs also got Gates to publicly support the company with a $150 million investment. The investment was largely symbolic, but Wall Street loved it: Apple stock shot up 30 percent. In return, Gates got Jobs to make Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the default web browser on the Mac, an important concession as Microsoft battled Netscape for control of the Web.
Jobs started talks with Gates personally, who then sent Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Gregory Maffei, to hammer out a deal. Maffei went to Jobs’s home and Jobs suggested they go for a walk around leafy Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. “It was a pretty radical change for the relations between the two companies,” said Maffei. “[Jobs] was expansive and charming. He said, ‘These are things that we care about and that matter.’ And that let us cut down the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a lot more ability. He didn’t ask for 23,000 terms. He looked at the whole picture, figured out what he needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring the Apple people around and sell the deal.”
The Brand. Jobs realized that while the products sucked, the Apple brand was still great. He considered the brand as one of the core assets of the company, perhaps the core asset, but it needed to be revitalized. “What are the great brands? Levi’s, Coke, Disney, Nike,” Jobs told Time in 1997.17 “Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn’t been doing anything with this incredible asset. What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think outside the box, people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.”
Jobs held a “bake-off ” between three top advertising agencies for Apple’s account. He told them to pitch a big, bold re-branding campaign. The winner was TBWA\Chiat\Day, who had created Apple’s legendary 1984 Super Bowl ad for the first Mac. As a result, TBWA created the “Think Different” campaign in close collaboration with Jobs.
Killing the clones was unpopular with Mac users who were becoming accustomed to buying cheap Macs from the clone makers, but the decision was the right strategic move for Apple.
Jobs also negotiated new deals with Apple’s suppliers. At the time, both IBM and Motorola were supplying Apple with chips. Jobs decided to pit them against each other. He told them that Apple was only going to go with one of them, and that he expected major concessions from the one he chose. He didn’t drop either supplier, but because Apple was the only major customer of PowerPC chips from both companies, he got the concessions he wanted and, more important, guarantees of the chips’ continued development. “It’s like turning a big tanker,” Jobs told Time magazine. “There were a lot of lousy deals that we’re undoing.”
组合拳好厉害The most important thing Jobs did was radically simplify Apple’s product pipeline. In his modest office near the company’s boardroom (he reportedly hated Amelio’s refurbished offices and refused to occupy them)
真实原因可能是觉得装修的品味不行，哈哈哈哈Jobs canceled hundreds of software projects and almost all the hardware. Amelio had already killed nearly three hundred projects at Apple—from prototype computers to new software—and laid off thousands of workers, but he’d had to stop there. “There’s only so much cutting one CEO can do,” Oliver said. “There was tremendous pressure on him when he did that. It made it much easier for Steve to take the fifty projects that remained and cut them back to ten.”
这位助手说的非常有道理，乔布斯算是捡便宜了The killing of the Newton was widely considered an act of vengeance on Sculley, who had ousted Jobs from Apple in the late 1980s. The Newton was Sculley’s baby, and here was Jobs knifing it to get revenge. After all, the Newton division had just turned its first profit and was about to be spun off into a separate company. A whole new industry for handhelds was springing up, which would soon come to be dominated by the Palm Pilot.
原来当时Newton已经能开始盈利了But to Jobs, the Newton was a distraction. Apple was in the computer business, and that meant it had to focus on computers. It was the same with laser printers. Apple was one of the first companies in the laser printer business and had carved out a big chunk of the market. Many thought Jobs was leaving millions of dollars on the table by getting out of it.
But Jobs argued that Apple should be selling premium computers: well-designed, well-made machines for the top end of the market, like luxury cars. Jobs would argue that all cars did the same thing—they went from A to B—but lots of people paid top dollar for a BMW over a Chevy. Jobs acknowledged that the analogy wasn’t perfect (cars run on anyone’s gas, but Macs couldn’t run Windows software) but argued Apple’s customer base was big enough to earn Apple good margins.
这个比喻还是生动的To Jobs, this was a key point. There was—and always has been—pressure on Apple to sell dirt-cheap computers. But Jobs insisted that Apple would never compete in the commodity computer market, which is a race to the bottom. Between Dell, Compaq, and Gateway, there were half a dozen computer makers, all making essentially the same product, distinguished only by price. Instead of taking on Dell with the cheapest possible computer, Apple would make first-class products to make enough profit to keep developing more first-class products.
逐底竞争在手机行业还是非常激烈There are much greater profits to be made selling a $3,000 machine than a $500 machine, even if you sell fewer of them. By aiming at the middle and high ends of the market, Apple enjoys some of the best profit margins in the business: about 25 percent. Dell’s profit margins are only about 6.5 percent, while Hewlett-Packard’s are even lower, about 5 percent.
原来Dell和HP的利润率这么低Yet in the third quarter of 2007, Apple reported a record profit of $818 million, while Dell, which sells more than five times as many machines, earned only $2.8 million in profit. Yes, a big chunk of Apple’s profit came from the sale of iPods, and Dell was going through a restructuring, but Apple clearly makes much more money on the sale of a $3,500 high-end MacBook Pro laptop (as much as $875) than Dell makes on a $500 system (about $25). This is why Dell bought Alienware, a boutique gaming-machine manufacturer, in 2006—to compete in the high end of the computer market and not sell only the cheapest computers possible.
这个对比好悬殊
原来当年Dell购买外星人，是为了冲向高端，但现在外星人，也要死不活的样子It’s been clear for years that Apple doesn’t compete in the same market as PC companies, but for many years its health as a business was measured by the number of machines it sold, not the value of those machines. Success in the PC market has traditionally been measured by quantity rather than quality. Pundits and industry-watch Gartner Inc. made repeated calls for Apple to exit the hardware business because its market share in the 2000s slipped into low single digits. But Apple goes after the most profitable segment of the market, not the highest number of machines.
这种以出货量来衡量，本身就不对The cutbacks and reorganization weren’t easy on Jobs, who put in long, grueling hours. “I’d never been so tired in my life,” Jobs told Fortune in 1998. “I’d come home at about ten o’clock at night and flop straight into bed, then haul myself out at six the next morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. She supported me and kept the family together with a husband in absentia.”
朝七晚十，也是不容易的
但和国内互联网的时长节奏比起来，还是好多了
而且乔布斯做的还是决策性质的思考，并不是非常累的执行层面He sometimes wondered if he was doing the right thing. He was already CEO of Pixar, which was enjoying the success of Toy Story. He knew that returning to Apple would put pressure on Pixar, his family, and his reputation. “I wouldn’t be honest if some days I didn’t question whether I made the right decision in getting involved,” he told Time. “But I believe life is an intelligent thing—that things aren’t random.”
Jobs was mostly worried about failing. Apple was in dire trouble, and he might not be able to save it. He’d already earned a place in the history books; now he didn’t want to wreck it. In the 1998 interview with Fortune, Jobs said that he looked to his hero Bob Dylan for inspiration. One of the things that Jobs admired about Dylan was his refusal to stand still. Many successful artists at some point in their careers atrophy: they keep doing what made them successful in the first place, but they don’t evolve. “If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists,” Jobs said. “Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.”
灵感与激励的源泉Jobs may have fired someone on the spot, but it wasn’t in Oliver’s presence—and he accompanied Jobs almost everywhere for three months as his personal assistant. If Jobs did fire anyone, Oliver doubts he did it more than once. “But the stories certainly got around and put people on their toes,” Oliver said. “These stories get repeated, but I never found the person he did it to.”
我也相信是杜撰的Based on what he’d heard, Oliver expected Jobs to be an unpredictable, bad-tempered basket case, and was pleasantly surprised to find him quite calm. Jobs’s outbursts are overplayed, Oliver said. He did witness a few temper flare-ups but they were “very rare” and often premeditated. “The public dressing-downs were clearly calculated,” Oliver said.
再次回到苹果，乔布斯已经能掌控自己的脾气。Jobs’s plan was simple: cut back so that the core A team—his cadre of ex-NeXT execs, and the company’s best programmers, engineers, designers, and marketers—could again develop innovative products, and keep improving and updating them. “If we could make four great product platforms that’s all we need,” Jobs explained in a 1998 interview. “We can put our A team on every single one of them instead of having a B or a C team on any. We can turn them much faster.”
Jobs made sure that Apple’s organizational chart was streamlined and straightforward. His new managerial flowchart was pretty simple: Jon Rubinstein ran engineering, Avie Tevanian ran software, Jonathan Ive headed up the design group, Tim Cook ran operations, and Mitch Mandich ran worldwide sales. Jobs insisted on a clear chain of command all the way down the line: everyone in the company knew whom they reported to and what was expected of them. “The organization is clean and simple to understand, and very accountable,” Jobs told Business Week.26 “Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.”
Bill Gates was mystified by the iMac’s success. “The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors,” he said. “It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.” Gates couldn’t see that beyond the iMac’s unusual colors, the computer had other merits that would make it a hit with consumers: easy setup, friendly software, and a distinct personality.
Jobs focused Apple on a small selection of products it could execute well. But that concentration has also been applied to the individual products themselves. To avoid “feature creep”—the growing list of features that is often added to new products during their design stage and after their initial release—Jobs insists on a tight focus. Many cell phones are shining examples of feature creep. They do everything under the sun, but basic functions like adjusting the volume or checking voicemail are sometimes obscured by the devices’ overwhelming complexity. To avoid confusing the consumer with an endless array of complex choices, one of Jobs’s favorite mantras at Apple is: “Focus means saying no.”
不用堆叠Feature
至今的Mac和iPhone，慢慢已经丧失那种简洁与干净Jobs wasn’t 100 percent sure of the decision himself, said Hoddie, but he trusted his gut that the floppy was becoming obsolete. The iMac was designed as an Internet computer, and owners would use the Net to transfer files or download software, Jobs reasoned.
有时候直觉和判断，建立在过去错了很多的基础上Jobs also keeps Apple’s product lineup very simple and focused. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Apple fielded at most half a dozen major product lines: two major desktop and laptop computers, some monitors, the iPod, and iTunes. Later, it added the Mac mini, the iPhone, the AppleTV, and some iPod accessories, like woolly socks and armbands. Contrast Jobs’s insistence on maintaining a tight focus with other companies in the tech industry, especially the giants, like Samsung or Sony, which carpet bomb the market with hundreds of different products. Over the years, Sony has sold six hundred different models of the Walkman.
所以苹果成为了苹果，三星还是三星
不过令人欣慰的是，三星在手机层面，还是拿出了一些很好的成果，至少是在硬件层面、工业设计层面上
缺少自己的核心操作系统，还是个硬伤Sony can’t release a product—any product—without multiple models at launch. This is usually perceived as good for customers. Conventional wisdom holds that more choice is always a good thing. But each variation costs the company time, energy, and resources. While a giant like Sony might have the means, Apple needed to focus and limit the number of variations it released just to get anything out the door.
Sony’s CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, has expressed envy of companies with a narrow product lineup. “Sometimes I wish there were just three products,” he has lamented.
其实大家都知道产品线聚焦会更好，但是大家无法学习
无法学习的原因是啥？是因为害怕削减低端机型后，又无法在中高端层面，和苹果竞争Of course, with the iPod, Apple now has a Sony-like lineup of products. There are more than half a dozen different models, from the bare-bones Shuffle to the high-end video iPod and the iPhone, priced at every $50 price point between $100 and $350. But to get there took Apple several years—it didn’t all happen at launch.
其实现在苹果的产品线，已经开始庞大，也是因为她现在又更多资源，同时也希望尽可能覆盖不同心理价位的客户At a personal level, Jobs focuses on his areas of expertise and delegates all else. At Apple, he is very hands-on in areas he knows well: developing new products, overseeing marketing, and giving keynote speeches. At Pixar, Jobs was just the opposite. He delegated the moviemaking process to his capable lieutenants. Jobs’s main role at Pixar was cutting deals with Hollywood, a skill at which he excels.
Over the years, the list of products Jobs hasn’t done has grown quite long, from handhelds to Web tablets and low-end, bare-bones computers. “We look at a lot of things, but I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as I am of the ones we have done,” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal.
Jobs has admitted he’s done a lot of thinking about a PDA, but by the time Apple was ready—in the early 2000s—he’d decided the device’s time had already passed. PDAs were fast being superseded by cell phones with address books and calendar functions. “We got enormous pressure to do a PDA and we looked at it and we said, ‘Wait a minute, 90 percent of the people that use these things just want to get information out of them, they don’t necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis and cellphones are going to do that,’” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal.31 He was right: witness the iPhone. (And the Palm, which hasn’t adapted well, is now on the ropes.)
There have also been calls for Apple to sell to big business, the so-called enterprise market. Jobs has resisted because selling to companies—no matter how big the potential market—is outside of Apple’s focus. Since Jobs’s return, Apple has focused on consumers. “The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations,” Jobs has said. “The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.”
Get informed; don’t guess. Make a thorough inspection of the company and base your decisions on data, not hunches. It’s tough but fair.
Stay focused; don’t allow feature creep. Keep things simple, which is a virtue in a world of overly complex technology.
Chapter 2 Despotism: Apple’s One-Man Focus Group
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
Computer platforms are doomed unless they can attract talented programmers to create applications for them, just like game consoles are doomed unless they can attract great games. From the Mac to the Palm Pilot and the Xbox, the success of a platform is primarily determined by the software that can run on it. In some cases this is the so-called killer app—an essential piece of software that guarantees the success of the platform, like Office on Windows, or the game Halo on the Xbox.
非常期待Apple Vision Pro里，会跑出怎样的Killer AppBut Ratzlaff thought it was a shame to put an ugly facade on such an elegant system, and he soon had designers creating mockups of new interface designs. He told me that the mockups were designed to show off many of the advanced technologies under NeXTstep’s hood—especially its powerful graphics and animation capabilities.
在苹果的氛围里，大家都会思考，如何去创造最好、最伟大的产品，不妥协，不将就“You’re the guys who designed Mac OS, right?” he asked them. They sheepishly nodded yes. “Well, you’re a bunch of idiots.”
The design team worked for three weeks, night and day, building working prototypes in Macromedia Director, a multimedia authoring tool often used for mocking up custom interfaces for software or websites. “We knew our jobs were on the line so we were pretty worried,” Ratzlaff said. “He [Jobs] came over to the offices. We spent the whole afternoon with him. He was blown away. From that point on, it was clear there was going to be a new user interface for OS X.”
Jobs was so impressed that he said to Ratzlaff: “This is the first evidence of three-digit intelligence at Apple I’ve seen yet.” Ratzlaff was happy to take the compliment. For Jobs, acknowledging you have an IQ higher than 100 is a glowing endorsement. Confident that their jobs were safe, Ratzlaff and the designers celebrated with a few six-packs of beer. But they became nervous when they saw Jobs coming back down the corridor with Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing. Luckily, Jobs was pleased. As Jobs approached, they heard him tell Schiller excitedly, “You’ve got to see this.”
The team had the working code running on another machine that was placed next to the Director demo. When they’d show the working code to Jobs, he’d lean forward, his nose to the screen, and examine them closely, moving from the demo to the prototype and back again.
To simplify things, Jobs ordered as many settings as possible to be collected together into a single System Preferences box that lived in a new navigation element called “the Dock.”
感谢乔布斯的坚持，让我们现在能有这么优秀、卓越的操作系统Critically for Jobs, the system required the designers to create a dedicated button in the window toolbar to switch it on and off. Jobs decided, in the interest of simplicity, to take the button away. He could live with resizing windows, but not the additional button cluttering the menu bar. “The extra button wasn’t justified by the functionality,” Ratzlaff said. Jobs’s decision to excise that button illustrates his obsession with simplicity, and his long-running desire to build systems as minimalist in design as possible.
CEO对设置中的一个选项，如此在意，真是非常非常难得But then Jobs made what seemed like an odd suggestion: that the buttons should be colored like traffic stoplights: red to close the window, yellow to shrink it, and green to expand it. “When we heard that, we felt that was a strange thing to associate with a computer,” Ratzlaff said. “But we worked on it for a little while and he was right.” The color of the button implicitly suggested the consequence of clicking it, especially the red button, which suggested “danger” if the user clicked it but didn’t mean to close the window.
While it was no secret Apple was working on OS X, the fact that it had a new interface was. The interface was designed in intense secrecy. Only the handful of people working on it knew it was being overhauled. One of Jobs’s stated rationales for keeping the new interface secret was to prevent others—Microsoft in particular—from copying it.
But more important, Jobs didn’t want to kill sales of the current Macintosh operating system. He wanted to avoid what’s known as the Osborne effect, in which a company commits suicide by announcing cool technology still under development, before it is ready to be sold.
确实有道理，如果知道明年的iPhone会大改、会有更好的性能、用户界面，那我也不会愿意买今年的产品As soon as OS X development started, Jobs directed everyone at Apple to stop criticizing the current Mac OS in public. For years, Apple’s programmers had been quite frank about the system’s problems and shortcomings. “OS X was his baby, so he knew how great it was,” said Peter Hoddie. “But he said for the next few years we’ve got to focus on Mac OS because we’ll never get there without it. He was like Khrushchev, banging his shoe on the table. ‘You’ve got to support the Mac OS, kids. Get this through your heads.’”
Jobs unveiled OS X in January 2000 at Macworld, after nearly two and a half years of work by almost one thousand programmers.
1000个工程师，开发2年半！！！
还是苹果的开发工程师，可怕可怕While introducing OS X at Macworld, Jobs also announced that he was becoming Apple’s permanent CEO, which drew huge applause from the keynote crowd. Several Apple employees have noted that Jobs didn’t become the company’s permanent CEO until after OS X shipped in March 2001. By this point, Jobs had been at Apple’s helm for two and a half years, and had replaced almost all the directors and senior staff, fixed marketing and advertising, reinvigorated hardware with the iMac, and reorganized sales. Ratzlaff noted that with OS X, Jobs had overhauled the company and all of Apple’s major products. “He was waiting for the last big parts of the company to be running to his standards before he took on the role of Apple CEO,” said Ratzlaff.
For many years, Apple encouraged strict adherence to its Human Interface Guidelines, a standards bible designed to ensure a consistent user experience across software applications. The HIG told designers where to put menus, what kind of commands they should contain, and how to design dialog boxes. The idea was that all Mac software would behave alike, no matter which company it came from.
所以其实你如果自己有很好的设计感、很有的设计能力，其实不用局限于HIG，HIG只是为一些个人开发者，提供了最最基本的指引，及格线而已The guidelines were first drafted in the 1980s, when computers were used primarily to produce things, such as creating and printing out documents. But in the Internet age, computers are used for communication and media consumption as much as they are for printing documents and editing video. Software for playing movies or videoconferencing with friends can be much simpler than applications like Photoshop or Excel. Often, only a few functions are required, and all the drop-down menus and dialog boxes can be jettisoned in favor of a few simple buttons. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a steady shift toward single-purpose mini-applications in both Mac (Widgets) and Windows (Gadgets).
应用与交互范式的转移，AI世代会发生新的改变At first, the designs were presented on a computer, but the team found that flashing them on and off screen was a laborious process, so they switched to printing out the designs on large glossy sheets of paper. The printouts were spread over a large conference table and could be quickly sorted through. Jobs and the designers found it easy to pick out the designs they liked from the pile, saying this texture should go with that shape. The method proved to be so effective that most of Apple’s designers have since adopted it.
原来设计专业的，都喜欢打印出来、或者模型出来，来做对比和思考At the next meeting Jobs showed up with a brochure from Hewlett-Packard with the HP logo in brushed metal, resembling a high-end kitchen appliance. “I like this one,” Jobs told the group. “See what you can do.”
乔布斯还是从对手身上，学习了非常多的东西Jobs is intimately involved in the design process. He brings a lot of ideas to the table and always makes suggestions for improving designs. Jobs’s contribution is not just choosing what he likes and dislikes. “He’s not, ‘this is bad, this is good,’ ” said Hoddie. “He’s really part of the design.”
2011年后，苹果痛失首席设计师Jobs is never interested in technology for technology’s sake. He never loads up on bells and whistles, cramming features into a product simply because they’re easy to add. Just the opposite. Jobs pares down the complexity of his products until they are as simple and easy to use as possible. Lots of Apple’s products are designed from the user’s point of view.
“We don’t see how you convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot—not just a stick,” Jobs said. “And the carrot is: We’re gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it’s only gonna cost you a dollar a song.”
Jobs is extremely customer-centric. In interviews, he has said the starting point for the iPod wasn’t a small hard drive or a new chip, but the user experience. “Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jonathan Ive said about the iPod. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.”
One of the most important parts of Apple’s design process is simplification. The simplicity of Apple’s products stems from choices being taken away from the customer. For Jobs, less is always more. “As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand,” he told the Times.
Former CEO John Sculley said Jobs concentrated as much on what was left out as on the stuff that was included. “What makes Steve’s methodology different than everybody else’s is that he always believed that the most important decisions you make are not the things that you do, but the things you decide not to do,” Sculley told me.
不做什么，有时候与做什么同样重要Many consumer electronics products are designed with the notion that more features mean better value. Engineers are often pressured to add features to new versions of their products, which are marketed as “new and improved.” A lot of this feature creep is driven by consumer expectations. Newer models are expected to have new capabilities; otherwise, where’s the incentive to upgrade? Plus, customers tend to look for devices with the most features. More features equals better value. Apple tries to resist this. The first iPod had the hardware for FM radio and voice recording, but these features were not implemented, lest they complicate the device. “What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, an almost . . . unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product,” Ive said. “But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”
A lot of companies like to say they’re customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This so-called user-centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies of users locked in a conference room. He plays with the new technology himself, noting his own reactions to it, which is given as feedback to his engineers. If something is too hard to use, Jobs gives instructions for it to be simplified. Anything that is unnecessary or confusing is to be removed. If it works for him, it’ll work for Apple’s customers.
极强同理心，地球最强产品经理John Sculley told me that Jobs always focused on the user experience. “He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be,” Sculley said. “But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’”
Creativity in art and technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group, Jobs doesn’t use them either. Jobs can’t innovate by asking a focus group what they want—they don’t know what they want. Like Henry Ford once said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
Whitney said Sony would never have invented the Walkman if it had listened to its users. The company actually conducted a lot of research before releasing it. “All the marketing data said the Walkman was going to fail. It was unambiguous. No one would buy it. But [founder Akio] Morita pushed it through anyway. He knew. Jobs is the same. He has no need for user groups because he is a user-experience expert.”
“We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base,” Jobs told Business Week. “We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Jobs is Apple’s one-man focus group. One of his great strengths is that he’s not an engineer. Jobs has no formal training in engineering or programming. He doesn’t have a business degree. In fact, he doesn’t have a degree at all. He’s a college dropout. Jobs doesn’t think like an engineer. He thinks like a layman, which makes him the perfect test bed for Apple’s products. He is Apple’s Everyman, the ideal Apple customer. “Technically he’s at the serious hobbyist level,” said Dag Spicer, a senior curator with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “He had no formal training, but he’s followed technology since a teenager. He’s technically aware enough to follow trends, like a good stock analyst. He has a layman’s view. It’s a great asset.”
Don’t be afraid to start from scratch. Mac OS X was worth doing over, even if it took one thousand programmers three years of nonstop toil to do it.
现在的苹果，我会认为，还是会有勇气，去重做系统
visionOS就是证明Avoid the Osborne effect. Keep the new goodies secret until they’re ready to ship, lest customers stop buying the current stuff while waiting for the new stuff.
Don’t shit on your own doorstep. Apple’s engineers hated the old Mac OS, but Jobs ordered a positive spin on it.
非常有意思，哈哈哈Find an easy way to present new ideas. If it means spreading glossy sheets all over a big conference table, get a big printer.