Chapter 3 Perfectionism: Product Design and the Pursuit of Excellence
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
——Steve JobsJobs is a stickler for detail. He’s a fussy, pain-in-the-ass perfectionist who drives subordinates crazy with his persnickety demands. But where some see picky perfectionism, others see the pursuit of excellence.
There are lots and lots of meetings and brainstorming sessions. The work is revised over and over, with an emphasis on simplification as it evolves. It’s a fluid, iterative process that sometimes means going back to the drawing board, or scrapping the product altogether.
Jobs’s pursuit of excellence is the secret of Apple’s great design. For Jobs, design isn’t decoration. It’s not the surface appearance of a product. It’s not about the color or the stylistic details. For Jobs, design is the way the product works. Design is function, not form. And to properly figure out how the product works, it has to be thoroughly hashed out in the design process. As Jobs explained in a 1996 interview with Wired: “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”
The original Macintosh took three years to design. Three years of incredibly hard work. It wasn’t knocked out in the hectic schedule typical of many technology products. It went through revision after revision. Every aspect of its design, from the precise beige of its case to the symbols on the keyboard, was exhaustively worked on, and worked on, and worked on, until it was right. As the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi said: “Simplicity is complexity resolved.”
“When you start looking at a problem and think it’s really simple, you don’t understand how complex the problem really is,” Jobs told the Mac’s designers in 1983. “Once you get into the problem . . . you see that it’s complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level. That’s what we wanted to do with the Mac.”
Of course, part of design is aesthetics. Jobs’s interest in computer aesthetics goes all the way back to the company’s first computer, the Apple I. Designed by Steve Wozniak and assembled by hand in Jobs’s parents’ garage, the Apple I was little more than a bare-bones motherboard covered in a few chips. At the time, personal computers were sold to a tiny niche audience: bearded engineers and hobbyists. They bought their computers in parts and soldered them together on a workshop table. They added their own power supply, monitor, and case. Most built cases from wood, usually old orange crates. One put his Apple I motherboard in a leather briefcase—a lamp cord trailing out the back—to make the first laptop.
好有趣的岁月“It was clear to me that for every hardware hobbyist who wanted to assemble his own computer, there were a thousand people who couldn’t do that but wanted to mess around with programming . . . just like I did when I was 10. My dream for the Apple II was to sell the first real packaged computer . . . I got a bug up my rear that I wanted the computer in a plastic case.”
果然后面的iMac，满足了乔布斯儿时的愿望
我们会看到乔布斯、一鸣，都是对儿时的梦想，念念不忘，然后开始做事，connect the dotsNo one else was putting computers in plastic cases. To figure out what it might look like, Jobs began scouting department stores for inspiration. He found it in the kitchen section of Macy’s while looking at Cuisinart food processors. Here was what the Apple II needed: a nice molded plastic case with smooth edges, muted colors, and a lightly textured surface.
审美没有技巧，只能是多看Knowing nothing about industrial design, Jobs went looking for a professional designer. Typically, he started at the top. He approached two of Silicon Valley’s top design firms, but was rejected because he didn’t have enough money. He offered them stock in Apple, which was worthless at the time but would soon be worth millions; they refused. They’d later regret that decision.
主要当时谁也没想到，最终会是Apple胜出Asking around, Jobs eventually found Jerry Manock, a freelance designer who’d just left Hewlett-Packard a month before and needed work. It was a good match. Jobs had only a little money, and Manock was nearly broke. “When Steve asked me to design the case for the Apple II, it didn’t occur to me to say no,” he said. “But I did ask to be paid in advance.”
这个家伙赚翻了，哈哈哈Jobs wanted it to look pretty when users opened the case, and asked Manock to have the cases chromed inside, but Manock ignored him and Jobs didn’t press it.
Manock prepared twenty for the Faire, but only three were finished with circuit boards inside. Jobs put these machines on the front desk. He stacked the remaining empty machines—very professionally—at the back of the booth. “Compared to the primitive stuff on view elsewhere at the Faire, our finished plastic blew everyone away,” recalled Manock. “Even though Apple was only a few months old, the plastic cases made it look like we had already achieved high-volume production.”
展台设计的技巧，贩卖产品的技巧The molded case helped Jobs position the Apple II as a consumer item, just as Hewlett-Packard had done with the pocket calculator. Before Bill Hewlett designed the first “pocket” calculator, most calculators were large, expensive, desktop models. Early HP marketing studies estimated that there was a market for perhaps fifty thousand pocket calculators. But Hewlett instinctively felt that scientists and engineers would love a small, pocketable calculator in a slim plastic case. He was right. HP sold fifty thousand of the iconic HP-35 calculators in the first few months. The packaging made all the difference.
HP的计算机历史
如一鸣在字节创业前三四年会去盘点世界上最伟大公司成立的三四年会怎样的情形一样
需要提前关注和学习、了解，避免到时来不及Jobs had hoped the Apple II would appeal to software junkies, rather than only hobbyists interested in tinkering with electronics, and so it did. A couple of student programmers from Harvard, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, created VisiCalc—the first spreadsheet—which soon became the Apple II’s “killer ap.” VisiCalc allowed tedious business calculations to be automated. Business ledgers that used to take hours to calculate by accountants were suddenly trivially easy to maintain. VisiCalc—and the Apple II—became a must-have for every business.
In the early 1980s, design was becoming a major force in industry, especially in Europe. The unexpected success of Memphis, a product- and furniture-design collective from Italy that dominated design during that period, convinced Jobs that the time was right to bring the flair and quality of high design to the business of computers. Jobs was especially interested in crafting a uniform design language for all the company’s products. He wanted to give the hardware the same design consistency that Apple was starting to achieve in software, and make it instantly recognizable as an Apple product. The company set up a design competition, instructing candidates plucked from design magazines like I.D. to draft seven products, each named after one of Snow White’s dwarfs.
顶级的设计，是让苹果家产品有统一的设计语言，就如同苹果家的软件一样The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German industrial designer in his mid-thirties who, like Jobs, was a college dropout with strong drive and ambition. Esslinger had gained notice designing TVs for Sony. In 1983, he emigrated to California and set up his own studio, Frog Design, Inc., providing exclusive services to Apple for an unprecedented $100,000 a month, plus billable time and expenses.
好昂贵啊！！！Searching for a new washing machine and dryer, Jobs roped his whole family into a two-week debate about which model to select. The Jobs family didn’t base its decision on a quick glance at the features and the price, like most other families would. Instead, the discussion revolved around American versus European design, the amount of water and detergent consumed, the speed of the wash, and the longevity of the clothes.
“We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.”
In the end, Jobs opted for German appliances, which he thought were “too expensive” but washed clothes well with little water and detergent. “They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about,” Jobs said. “These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.”
Ive said keeping it simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that effort,” he said. “We kept going back to the beginning again and again. ‘Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?’ It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with.”
“It’s really much more potent when you don’t put on a veneer pretending to be powerful,” he said. “I see it as a tool. It’s an extremely powerful tool. There’s not a plastic facade that adds to the fact that it’s a really powerful tool. It’s very, very obvious that it is what it is.” He continued, “From a designer’s point of view, it’s not an appearance game we’re playing. It is very utilitarian. It’s the use of material in a very minimalist way.”
“I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use,” he said. “I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company: how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt about this cheeky—almost rebellious—company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.”
“There’s no other product that changes function like the computer,” he said. “The iMac can be a jukebox, a tool for editing video, a way to organize photographs. You can design on it, write on it. Because what it does is so new, so changeable, it allows us to use new materials, to create new forms. The possibilities are endless. I love that.”
我们热爱电脑的，也是这种无尽的可能性After leaving Newcastle, Ive cofounded the Tangerine design collective in London in 1989, where he worked on a wide range of products, from toilets to hair combs. But he found contract work frustrating. As an outsider, he had little influence on the outcome of his ideas within the company.
外包设计师无法把控自己的最终成果
但有例外，如果你足够大牌In 1992, he got a call from Apple asking him to submit some concepts for early laptops. Apple was so impressed, Ive was hired as a designer and moved to California. But as Apple went into decline during this period, design was relegated to a dusty basement. Apple’s managers started to look to the competition for inspiration. They wanted focus groups. Ive came close to quitting. He worked independently and alone. He’d continue to design prototype products, but they rarely got any further than a shelf in his office. Jobs found Ive working by himself in his office, recognized his obvious talent, and promoted him.
向竞品对齐、做焦点小组，就意味着苹果也开始失去方向Even Sculley was locked out of the design studio.
哈哈哈，居然Sculley也没让进When it comes to tools, no expense is spared. Instead of hiring more and more designers, Ive puts his resources into prototyping machinery. “By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare,” Ive said. “In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.”
那种用心，隔着地球也能感受到The small, intimate team is key to being creative and productive, Ive says. He denies that Apple’s innovations came from one individual designer or another; rather, they came from the team working together. It’s a process of “collectively learning stuff and getting better at what we do. One of the hallmarks of the team is inquisitiveness, being excited about being wrong because that means you’ve discovered something new.”
好奇心After Digweed first met Ive, it took him months to discover what Ive’s real role was at Apple. “Jonathan was saying how they’d designed different things and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, my God. His work is used by creative people across the world every day but he has no ego about it.’”
The task, Ive said, is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense how difficult this thing was.”
The simplicity is the outcome of a design process characterized by generating a lot of ideas and then refining them—the same way Apple’s software is designed. The process involves multiple teams at Apple, not just the designers. Engineers, programmers, and even marketers are also involved. Ive’s industrial designers are involved from the get-go of every project. “We get involved really early on,” said Ive. “There’s a very natural, consistent collaboration with Steve, with the hardware and software people. I think that’s one of the things that’s distinctive at Apple. When we’re developing ideas there’s not a final architecture established. I think it’s in those early stages when you’re still very open to exploration, that you find opportunities.”
This is not always the case at other companies. Jobs has said it’s like seeing a cool prototype car at a car show, but when the production model appears four years later, it sucks. “And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! . . . What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”
每一个环节都打一些折扣“The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” Ive told Time. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”
Robert Brunner, a partner at Pentagram Design and former head of Apple’s Design Group, said, crucially, Apple’s prototypes are always designed with the manufacturing process very much in mind. “Apple’s designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming,” he said. “They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas.”
这个时间的分配，有点厉害Apple’s iterative design method is akin to a technique known to psychologists studying problem solving as “generate and test.” To solve a problem, all the possible solutions are generated and then tested to see if they offer a solution. It’s a form of trial and error, but not as random; it’s guided and purposeful. Apple’s designers create dozens of possible solutions, constantly testing their work to see if it is approaching a solution. The process is essentially the same as techniques used in a lot of creative endeavors, from writing to creating music. A writer will often start by banging out a rough draft, spilling out words and ideas with little thought for structure or cohesion, and then go back and edit his work, sometimes multiple times. “Trying to simplify and refine is enormously challenging,” Ive said.
“I think one thing that is typical about our work at Apple is caring about the smallest details,” Ive said. “I think sometimes that’s seen as more of a craft activity than a mass-production one. But I think that’s very important.”
“You can see our preoccupation with a part of the product that you’ll never see,”
The foot of the iMac’s aluminum base is made from a special nonslip material to prevent the machine from shifting when the screen is tilted. Why a special material? Because Ive doesn’t like rubber feet. Rubber feet would have been trivially easy to add to the base, and few people would notice whether they were there or not. But to Ive, using rubber feet doesn’t advance the state of the art. Ive is driven to learn through creating new products and perfecting new manufacturing processes.
可怕的细节，以前从来没关注过iMac的底部“I love that we took one raw piece of material—a thick piece of aluminum—and achieved that sort of utility: you bend it, stamp a hole into it and anodize it. . . . We spent time in Northern Japan talking to a master of metal-forming, to get a certain kind of detail. We love taking things to pieces, understanding how things are made. The product architecture starts to be informed by really understanding the material.”
“We can now do things with plastic that we were previously told were impossible,” Ive told the Design Museum. “Twin-shooting materials gives us a range of functional and formal opportunities that really didn’t exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors, enabling us to create a design which was dense and completely sealed.”
chapter 4 Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos
“In our business, one person can’t do anything anymore. You create a team of people around you.” ——Steves Jobs
When Jobs was conducting his product review after returning to the company, he “steved” most of Apple’s products. But he made sure to keep the best talent on staff, among them people like Jonathan Ive and Cordell Ratzlaff. When Jobs wanted to open a chain of Apple retail stores in 2001, the first thing he did—the very first thing—was find an advisor. He was afraid of getting burned, and so went and recruited himself an expert, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, who was running the Gap. Jobs invited Drexler to sit on Apple’s board and advise the company as it got Apple’s retail chain off the ground. Jobs views the talent on Apple’s staff as a competitive advantage that puts the company ahead of its rivals. He searches for the best people in a given field and puts them on the payroll.
计算机等科技行业，无论硬件还是软件，人都是最最关键的因素“I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high,” said Jobs. “That’s what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually to—to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having ‘A’ players. In everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world.”
确实是非常重要的独立贡献“I refer to those guys as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” jokes Brad Bird, director of Pixar’s The Incredibles. “Ed, who invented this cool medium and is the designer of the human machine that is Pixar, is the Father. John, its driving creating force, is the Son. And you-know-who is the Holy Ghost.”
有意思，哈哈哈In Hollywood, studios fund story ideas—the famous Hollywood pitch, the big concept. Instead of funding pitches and story ideas, Pixar funds the career development of its employees. As Nelson explains, “We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people.”
这个逻辑在冬天来的时候，是站不住脚的
新冠疫情结束时的皮克斯裁员，就证明了这一点At the heart of the company’s “people investment” culture is Pixar University, an on-the-job training program that offers hundreds of courses in art, animation, and filmmaking. All of Pixar’s employees are encouraged to take classes in whatever they like, whether it’s relevant to their job or not. At other studios, there’s a clear distinction between the “creatives,” the “techies,” and the crew. But Pixar’s unique culture doesn’t distinguish between them—everyone who works on the movies is considered an artist. Everyone works together to tell stories, and as such, everyone is encouraged to devote at least four hours of the workweek to class. The classes are filled with people from all levels of the organization: janitors sit next to department heads. “We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners,” said Nelson.
这是一个好有趣的企业文化
值得学习
皮克斯大学At Pixar, they say “art is a team sport.” It’s a mantra, oft repeated. No one can make a movie alone, and a team of good storytellers can fix a bad story, but a poor team cannot. If a script isn’t working, the whole team works together to fix it. The writers, the animators, and the director all pitch in without regard to their official role or job title. “This model tackles one of the most enduring people problems in any industry: How do you not only attract wildly talented people to work in your company, but also get those wildly talented people to continuously produce great work together?” said LaBarre.
软件的开发，也越来越像艺术，单打独斗很难
单打独斗你可以一直保持小而美
但如果要变大、取得规模效应，那必须学会克服组织的重力The answer is that Pixar has created a nurturing, fun place to work. In Hollywood, filmmakers spend a lot of time jockeying for position, stabbing collaborators in the back to gain advantage, and constantly worrying whether they are in or out. It’s hyper-competitive and insecure, and it burns people out. At Pixar, the process is all about collaboration, teamwork, and learning. There’s pressure, of course, especially when movies approach deadlines, but the workplace is generally nurturing and supportive. The opportunity to learn, to create, and, most of all, to work with other talented people is the reward. Plus the generous stock options, of course. At Pixar, the animators are getting rich and having fun, too. As the Latin inscription on the Pixar University crest says, Alienus Non Diutius, Alone No Longer.
持续变好，才能一直留在团队里As Jobs boasted: “Pixar’s got by far and away the best computer graphics talent in the entire world, and it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of film. There’s really no one else in the world who could do this stuff. It’s really phenomenal. We’re probably close to ten years ahead of anybody else.”
“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay,” Jobs wrote in a 1984 essay that was printed in the inaugural issue of Macworld magazine.
“It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found that my job has sometimes exactly been that—to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up and I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun,” Jobs said in a 1995 interview.
Jobs likes to work in small teams. He didn’t want the original Mac team to exceed one hundred members, lest it become unfocused and unmanageable. Jobs firmly believes that small teams of talented employees run circles around larger groups. At Pixar, he tried to ensure that the company never grew to more than a few hundred people. When asked to compare Apple and Pixar, Jobs attributed much of Pixar’s success to its small size. “Apple has some pretty amazing people, but the collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people that I have ever witnessed,” Jobs told Fortune in 1998. “There’s a person who’s got a Ph.D. in computer-generated plants—3-D grass and trees and flowers. There’s another who is the best in the world at putting imagery on film. Also, Pixar is more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it is much smaller. Pixar’s got 450 people. You could never have the collection of people that Pixar has now if you went to two thousand people.”
苹果的中高层加起来，确实也就是几百人，也Make SenseTo some extent, Jobs’s preference for small development teams at Apple today is the same thing: a simulation of a garage startup inside a big company with more than 21,000 employees.
One source told me that Ive once confided that he wouldn’t be able to do the work he does without Jobs’s input. Ive may be a creative genius, but he needs Jobs’s guiding hand.
Jobs is the “product picker,” in the parlance of Silicon Valley. Product picker is a term used by Silicon Valley venture capitalists to identify the key product person at startup companies. By definition, a startup must succeed on its first product. If it doesn’t, it goes under. But not all startups start with a product. Some are a group of engineers who have a lot of talent and ideas but haven’t yet figured out what product they want to develop. This happens all the time in the Valley. To ensure the success of a startup like this, there has to be an individual who’s got a nose for what that product should be. It’s not always the CEO or a top executive, and they may not have expertise in management or marketing—their skill is picking out the key product from a torrent of ideas.
这里需要的品质是，对各种新技术，各种新的趋势，需要保持关注At Apple, Jobs has successfully picked and guided to development a hit product every two or three years—the iMac, the iPod, the MacBook, the iPhone. “Apple is a hit-driven company,” said Moore. “It’s had one hit after another.”
乔布斯去世的这12年，苹果的Hit是什么？For much of the last century, there were myriad companies run by similar strong-willed product czars, from Thomas Watson Jr. at IBM to Walt Disney. But the number of successful companies with product czars at the helm, like Sony under Akio Morita, has dwindled in recent years. Many contemporary companies are run by committee. “What’s missing today is that these kind of entrepreneurs are no longer there,” lamented Dieter Rams, the design genius who helped propel Braun to prominence for several decades. “Today there is only Apple and to a lesser extent Sony.”
Committee式的治理，导致平庸，确实也没有错Take the pricing of the first Mac in 1984. Jobs wrestled the pricing of the Mac with Sculley for several weeks. Not a couple of meetings. They argued about the issues night and day for weeks. Setting a price for the Mac presented a big problem. Apple’s revenues were on the slide, and the Mac had been expensive to develop. Sculley wanted to recoup the R&D investment, and he wanted to raise enough money to strategically out-advertise the competition. But if the Mac was priced too high, it might scare off buyers and wouldn’t sell in volume.
“He’s really bright. He’s extremely well informed. He has access to some of the best people on the planet. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, he’s gonna know.”
他会打电话！！！The “1984” ad is typical of Jobs. It was bold and brash, and unlike any other commercial of its time. Instead of a straightforward product presentation, “1984” was a mini-movie with characters, a narrative, and high production values. Jobs didn’t think of it, write it, or direct it, but he was smart enough to team up with Lee Clow and Jay Chiat, and give them the room to be creative.
Jobs was concerned about Apple’s lack of focus. He wanted an ad that would remind the world—and Apple itself—what its core values were. Jobs asked Chiat\Day to create a campaign that would speak to those core values. “They asked us to come in and talk about what Apple needed to do to get its focus back,” Clow said. “It really wasn’t hard; it was just to go back to Apple’s roots.”
Clow, who’s habitually dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, said the idea for “Think Different” came from thinking about the Mac user base—the designers, artists, and creatives who remained loyal customers through the company’s darkest days. “Everybody immediately embraced the idea that this campaign should be about being creative and thinking out of the box,” Clow said. “It got bigger when we said why not celebrate anyone who’s ever thought about ways that they could change the world, and that’s when Gandhi and Edison started coming into the conversation.”
The campaign came together very quickly and featured a series of black-and-white photos of about forty famous iconoclasts, including Muhammad Ali, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Maria Callas, Cesar Chavez, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jim Henson, Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Picasso, Jackie Robinson, Jerry Seinfeld, Ted Turner, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Apple ran the ads in magazines and on billboards, and aired a TV ad celebrating “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers . . . the crazy ones.”
可以详细了解下这几位The photos were run without identifying labels, a strategy previously used by the agency for a 1984 Nike campaign featuring famous athletes. The lack of labels challenged the viewer to figure out who the subject was. This strategy makes the ads inclusive and involving. It rewarded those in the know. If you knew whom the ad featured, it saluted you as an insider, part of the cognoscenti. It worked like a charm. People delighted in identifying the subjects of the ads, and they collected campaign posters for their bedroom walls and offices.
我也想收集海报Jobs was involved from the beginning, submitting personal heroes like Buckminster Fuller and Ansel Adams. He also used his extensive contacts and formidable persuasive powers to secure permissions from the likes of Yoko Ono and the estate of Albert Einstein. But Jobs declined the agency’s suggestion to feature him in one of the ads.
原来Buckminster Fuller and Ansel Adams也是乔布斯的偶像
后者有认知，前者倒是第一次知道
网状穹顶
可以理解后来的Apple Park的屋顶结构设计“My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company,” he said in Apple’s early days. Jobs is immensely proud of Apple’s advertising. He often debuts new ads during his Macworld keynote speeches. If he’s giving a product presentation, there’s usually an ad to accompany the new product, and Jobs always shows it off to the public. If the ad is particularly good, he’ll show it twice, obviously delighted.
振聋发聩！！
“My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company,”During the “Cola Wars” of the seventies, Sculley massively boosted Pepsi’s market share by spending huge sums of cash on savvy TV advertising. Expensive, slick campaigns like the “Pepsi Challenge” transformed Pepsi from an underdog into a soda giant on equal footing with Coca-Cola. Jobs wanted Sculley to apply the same advertising chops to the fledgling market for personal computers. Jobs was especially worried about the Macintosh, which would debut in a few months. He felt that advertising would be one of the major factors in its success. He wanted the Mac to appeal to the general public—not just electronics freaks—and effectively advertising a weird and unfamiliar new product would be key to achieving that. Sculley had no technology experience whatsoever, but it didn’t matter. Jobs wanted his marketing expertise. Jobs wanted to create, in his own words, an “Apple Generation.”
是来自小时候电脑店的经历，告诉乔布斯要提前Marketing卖货的吧Sculley and Jobs’s strategy at Apple was to build sales rapidly and then out-advertise the competition. “Apple hadn’t yet realized that as a billion-dollar corporation it had immense advantages we hadn’t exploited,” Sculley wrote in his autobiography, Odyssey. “It’s almost impossible for a company with sales of $50 million or even $200 million to invest in the kinds of effective television advertising campaigns you need if you’re going to leave any impression at all.”
说直白点就是：大公司有更多的Marketing预算呗The Pepsi commercials were treated like miniature movies, shot with the highest production values by Hollywood filmmakers. When other companies were spending $15,000 to shoot a commercial, Pepsi spent between $200,000 and $300,000 for a single spot.
如此不计成本
基本是15倍的投入啊Jobs does exactly the same thing at Apple today. Apple is famous for its lifestyle advertising. It never loads its ads with speeds and feeds, functions and features, like everyone else. Instead, Apple engages in lifestyle marketing. It portrays hip young people with “enviable lifestyles,” given to them courtesy of Apple’s products. The company’s highly successful iPod ad campaign shows young people grooving to the music in their heads. There is never any mention of the iPod’s hard-drive capacity.
Lifestyle, 无论是产品，还是广告，都是关于人的
这也是User Story“Marketing, after all, is really theater,” Sculley wrote. “It’s like staging a performance. The way to motivate people is to get them interested in your product, to entertain them, and to turn your product into an incredibly important event. The Pepsi Generation campaign did all this in scaling Pepsi to epic proportions and making a brand bigger than life.”
这是智慧：“Marketing, after all, is really theater,”The rumormongering surrounding Macworld 2007—where Jobs introduced the iPhone—even made the nightly news on all the cable and TV networks, which is unheard of for any company in any industry. Not even Hollywood can garner as much attention for its movie premieres.
原来还有这回事，哈哈哈The CES is more important economically than Macworld, yet Jobs and the iPhone handily stole its thunder. Jobs’s iPhone launch also overshadowed announcements from much bigger companies, including the introduction of the consumer version of Microsoft’s Vista, and became the biggest technology story of the year. Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie estimated that the iPhone rumor reports and follow-up stories were worth $400 million in free advertising. “No other company has ever received that kind of attention for a product launch,” Yoffie says. “It’s unprecedented.”
07年的4亿美金，震撼“Our secret marketing program for the iPhone was none,” Jobs told Apple employees in a companywide address. “We didn’t do anything.”
Marketing到最高境界，就是好好打磨产品，让别人围绕着你的产品转，免费为你宣传“The urge to clamp down on information sometimes borders on paranoia,” wrote Tom McNichol in Wired magazine.
记者评价苹果发布会保密工作的这句话，用来形容老共，倒是一点不违和，哈哈哈Jobs plays off old rivalries. He pits Time against Newsweek and Fortune against Forbes. The magazine that promises the most extensive coverage gets the exclusive. Jobs uses this same trick time after time, and it always gets results. He started this practice with the original Mac and called them “sneaks,” as in sneak peeks. Familiarizing a reporter with a new product ahead of time usually guaranteed a more favorable review. When Jobs launched a new iMac in 2002, Time magazine got the exclusive behind-the-scenes story, and in return Jobs got the front cover and a glossy seven-page spread inside. It was timed perfectly for the machine’s introduction at Macworld.
这些媒体也在竞争，哈哈哈
独家要被对手抢走The minute Jobs unveils the product, Apple’s marketing machine begins its advertising blitz. The secret banners at Macworld are unveiled, and immediately the front door of Apple’s website showcases the new product. Then begins a coordinated campaign in magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV. Within hours, new posters go up on billboards and bus stops all over the country. Apple ads are everywhere. It’s the old advertising adage: awareness equals sales. All the ads reflect a consistent message and styling. The message is simple and direct: “One thousand songs in your pocket” is all you need to know about the iPod. “You can’t be too thin. Or too powerful” sends a clear message about Apple’s MacBook laptops.
当你学习苹果的思路的时候
你会发现许多老共的影子，可怕可怕Some speculated that Jobs sued the websites to keep the press in line. The lawsuit was seen as press intimidation, a scare tactic designed to deter them from reporting rumors. Much of the public discussion concerned press freedom and whether bloggers have the same rights as professional reporters, who enjoy some protection under laws that shield journalists. This is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the case and turned it into a cause célèbre—to protect press freedom. But from Jobs’s point of view, the case had nothing to do with press freedom. He sued the bloggers to scare his own employees. He was less concerned with gagging the press than gagging staff who had leaked to the press—and anyone who might think of doing it in the future. Apple’s buzz marketing is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Jobs wanted to check the leaks.
我也认同作者的观点
更重要的是警告泄密者Jobs’s Apple is obsessively secretive. It’s almost as secretive as a covert government agency. Like CIA operatives, Apple employees won’t talk about what they do, even with their closest confidants: wives, boyfriends, parents. Employees certainly will not discuss their work with outsiders. Many won’t even refer to the company by name. Like superstitious theater folk who call Macbeth the “Scottish play,” some Apple employees call it the “fruit company.”
Some of Jobs’s secrecy measures get a little extreme. When Jobs hired Ron Johnson from Target to head up Apple’s retail effort, he asked him to use an alias for several months lest anyone get wind that Apple was planning to open retail stores. Johnson was listed on Apple’s phone directory under a false name, which he used to check into hotels.
竞争优势Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, said he’s not allowed to tell his wife and kids what he’s working on. His teenage son, an avid iPod fan, was desperate to know what his dad was cooking up at work, but Daddy had to keep his trap shut lest he get canned. Even Jobs himself is subject to his own strictures: he took an iPod hi-fi boom box home for testing, but kept it covered with a black cloth. And he listened to it only when no one else was around.
这有时候也太过头了些
越看越觉得和老共很像Apple’s obsessive secrecy is not a quirk of Jobs’s control-freak tendencies; it’s a key element of Apple’s extremely effective marketing machine. Apple makes millions of dollars in free advertising every time Jobs steps onto a stage to reveal a new product. Many have wondered why there are no bloggers at Apple. It’s because loose lips at Apple sink ships. But there are dozens of bloggers at Pixar, and there were even before Jobs sold Pixar to Disney. Pixar bloggers happily gossip about all aspects of the company’s projects and their work lives. The difference is that Pixar’s movies don’t rely on a surprise unveiling to get press. New movies are routinely reported in the Hollywood trade press. Jobs isn’t a control freak for the sake of it; there’s a method to his madness. A new product isn’t news unless it’s new. Secrecy maintains the element of surprise.
将皮克斯和苹果拿来对比，就确实生动多了As well as introducing cool products, Jobs has been very successful at creating a persona for Apple. Through advertising, he has developed an image of the things he, and Apple, stand for. In the late 1970s, it was revolution through technology. Later it was about being creative, thinking different. Jobs’s personality allows Apple to market itself as human, and cool. His personality is the raw material of Apple’s advertising. Even an agency like Chiat\Day could never ever make Bill Gates look cool.
这是盖茨被黑的最惨的一次！！！Apple’s advertising has done a good job of conveying the company as an icon of change, of revolution, and of bold thinking. But it does so in a subtle, indirect way. Apple rarely brags. It never says, “We’re revolutionary. Really.” It uses the storytelling of its advertising to convey this message, often as a subtext.
最强潜台词Berger said the best way to get creative advertising is to hire the most creative agency. Chiat\Day is one of a handful of the most creative agencies in the world, but the real trick is to communicate what the brand is about. “Lee Clow and Jobs understood each other so well, they became buddies,” said Berger. “Clow really got the culture of Apple, the mind-set. He really understood what they were trying to do. And Jobs gave Clow total creative freedom. He allowed Clow to show him anything no matter how crazy it might seem. It really allows people to push the boundaries. IBM could never do that. They would never give Chiat\Day the freedom that Jobs gave them.”
Hewlett-Packard had hired Goodby Silverstein, another superstar agency. The ads were interesting and very well done, but they never had the strength of personality of Apple’s ads, because the company doesn’t have the strength of personality. No matter how the ads tried to personalize HP the corporation through celebrities like Jay Z, it still felt like a company. Apple is more of a phenomenon than a company. Hewlett-Packard can never be quite as magical because it doesn’t have a personality. The same thing happened to Apple when Jobs left in 1985. “When Steve left, Apple became a company again,” said Berger.
灵魂与SoulNot everyone loves Apple’s advertising. Seth Godin, author of several best sellers about marketing, said Apple’s advertising has often been mediocre. “I’m underwhelmed by most of Apple’s advertising,” he told me by phone from his office in New York. “It’s not been effective. Apple’s advertising is more about pandering to the insiders than acquiring new users. If you have a Mac, you love Apple’s advertising because it says ‘I’m smarter than you.’ If you don’t have a Mac it says ‘you’re stupid.’”
反面的声音，也值得一听Booker said the campaign’s biggest problem is that it “perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow ‘define themselves’ with the technology they choose.”
这个判断本身也没有错，但确实你选择的生活方式、你使用的物件，会真真实实地反馈你是一个怎样的人He continues, “If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe—but not a personality.”
这个判断我是不同意的
随着年岁的增长，我发现：你选择的东西，真真实实地反应了你的品味，你的热情与爱好The “Think Different” campaign was criticized for using noncommercial figures, people who patently didn’t believe in commercial culture. It even included committed nonmaterial ists like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, who actively opposed commercialism. These figures would never endorse a product in a commercial—and here Apple was using them to endorse products. A lot of critics couldn’t believe Apple’s chutzpah and thought the company had stepped over the line.
In Apple’s defense, Clow told the New York Times that Apple intended to honor the subjects of the campaign, not exploit them. “We’re not trying to say these people use Apple, or that if they could’ve used a computer, they would’ve used Apple. Instead, we’re going for the emotional celebration of creativity, which should always be part of how we speak about the brand.”
乔布斯内部讲话可不是这样的，哈哈哈
他说：如果这些人还活着，他们会选MacAllen Olivo, an Apple spokesperson at the time, said, “We would never associate these people with any product; it’s Apple celebrating them versus Apple using them. To say that Albert Einstein would have used a computer would cross the line. Why would he need one? But it’s different to say he looked at the world differently.”
Berger, the ad critic, said he loved the “Think Different” campaign. “American culture is very commercial. This stuff gets jumbled up. Quentin Tarantino talks about Burger King. Apple makes a poster of Rosa Parks. That’s our culture. People are free to use anything from wherever they want.”