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The Entrepreneur of the Decade, An interview with Steve Jobs, Inc.'s Entrepreneur of the Decade

 

It took us all of about five minutes to decide that our Entrepreneur of the Decade would be Steven P. Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and founder of NeXT Inc. Granted, there are other entrepreneurs, a handful, who have enjoyed comparable success in the past 10 years, and who—unlike Jobs—have managed to avoid getting sacked by their companies in the process. But ultimately, their accomplishments pale alongside his. Without Jobs, after all, there would have been no Apple II. To that extent, he deserves credit for instigating—and shaping—a microcomputer revolution that has already transformed how we do business and may yet transform how we live.

Along the way, Jobs came to personify a whole generation of youthful company builders pioneering on the frontiers of technology—the men and women who, overnight, made Silicon Valley a business landmark and a household name. They were not only building companies; they were also experimenting with new ways of thinking about business itself. The national media hailed them for their innovative spirit and touted them as the people who would restore America's competitive edge.

Jobs was their most prominent representative, on the cover of Time before he turned 27. He came across as brash, abrasive, and rough edged. But he also had dreams, big dreams, and the peculiar ability to develop products that seemed to give us a glimpse of a bright and exciting future. What he did once with the Apple II, he did again with the Macintosh, only to be forced out of his company by the man he had recruited to lead it, former soft-drink executive John Sculley. Soon afterward Jobs started a new computer company, NeXT Inc., and then slipped from public view. But last fall he reemerged, staging a dramatic presentation at San Francisco's Symphony Hall to introduce his latest creation—a workstation for the higher-education market. Once again, his picture was splashed across newspapers and magazine covers. Steve Jobs was back.

Through it all, we followed his journey and shared his experiences, quietly rooting for his success. But it was not until we had settled on him as our Entrepreneur of the Decade that we realized how little we actually knew about him. That is the paradox of Jobs. As public as his life has been, he has remained a mystery over the years. We weren't at all sure what to expect when we met him at his Palo Alto, Calif., office.

Boyish is probably the word that best describes our first impression. He was wearing jeans and a turtleneck as he bounded up the stairs. He was friendly, even cordial, but there was a diffidence in his manner that became more pronounced as the afternoon wore on. A profoundly shy man, he had an almost physical aversion to any question that could be construed as even remotely personal.

On the other hand, he was thoroughly forthcoming about business. The experiences of recent years have not diminished his passion. He clearly loves what he is doing and talks about it with a fervent voice and gleaming eyes. In that respect, he seems as youthful as ever. Yet, at the same time, one senses a newfound maturity. Ask him the right questions, and he comes across as an extremely thoughtful person, engaged by deep issues, struggling to find the appropriate words, now able to articulate things that before he knew only by instinct.

By reputation, Jobs is a perfectionist and an extraordinarily demanding boss. Stories abound of the people he has burned out. We can believe them all. NeXT is surely no fun for those who don't share his fervor. Yet as we left, we realized that our strongest reaction to Steve Jobs was the one we considered least probable going in. We liked him.

Steve Jobs was interviewed by Inc. editors George Gendron and Bo Burlingham.

INC.: Where do great products come from?

JOBS: I think really great products come from melding two points of view—the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both. You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new. It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them—not something they'd want now.

INC.: You mean the technology is changing too fast.

JOBS: Yeah, and customers can't anticipate what the technology can do. They won't ask for things that they think are impossible. But the technology may be ahead of them. If you happen to mention something, they'll say, "Of course, I'll take that. Do you mean I can have that, too?" It sounds logical to ask customers what they want and then give it to them. But they rarely wind up getting what they really want that way.

INC.: It's got to be equally dangerous to focus too much on the technology.

JOBS: Oh, sure. You can get into just as much trouble by going into the technology lab and asking your engineers, "OK, what can you do for me today?" That rarely leads to a product that customers want or to one that you're very proud of building when you get done. You have to merge these points of view, and you have to do it in an interactive way over a period of time—which doesn't mean a week. It takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want, and it takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give.

INC.: What do you mean?

JOBS: It's hard to explain. Sometimes the technology just doesn't want to show you what it can do. You have to keep pushing on it and asking the engineers over and over again to explain why we can't do this or that—until you truly understand it. A lot of times, something you ask for will add too much cost to the final product. Then an engineer might say casually, "Well, it's too bad you want A, which costs $1,000, instead of B, which is kind of related to A. Because I can do B for just 50¢." And B is just as good as A. It takes time to work through that process—to find breakthroughs but not wind up with a computer no one can afford.

INC.: And that's how you developed the NeXT machine?

JOBS: Right. I mean, we had the idea of doing a machine for higher education in the fall of 1985, but our original concept was about a third as good as the computer turned out to be. The improvement came from a lot of interaction between people in higher education and those of us at NeXT.

INC.: Give us an example.

JOBS: I have a friend at Stanford, a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. He was showing me what some of his students were doing to understand how proteins fold. He asked, "Couldn't you model this stuff on a computer if you had something more powerful than a PC?" It really got me thinking. What if you came up with something that was as easy to use as a Mac, or even easier, and had the power of a workstation? What if you unleashed that machine in higher education? The more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

INC.: But there are a lot of workstations around and computers far more powerful than workstations. What's so exciting about a souped-up microcomputer?

JOBS: Well, that gets back to something I've said before. You see, I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we've ever built. The big insight a lot of us had in the 1970s had to do with the importance of putting that tool in the hands of individuals. Let's say that—for the same amount of money it takes to build the most powerful computer in the world—you could make 1,000 computers with one-thousandth the power and put them in the hands of 1,000 creative people. You'll get more out of doing that than out of having one person use the most powerful computer in the world. Because people are inherently creative. They will use tools in ways the toolmakers never thought possible. And once a person figures out how to do something with that tool, he or she can share it with the other 999.

INC.: That's a big idea.

JOBS: It's an extremely powerful paradigm. It's what has driven a bunch of us since this whole thing began to happen, and it hasn't changed. It hasn't changed for me since 1975. That's almost 15 years now. I believe this is one of the most important things that's going to happen in our generation. It would be easy to step back and say, "Well, it's pretty much over now." But if you look carefully, it's not over by any stretch of the imagination. The technological advances are coming at a rate that is far more ferocious than ever. To me, it's staggering to contemplate the tools we're going to be able to put in people's hands in the next few years—and I don't get impressed by this stuff so easily anymore.

So what we're doing here is driven by a fairly strong faith that people are going to continue to be as creative and as ingenious and as sharing with their results as they have been over the past 15 years. That sharing gives us a kind of leverage. For every improvement we can make in the tools we give people, we can improve the ultimate results even more, thanks to this leverage. That's what gets us so excited.

INC.: Let's go back to the process of creating these tools. How different was it back in the '70s, when you and Steve Wozniak were developing the Apple I and the Apple II?

JOBS: It was basically the same, although we were a lot less sophisticated. The customers for the Apple I were Woz and me and our friends in the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was really the first computer to address the needs of the hobbyist who wanted to play with software but could not build his or her own hardware. It came with a digital circuit board, but you still had to go get your own keyboard, power supply, and television monitor. If you were a techie, the Apple I seemed to go 90 percent of the way. Of course, if you weren't a techie, it only went 10 percent of the way. We sold almost 200 of the Apple I. I think they're all collector's items now.

INC.: No doubt.

JOBS: The Apple I took us over a big hurdle, but a lot of people who wanted to use the product were unable to. We were getting some feedback from a fairly small sample—maybe 40, 50 people. We were hearing from dealers, too. They'd say, "I think I can sell 10 times more of these if you would just put a case and keyboard around it." That's where a lot of the direction for the Apple II came from. If there hadn't been an Apple I, there would not have been an Apple II. The first product solved some of the problems and exposed the remaining ones in a much clearer light. But we were going on common sense. We didn't think in terms of customer feedback. We never even used the word customer.

INC.: So what were you thinking?

JOBS: We were thinking we should build a computer you could just roll out of the box and use. There were a lot more software hobbyists than hardware hobbyists around, and we could satisfy a lot more people if they didn't have to be hardware hackers to use it.

INC.: And that observation led to the Apple II.

JOBS: Right. And the same fundamental thing happened in 1979, when I saw an Alto [that had been developed] at Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center]. It was as if, all of a sudden, the veil had been lifted from my eyes. It had the mouse and the multiple-font text on the screen, and you realized in an instant that this would appeal to exponentially more people than the Apple II. I'm talking about people who didn't want to learn how to use a computer—they just wanted to use one. You could eliminate a whole layer of what someone had to know in order to take advantage of this tool.

INC.: So the contribution of the Apple II . . .

JOBS: The Apple II peeled off the hardware layer. You didn't need to know about the hardware to use a computer. The next step was the transition from the Apple II to the Macintosh, which peeled off the computer-literacy layer, if you will. In other words, you didn't have to be a hacker or a computer scientist to use one of these.

INC.: Let's talk about some other aspects of these products. We've read stories about how finicky you were with the Apple II—how you insisted that every line of solder on the circuit board be perfectly straight, for example, and that the inside of the machine look neat and attractive.

JOBS: Yeah, that's right.

INC.: The NeXT circuit board is a thing of beauty, too. So is the computer. In fact, it could probably go in some collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

JOBS: They've called.

INC.: But why is the appearance of a circuit board so important to you? Is this just a personal quirk of yours?

JOBS: No, it's not arbitrary. You're asking, where does aesthetic judgment come from? With many things—high-performance automobiles, for example—the aesthetic comes right from the function, and I suppose electronics is no different. But I've also found that the best companies pay attention to aesthetics. They take the extra time to lay out grids and proportion things appropriately, and it seems to pay off for them. I mean, beyond the functional benefits, the aesthetic communicates something about how they think of themselves, their sense of discipline in engineering, how they run their company, stuff like that.

INC.: But who cares? Most people are never going to look inside.

JOBS: Woz and I cared from the very beginning. And we felt the people who were going to own the Apple II would care, too. We were selling these things for $1,600, I think, which was a lot of money back in 1977, and these were people who generally didn't have $1,600. I know people who spent their life savings on one. Yeah, they cared what it looked like on the inside.

INC.: Was this just intuitive to you?

JOBS: Yes, it was. We thought, why don't we take the extra few days or weeks and do it right? We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I've seen them again and again throughout my business life. They're just staggering.

INC.: How do you mean?

JOBS: In my experience, people get far more excited about doing something as well as it can be done than about doing something adequately. If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without anything but self-motivation. I'm talking about an environment in which excellence is noticed and respected and is in the culture. If you have that, you don't have to tell people to do excellent work. They understand it from their surroundings. You may have to coach them at first, but then you just get out of their way, and they'll surprise you time and time again.

INC.: So?

JOBS: So how do you communicate to people that they are in an environment where excellence is expected? You don't say it. You don't put it in an employee handbook. That stuff is meaningless. All that counts is the product that results from the work of the group. That will say more than anything coming out of your mouth or your pen. So you have to pay close attention to those details, even if they seem minor, because they communicate a big attitude about what you do.

INC.: Can you be more specific?

JOBS: Sure. When we started the Macintosh factory, I made a few mistakes before I finally put Debbie Coleman in to run it, and she turned out to be a good choice. I remember that I'd go out to the factory, and I'd put on a white glove to check for dust. I'd find it everywhere—on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I'd ask Debbie to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debbie up the wall. She didn't understand why you should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. And I couldn't articulate it back then.

See, I'd been very influenced by what I'd seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there—and part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and discipline. We lacked discipline about little details, but they were important. This was an automated factory. It wasn't going to be the big things that would stop us. It was going to be the little details, because one little detail could shut down the whole line. If we didn't have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren't going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.

INC.: What happened?

JOBS: We went along for a while, and the factory became clean, but Debbie and I continued to have conflicts over various things. Then one day I came into the factory, and I saw that she had rearranged some of the machines. Before, they had been randomly placed around the floor. Debbie had moved them for some functional reasons and also for some nonfunctional reasons. She'd put them in a straight line and cleaned the place up visually. And I hadn't mentioned anything to her. Well, that told me a light bulb had come on for her, and I didn't need to say a thing about it ever again—and I never did. From then on, she just took off like a rocket, because she understood the underlying principle. And the factory worked great.

INC.: It sounds as if she had to figure it out on her own.

JOBS: Yeah, but this stuff takes time. Let me give you an example from NeXT. We have probably the most automated factory in the world. Our circuit board comes out untouched by human hands. We have a series of sophisticated robots, some of which we built, some of which we bought. Now these robots come in different colors, and I wanted them all painted the same color. We went through a lot of trouble over that because the robot companies weren't used to painting things in any color but their own. People in our factory asked me, "Why is it so important to paint these machines the same color? We don't understand it." So we had to sit down with everybody and explain. Even after hearing the reasons, it took people six months or so before they began to understand.

INC.: What are the reasons?

JOBS: For one thing, we want the place to look nice because we bring customers through. They're going to make a decision on using NeXT products, and they ought to know that we have a very high-quality manufacturing operation. But the real reason is that we don't want people to think of the factory as separate islands of automation. We want people thinking of the whole. Suppose we have a bottleneck at one robot. In reality, you can probably rebalance the line and solve the problem—provided you think of it as a whole. It took people six months to understand this, but now it's in their bones. We spend a lot of time going over these concepts and why they are important—not just in the abstract, but right down to the everyday tangible point of view. That's what building a company culture is all about.

INC.: Do you have more influence over things like that now than at Apple? There's a perception that the launch of Apple was a team effort, and NeXT is very much your show.

JOBS: Is that really the perception?

INC.: To some extent, it is. Of course, there weren't any celebrities at Apple back then. Now, you're a celebrity.

JOBS: Well, we all tend to reduce reality to symbols, but Superman went out a long time ago. The way you accomplish anything significant is with a team.

INC.: Is it a problem or an asset to be a celebrity?

JOBS: Is this Inc. or People?

INC.: Hold on. We're asking a legitimate business question. Maybe celebrity is the wrong word, but you must certainly be a magnet for bright, young talent, which is probably what helps make this an exciting place to work. Don't you ever worry that the very thing that attracts people to your company might also inhibit them from challenging you when they should?

JOBS: Again, it all depends on the culture. The culture at NeXT definitely rewards independent thought, and we often have constructive disagreements—at all levels. It doesn't take a new person long to see that people feel fine about openly disagreeing with me. That doesn't mean I can't disagree with them, but it does mean that the best ideas win. Our attitude is that we want the best. Don't get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let's go.

INC.: What about the expectations people have of you?

JOBS: I think people outside NeXT have fairly high expectations of us, because we have a lot of people here with impressive track records. Before we introduced the machine, many people felt we had little chance of living up to those expectations. The feedback I've gotten is that we've exceeded their expectations—which is a double-edged sword. Now, we have to be pretty much world class with our products and services, but that's also an opportunity.

INC.: Did you ever doubt you'd meet or exceed the expectations?

JOBS: You don't think about it that way. You just make the best product you can, and you don't put it out until you feel it's right. But no matter what you think intellectually, your heart is beating pretty fast right before people see what you've produced.

INC.: What about your expectations of yourself? A lot of successful company builders we know agonize about going back and doing it all over a second time. They think, if it's not bigger—in importance, that is, not necessarily in scale—why bother doing it?

JOBS: Well, first, you have to realize this is my third time. The Macintosh was my second. I mean, that was a bunch of us going off and starting in the garage again. We used Apple as a financial mechanism, and we used the sales force. But we fundamentally redefined a lot of things at Apple, and we had to do it from scratch.

INC.: Are you saying that you've already proven to yourself that you can do it all over again?

JOBS: I'm saying that my motivation is a little different this time. The computer industry is young. I view its future and its history as one long vector. We're only in the first inch of that vector. For some reason, we are in the right place at the right time to influence its direction. You just have to move the vector a little bit in the first inch, and the swing will be enormous by the time it gets to be three miles long. I think both the Apple II and the Macintosh contributed to setting the vector's direction—at least for the part of the computer industry that is most exciting to me. I hope the NeXT machine will contribute as well.

INC.: That's a tall order.

JOBS: It sure is. It means we have to succeed on a very large scale. Our smallest competitor is $1.75 billion these days. The world doesn't need another $100-million computer company. We have to get up to a certain scale if we want to play in the sandbox, and if we want to have the effect we're looking for at the end of the process. We're building the next billion-dollar computer company here—from the ground up.

INC.: How can you actually plan that kind of growth?

JOBS: You can't. Somebody once told me, "Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow." What's the top line? It's things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What's our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

INC.: Are those explicit goals for NeXT?

JOBS: We have three high-level goals. One is to make the best computers in the world for individuals. They might be in networks or in groups, but one person, one computer. Second, we want a company where really bright people can come and be handed a lot of responsibility early on. If we have an exciting place to work, we can get the best and the brightest to come work here. The third goal is to make sure that the people who build this company share in its success.

INC.: You once said that you felt people do their best work in their twenties. You're 33 now...

JOBS: I'm about to turn 34. Any day.

INC.: So is that a concern for you, given your ambitions for NeXT?

JOBS: No, I think I'm going to be doing some of my best work in the next few years. I want to make the most of it, and that means providing an unobstructed path for the brightest minds in our industry. My job becomes more to help them pick the targets correctly and then get out of their way.

INC.: That's very different from playing an intense hands-on role. It takes a certain maturity. You have to look for different rewards.

JOBS: I don't know about that. You're still in there working with your sleeves rolled up. Then the time comes to get out and let people do their work. But in a company as amibitious as NeXT, there is always another group asking for help. So it's not as if you ever have to sit around with nothing to do.

INC.: You seem to have thought a lot about your role.

JOBS: Yeah, well, when you do things the first time, you might have good instincts, but you don't understand the process intellectually. You may get some fairly good results, but you're not exactly sure why. It takes time and reflection to understand the process.

Then you get a chance to test your understanding. Some things will test out right; others will test out wrong. Hopefully, you're paying attention. By the third time, you should start to get a pretty good feeling in your gut that you understand the process. And you can use that understanding to become a lot more productive. That's how this feels. A lot of us have been working together for a long time.

INC.: So you can avoid mistakes?

JOBS: Oh, we'll make a whole bunch of mistakes. That's what life is about. But at least they'll be new and creative ones.

INC.: You once said that, in the early days of Apple, Woz was the great engineer, but you were the one who turned the ideas into products. Do you still think of your role in terms of the product?

JOBS: I think the same philosophy that drives the product has to drive everything else if you want to have a great company. Manufacturing, for example, is an extension of the engineering process for us. We view it more and more as a software-engineering job with interesting I/O [input-output] devices on the ends. It demands just as much thought and strategy as the product. If you don't pay attention to your manufacturing, it will limit the kind of product you can build and engineer. Some companies view manufacturing as a necessary evil, and some view it as something more neutral. But we view it instead as a tremendous opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

INC.: Have you always viewed it that way?

JOBS: Ever since I visited Japan in the early '80s. And let me add that the same is true of sales and marketing. You need a sales and marketing organization that is oriented toward educating customers rather than just taking orders, providing a real service rather than moving boxes. This is extremely important. For most of your customers, after all, the sales folks are your company. So you've really got to pay attention to that. The point is that our philosophy is not a product philosophy. It's a philosophy of how we go about things, and it affects everything—finance, information systems. Can I digress for a moment?

INC.: Go ahead.

JOBS: Let's take the decision to automate a factory. You might have a lot of reasons for doing it, quality and other things. But there's a nice by-product of automation if you're growing very fast: you probably don't have to hire people as rapidly as you would if you weren't automated. When you hire people too quickly and don't give them appropriate training, quality drops off. So you have a much better chance of hanging on to your quality if you automate. The same is true in other parts of the company—accounts payable, for example. With a really good information system, you can automate a lot of those functions. Then you don't have to hire people, which saves your company an enormous amount of energy.

So, to build a great company, you need more than a great product. You have to pay attention to all the different areas and be as aggressive with them as with your product. Otherwise, you'll spend half your time fixing things that break. And that's typical of high-growth companies. Half the management time is spent making repairs—stock-option plans, marketing strategies, information systems, whatever.

INC.: Let's stop there. Suppose somebody is starting a company and doesn't have your resources to fall back on. Is any of this relevant?

JOBS: Well, obviously, you can't build a multimillion-dollar automated factory if you don't have the money. But a lot of this stuff just requires energy.

Take an employee stock-participation plan. You need help from a lawyer or a consultant. Most people take very little time selecting lawyers and consultants. It doesn't cost money to interview 10 lawyers, but you have to invest your time. And most people don't do it because they don't think it's important. But it is important. It will save you countless hours in the future.

And the same goes for auditors, accountants, engineering consultants, and so on. Because you need people who can anticipate the problems you will encounter and who can offer solutions.

INC.: It sounds as though you experienced these problems at Apple.

JOBS: Of course. I can show you the arrows.

INC.: This is just a personal observation. You seem much more interested in business than we had expected.

JOBS: Business is what I do.

INC.: But you have an image as someone more focused on the technical side of things.

JOBS: Well, there's the technical part of the equation and the business part, meaning the distribution, manufacturing, and so on. And then there's the human part. You just have to put the whole equation together.

INC.: May we ask you a mushy question? We're in a business in which we rarely get to see people using our product, except maybe on an airplane once in a while. But you get to see the products you've created being used all the time. Do you sometimes marvel at the effect you've had on people's lives?

JOBS: Well, yes, there are some moments. I was in an elementary school just this morning, and they still had a bunch of Apple IIs, and I was kind of looking over their shoulders. Then I get letters from people about the Mac, saying, "I never thought I could use a computer before I tried this one."

INC.: To some extent, you don't know how people are going to use a computer when it first comes out, do you?

JOBS: No, you don't. Sometimes it takes years to exploit a computer's baseline capabilities. It took five years before people exploited the advanced features of the Apple II. With the Macintosh, it took three or four years. So it's important to build in as much raw capability as possible when you put out the machine.

INC.: Did you have any idea that you were creating whole new industries with the development of the Apple II and the Mac?

JOBS: With the Mac, it was fairly clear; less so with the Apple II. But I must also say that the experience of watching it happen is quite different from the experience of imagining it happen. I think everybody who had anything to do with creating the Mac has very, very good feelings about it.

 

 

 

 

 

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  《沸腾十五年》 讲述中国,1995-2009 1995互联网商业元年 马云中国黄页 杭州电信有着非常好的社会资源和政府资源,马云却一样都没有。 杭州电信利用中国黄页( chinapage.com )已有的名声,做了一个名字很接近的网站,也叫“中国黄页”( chinesepage.com ),借以分割马云版“中国黄页”的市场。 海归、极客、商人成为中国互联网创业者中的三大特色群体(VC是推手) 1996海归归来 为了确保搜狐不被遗忘,张朝阳选择了最便宜也最有效的方法:树立个人品牌。 1997大门洞开 互联网的一年等于其他行业的7年 网易免费电子邮箱系统一出,中关村性急的评论家们甚至给丁磊戴上第三代程序员的帽子,这个代别划分是这样的:基于DOS平台开发的是第一代,基于Windows平台开发的是第二代,基于Internet平台开发的是第三代。 1998极客当道 曾李青是腾讯5个创始人中最好玩、最开放、最具激情和感召力的一个,与温和的马化腾、爱好技术的张志东相比,是另一个类型。 周鸿祎在公开场合经常教育年轻的创业者,应该先用创业的心态去打工,充分积累自己在管理和业务上的能力和资源 1999狂欢开始了 海归、商人、极客、VC推手,这四类人一起齐刷刷地汇聚在1999年,1999年就这样成为中国互联网最黄金、最灿烂、最辉煌、最值得念想的大年份。 2000泡沫四溢 亚马逊的卖点是:‘最近50年的书我们都有’——这是它提供海量品种的意义。(因为国外有很高的信息化程度,以查询库房是否有存书) 雷军在商店买T恤的时候,发现了求同消费现象。“中国经济和美国经济处在不同的发展阶段,美国消费者寻求个性消费,中国现阶段,需求高度趋同,中国需要50年前版书的人极少。” 单品价格压得再便宜,但5元钱的配送费卓越坚决不免,用户冲着几乎免费的产品而来,但想想既然要出5元的配送费,买一样商品是这个钱,10样商品也是,不如多挑几样商品。 雷军发现,互联网比软件要好玩得多,可以不断地改,不断地去修正,用户可以很快地反馈给你,你也可以很快地进步 2001大转折 段永平反问他:“你卖了公司之后干吗?”丁磊说:“我卖了公司有钱后再开一家公司。” 段永平发现,网易股票被低估是因为公司面临一场官司,也可能被摘牌,这里面有些不确定性。段永平就去找一些法律界人士问官司的问题,问类似的官司最可能的结果是什么,得到...

产品随想 | 陪读《芯片战争》:一、二章

作者其它书也值得读读 已出版《食用油营销第1书》《金龙鱼背后的粮油帝国》《鲁花:一粒花生撬动的粮油帝国》《手机战争》等财经书籍。 第一章 从晶体管到芯片 肖克利要创业的消息,就像17世纪的牛顿宣布要建立工场一样引起了轰动。那时候,美国还在草创时期的半导体产业主要集中在东部的波士顿和纽约长岛地区,许多科学家和工程师精英都慕肖克利之名前往美国西海岸,不远千里地聚集在肖克利旗下。可以这么说,肖克利给硅谷带来了最初的火种。 ——我也認可這個說法,不是斯坦福或其他校園,純粹是人才的原因 芯片发明后的六年间,政府对芯片项目的资助高达3200万美元,其中70%来自空军。同期美国半导体产业的研发经费有约85%的比例来自政府,政府的支持成就了美国在半导体领域的技术优势。“华盛顿通过支付技术研发费用和保证最终产品的市场份额,将原子弹最终制造成功的间隔缩短至六年,晶体管缩短至五年,集成电路缩短至三年。”不过,这些半导体企业实力壮大以后,往往不愿再参与美国政府出资的研发项目,因为那意味着专利权归政府所有,而且还得受保密条款的约束。 ——這纔是更合理的產業支持政策 诺伊斯采用激进的价格政策,将主要芯片产品的价格一举降到1美元,不仅是市场上的主流芯片价格的零头,还低于当时芯片的成本。这不是传统意义上的亏本倾销,而是第一个以反摩尔定律为定价依据的案例。反摩尔定律认为,同样的芯片在18个月后价格就会跌一半,所以按照几年后的价格为当前的芯片定价是有一定合理性的。市场被迅速打开,芯片很快在民用市场得到越来越广泛的应用,仙童的营收和利润都迅速上升,还带动了其母公司的股价上涨。摩尔后来评论:“诺伊斯以低价刺激需求,继而扩大产能、降低成本的策略,对于芯片产业的发展而言,其重要性堪比芯片的发明。” ——看到這裏的時候,真是非常震撼,好厲害的定價策略 东通工用磷渗透法研发出了高频的晶体管,于1957年做出世界上第一款袖珍收音机,并在这款产品上启用了索尼商标。盛田昭夫到美国去推销袖珍收音机的时候,德州仪器刚刚轻率地放弃了这个市场。美国人对盛田昭夫说:你们为什么要制造这种小收音机?美国人都想要大收音机。盛田昭夫回答:单单纽约就有20多家广播公司,同时就有20多套节目在播放,每人使用一台小收音机收听自己喜欢的节目,岂不更好?索尼用“一人一台”的宣传成功打破了美国人全家共用一台大型收音机的观念,成为全世界最畅销的收音机...

Scott Forstall: "Great leaders exude a positive attitude of possibility and don’t shy from working harder than their employees and taking risks."​

  Scott Forstall led the team at Apple that developed the iPhone – and is equally successful in vastly different realms, including co-producing multiple Tony Award winning Broadway shows. What has always impressed me most, though, is the time he devotes to mentoring a diverse set of entrepreneurial founders. We’ve had the pleasure of knowing each other for several years, thanks to mutual friend Ali Partovi ’s incredible Neo community , a mentor community, accelerator and VC through which we support junior engineers to become senior leaders. Ali was an early backer of Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber and Facebook, so I knew I was in good hands! At our recent Neo reunion I was able to catch-up with Scott for a wide-ranging conversation on the landscapes of opportunity in technology and what we’re anticipating next. He kindly agreed to go o...

产品随想 | 周刊 第116期:Great things in business are never done by one person.

Cromite   https://github.com/uazo/cromite Cromite a Bromite fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser! awesome-shizuku   https://github.com/timschneeb/awesome-shizuku Curated list of awesome Android apps making use of Shizuku KernelSU   https://github.com/tiann/KernelSU A Kernel based root solution for Android Love, Hate or Fear It, ​​TikTok Has Changed America   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/18/business/media/tiktok-ban-american-culture.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mE0.DpEZ.VWmNssw5B6_c "My model for business is The Beatles.There were four guys who kept each others, kind of, negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that's how I see business. You know, great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. "Our motivation is simple--we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we wa...

《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 11 Do Your Level Best

As a mass-market consumer electronics device, the iPod would eventually be sold, of course, all the usual places: Best Buy, Circuit City, big-box department stores, and even the computer retailers like CompUSA. Steve disdained all these outlets. His obsession with his products continued well after they’d been manufactured. The tacky, low-margin hustle of these chains ran completely against the minimalist aesthetic of his products and the clean exuberance of his marketing. There was only one place where he really enjoyed seeing his products sold to the public: his own Apple stores, which had debuted four months ahead of the iPod. 觉得那些喧嚣、嘈杂的零售渠道,配不上自己极美的产品 Going back as far as the debut of the Mac, Steve had always groused about the way Apple computers were sold in its resellers’ stores. The way his computers were displayed and sold represented the very worst of what could go wrong when things weren’t done his way. The salespeople, always interested in quick turnover, seemed to make litt...

产品随想 | 周刊 第117期:He saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

He disliked biography attempts. “I regard my scientific papers as my essential biography,’’ Land said. “I pour my whole life into the scientific project I’m investigating. I leave behind the things I’ve done in the past to do the work in the present.’’ “The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic,’’ Land said in 1947, announcing the process’s invention. “We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.” — Edwin Land, Statement to Polaroid Corporation employees (25 June 1958) The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter ask...

Bilibili Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Moving on to our community growth. Our DAUs increased by 15% year-over-year to 96.5 million in the second quarter, driving our DAU to MAU ratio up to 29.8%. In the second half of this year, we plan to shift our video watching metric from video views to video time spent, which will help our users discover more high-quality content on Bilibili. In addition, we are exploring new live broadcasting products to create more paying channels for our users, including live celebration events. We expect our ongoing integration activities to support our revenue growth in the second half of 2023. Our top five advertising verticals in the second quarter were games, e-commerce, digital products and home appliances, skincare and cosmetics, and food and beverage. 五大Top广告垂类 In the meantime, we have seven new titles that we plan to release in domestic and overseas markets in the second half of the year, including the highly anticipated game Pretty Derby 期待7款游戏能红火一波 We cut sales and marketing expenses by 2...

产品随想 | 读《置身事内:中国政府与经济发展》 第一章:地方政府的权力与事务

产品随想 此书写于疫情封锁期间的那2个月,作者表述是,平时太忙没时间,疫情封锁刚好有大块完整空闲 ──果真是有闲,才能促进思考,当大家都忙于房贷、生存的时候,即使是智者,也没时间思考 引言 一套严格的概念框架无疑有助于厘清问题,但也经常让人错把问题当成答案。社会科学总渴望发现一套“放之四海而皆准”的方法和规律,但这种心态需要成熟起来。不要低估经济现实的复杂性,也不要高估科学工具的质量。 ——亚历山大·格申克龙《经济落后的历史透视》 ──别把问题当成是答案 前言 我剔除了技术细节,尽量用通俗的语言讲述核心的内容和观念:在我国,政府不但影响“蛋糕”的分配,也参与“蛋糕”的生产,所以我们不可能脱离政府谈经济。必须深入了解这一政治经济机体如何运作,才可能对其进行判断。我们生活在这个机体中,我们的发展有赖于对这个机体的认知。要避免把舶来的理论化成先入为主的判断——看到现实与理论不符,便直斥现实之非,进而把要了解的现象变成了讥讽的对象——否则就丧失了“同情的理解”的机会。 ──开宗明义,即:我们学到的西方经济学,与中国现实不符合时,不应该直接讽刺中国,而应更深了解中国。政府参与蛋糕生产、蛋糕分配的表述,足够清晰。 对从事经济实务工作(如金融和投资)的读者,我希望能帮助他们了解日常业务之外的政治经济背景,这些背景的变化往往对行业有深远的影响。对经济学专业的大学生,由于他们所学的西方理论和中国现实之间脱节严重,我将中国政府作为本书分析的主角,希望可以帮助构建二者之间的桥梁。对非经济学专业的读者,我希望这本书能帮助他们读懂国家政经大事和新闻。 ──1000个哈姆雷特 本书注重描述现实,注重解释“是什么”和“为什么”。当不可避免涉及“怎么办”的时候,则注重解释当下正在实施的政策和改革。对读者来说,了解政府认为应该怎么办,比了解“我”认为应该怎么办,重要得多。 ──“比了解“我”认为应该怎么办,重要得多”,个人不赞同,更好的做法是,了解政府认为怎么做之后,仍继续思考、提出自己认为更优的解法,因为政府采取的方案,并不一定是最优的。 本书几乎每一章的主题,复旦的同事都有研究和著述,我从他们那里学到了很多。在复旦工作的六七年中,我几乎每周都参加陈钊和陆铭等同仁组织的学习讨论小组,本书中的很多想法都源于这些讨论。 ──又推荐了2名学者 书籍框架 第一章:介绍决定地方事务范围的主要因素,这些因素不...

Steve Jobs: Rolling Stone’s 2003 Interview

  When Steve Jobs cruises into the airy reception area on the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, California, on a recent morning, nobody pays much attention to him, even though he’s the company’s CEO. He’s wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and running shoes. Tall and a little gawky, Jobs has a fast, loping walk, like a wolf in a hurry. These days Jobs seems eager to distance himself from his barefoot youth – who was that crazy kid who once called the computer “a bicycle for the mind”? – and driven to prove himself as a clear-thinking Silicon Valley capitalist. Jobs punches the elevator button to the fourth floor, where his small office is located. For a man who is as responsible as anyone for the wonder and chaos of Silicon Valley, Jobs’ view of it all is surprisingly modest: shrubby treetops extending out toward San Francisco Bay, the distant whoosh of the freeway below. There is nothing modest, however, about Apple’s recent accomplishments. In the past few months,...

Hacking Team武器库

之前百度盘上公开了部分Hacking Team工具,自己一直没有看懂,今天在泉哥博客上看到他对于武器库的几篇文章,mark一下