1992-02-03 Steve Jobs.MicroTimes Interview
In early 1992, MicroTimes published a two-part interview with Steve Jobs. John Perry Barlow asked Jobs many questions about his plans for Next. Steve Jobs is at his Steve Jobsesist. Enjoy this interesting look at what could have been.
1992 年初，MicroTimes 刊登了对史蒂夫·乔布斯的两部分访谈。约翰·佩里·巴洛向乔布斯提出了许多关于他对 Next 公司计划的问题。史蒂夫·乔布斯展现了他最典型的风格。请欣赏这段有趣的访谈，看看当时可能实现的未来。
Quick Side note: John Perry Barlow has quite a list of accomplishments: He was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier.
快速附注：约翰·佩里·巴洛有不少成就：他曾是感恩至死乐队的作词人，也是电子前线的创始成员之一。
From the February 3, 1992 issue of MicroTimes magazine
摘自 1992 年 2 月 3 日《MicroTimes》杂志
At Last, NexT Sells The Dream...To MIS
最终，NeXT 将梦想卖给了 MIS
The MicroTimes Interview With Steve Jobs, Part One
MicroTimes 对史蒂夫·乔布斯的采访（第一部分）
One does not encounter many published interviews with Steve Jobs. Indeed, I’ve seen his picture on a number of magazine covers, only to find the lead articles within them barren of a single word directly from Himself.
人们很少看到史蒂夫·乔布斯的访谈被公开发表。事实上，我曾多次在杂志封面上看到他的照片，却发现里面的主要文章中竟然没有一句他本人的直接言论。
There is a reason for this. While he is not quite yet the Howard Hughes of computing, it is easier to get an audience with the Pope than an interview with Steve Jobs. Nor is there any point in the process when one might feel he’s got it nailed.
这是有原因的。尽管他还算不上计算机界的霍华德·休斯，但想要采访史蒂夫·乔布斯，比觐见教皇还难。而且在整个过程中，你永远不会觉得自己已经完全掌控了局面。
I can’t blame him-for being wary of the press. He is a Mick Jagger-class celebrity, and Global Villagers of this magnitude usually go a bit south. You would too if everyone you met focused not on you but on some virtual image, floating vastly above you like a Macy’s parade balloon. (As Bob Dylan sang in “Idiot Wind”: “People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act. Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts.”)
我不能责怪他对媒体保持警惕。他是米克·贾格尔级别的名人，这种级别的全球村民通常都会有些失常。如果你遇到的每个人关注的不是你本人，而是某种虚拟的形象，像梅西百货游行中的气球一样高高漂浮在你头顶，你也会如此。（正如鲍勃·迪伦在《白痴风》中所唱：“人们总是见到我，却忘了该如何表现。他们的脑海里充满了宏大的想法、形象和扭曲的事实。”）
This problem is exacerbated in Jobs’ case by the fact that there really is something compellingly, well, different, about him. For the last decade, the workings of his complex personality have been like an Exploratorium exhibit on monomania; highly visible, well-annotated, and endlessly fascinating to gawking legions who have never actually met the guy.
在乔布斯的案例中，这个问题更加严重，因为他身上确实有某种引人注目的、与众不同的特质。在过去十年里，他复杂个性的运作方式就像是探索博物馆中关于偏执狂的展览：高度可见、注释详尽，并且对那些从未真正见过他却热衷围观的人群而言，有着无穷的吸引力。
Of course, Jobs would prefer these people look upon his works rather than whatever personal demons might drive him, and those around him, to produce them. After all, no one sits around psychoanalyzing SPARCstations for insights into Bill Joy’s mind, nor have I ever heard a portentous word spoken about Ken Olsen’s childhood.
当然，乔布斯更希望人们关注他的作品本身，而不是去探究驱使他及其身边人创造这些作品的个人心魔。毕竟，没有人会坐下来通过心理分析 SPARCstations 来洞察比尔·乔伊的内心世界，我也从未听说过有人郑重其事地谈论肯·奥尔森的童年。
But unfortunately for all concerned, it has become difficult to discuss either his companies or their products without talking about Jobs on a fairly personal level. In the past, this was not such a bad thing. What separated Apple from its many early competitors was largely a mystique based on the showier of its Steves. Both the Macintosh and the NeXT originally became objects of obscure desire due to something not unlike a personality cult.
但不幸的是，对于所有相关人士而言，现在很难在不涉及乔布斯个人层面的情况下讨论他的公司或产品。在过去，这并非坏事。苹果公司与早期众多竞争对手的区别，很大程度上源于围绕着更引人注目的那位史蒂夫所形成的一种神秘感。无论是 Macintosh 还是 NeXT，最初都因某种类似个人崇拜的因素而成为人们隐秘渴望的对象。
But the mystique which once served him has lately been his principal liability. NeXT appears dominated by true believers whose devotion takes the form of creating products, the greatness of which may be literally a bit insane. But in the process, they devote to, the cult a lot of the attention which would better be directed at customers. Dale Carnegie would not dig this. And neither has the marketplace.
但曾经助他成功的神秘感最近却成了他的主要负担。NeXT 似乎被一群真正的信徒所主导，他们的热忱表现为创造出一些伟大到近乎疯狂的产品。但在这一过程中，他们将大量精力投入到这种崇拜之中，而这些精力本应更好地用于关注客户。戴尔·卡内基不会欣赏这一点，市场也同样不买账。
Which is a damned shame. In my opinion, the NeXT is simply the most powerful, versatile, and deep digital engine you can put on a desk. It is years ahead of its competitors in every area where they are devoting so many of their R&D resources: object-orientation, operating system, ease of programming, graphical interface design, interoperability, connectivity, and stability. It is unbelievably cool.
这真是太遗憾了。在我看来，NeXT 简直是你能放在桌面上的最强大、最多功能、最深入的数字引擎。在竞争对手投入大量研发资源的每个领域——面向对象、操作系统、编程便捷性、图形界面设计、互操作性、连接性和稳定性——它都领先了数年。它酷得令人难以置信。
And that’s the problem. A lot of people haven’t believed it. NeXT, however committed to Steve’s dream, has been unable to reveal it convincingly to the rest of the world. And so it is that the world’s most-elegant computer has only shipped some thirty-six thousand units since 1988.
这就是问题所在。很多人并不相信这一点。然而，尽管 NeXT 致力于史蒂夫的梦想，却未能令人信服地向外界展示。因此，自 1988 年以来，这台世界上最优雅的计算机仅售出了大约三万六千台。
Lately, as you will read in the following, this has begun to change. Sales have started to pick up. Corporations have discovered NeXTs and are beginning to use them to write the custom applications they once wrote on mainframes and then on the PC.
正如你将在下文中读到的，这种情况最近已开始发生变化。销售量开始回升。企业发现了 NeXT 电脑，并开始用它们来编写曾经在大型机上、后来在个人电脑上编写的定制应用程序。
The swift spread of such news could make a big difference to NeXT. But Jobs’ cavalier treatment of the press, however understandable, has earned him ill will of the sort they usually reserve for such as Richard Nixon. Most of the journalists who might otherwise carry the new message are too irritated to give him the satisfaction.
这种消息的迅速传播可能会对 NeXT 产生重大影响。但乔布斯对媒体的傲慢态度，尽管可以理解，却为他招致了通常只有理查德·尼克松那样的人才会遭受的恶感。大多数本来可能传播这一新信息的记者都因过于恼火而不愿让他如愿以偿。
By the time the following conversation took place, I was in a pretty dyspeptic mood myself. Nor was Jobs all that happy with me. Frustrated by the apparent absence of any coherent approach to marketing and sales at NeXT, I had electronically circulated several rants on the subject, elevating temperatures inside and outside NeXT.
当下面这段对话发生时，我自己的情绪也相当烦躁。乔布斯对我也并不满意。由于对 NeXT 公司在市场营销和销售方面明显缺乏连贯策略感到沮丧，我曾通过电子邮件散发了几篇对此事的激烈批评，引发了 NeXT 公司内外的紧张气氛。
He emailed me, telling me that I was “all wet” but failing to elucidate further. I told him that the best way to set me (and other similarly wet individuals) straight would be to give me an interview. To my surprise, he agreed.
他给我发了邮件，说我“完全错了”，但没有进一步解释。我告诉他，要纠正我（以及其他同样犯错的人），最好的办法就是接受我的采访。令我惊讶的是，他同意了。
Two days before the interview, after I had bought a nonrefundable ticket from Wyoming, he cancelled. Then he changed his mind again and I flew to Redwood City. There he kept me and my “second,” MicroTimes editor Mary Eisenhart, waiting for forty minutes before he bounced in and told us that he could only spare us twenty of the ninety minutes we'd been promised. But not to worry. He could “talk real fast.” (Which he most assuredly can.) As it turned out, he stayed put for nearly an hour, but, by this opening gambit of evasive zigs and zags, he managed to put me irretrievably off balance.
采访前两天，就在我从怀俄明州买了一张不可退款的机票后，他取消了采访。随后他又改变了主意，于是我飞往了红木城。在那里，他让我和我的“助手”、《MicroTimes》编辑玛丽·艾森哈特等了四十分钟，才匆匆赶来告诉我们，原本承诺的九十分钟采访，他只能抽出二十分钟。但他又说不用担心，他可以“说得非常快”（他确实能做到）。结果，他待了将近一个小时，但通过这种开场时闪烁其词的迂回策略，他成功地让我彻底失去了平衡。
So there was little I could do to prevent him from “playing his tapes” at me. This was unfortunate, because much of what he says about changing NeXT fortunes is more plausible than it may sound in the following...or would have sounded if he’d been speaking less automatically.
因此，我几乎无法阻止他向我“播放他的录音带”。这很不幸，因为他所说的关于改变 NeXT 命运的许多内容，比接下来听起来的更可信一些……或者说，如果他当时说话不那么机械的话，听起来本会更可信一些。
I think he has rediscovered a huge market: Son of dBASE, custom workstation apps for MIS. Like Jobs, I imagine small groups of networked guerrillas roaming the corporate steppes of Cyberspace, continuously conjuring up new tools of the moment from their NeXTs. While he may be, as usual, dangerously ahead of the curve, Steve Jobs is once again onto something. I’m not surprised.
我认为他重新发现了一个巨大的市场：dBASE 的继承者，即面向 MIS 的定制工作站应用程序。和乔布斯一样，我想象着小型网络游击队在网络空间的企业草原上游走，不断用他们的 NeXT 电脑创造出当下的新工具。尽管他可能像往常一样危险地走在时代前沿，但史蒂夫·乔布斯再次抓住了某种趋势。我对此并不感到惊讶。
Whatever his personal wrinkles, I think this guy really is a genius. Difficult and elusive, there remains something quite winsome about Steve Jobs. He can make you nuts, but this is not entirely unpleasant.
不论他个人有什么缺点，我认为这个人确实是个天才。尽管难以相处、难以捉摸，史蒂夫·乔布斯身上仍有一种相当迷人的特质。他可能会让你抓狂，但这种感觉并不完全令人讨厌。
The interview is printed in two parts, the second to appear next month. In the first part, we primarily discuss NeXT’s brand-new marketing strategy, arguably the first credible one it has ever had. While there may be some perils to their new approach, I do believe that they are at last about to move a lot of boxes.
采访分为两部分刊登，第二部分将于下个月发表。在第一部分中，我们主要讨论了 NeXT 全新的营销策略，这可能是他们迄今为止第一个真正可信的策略。尽管他们的新方法可能存在一些风险，但我确实相信，他们终于要开始大量出货了。
Radiating energy, Jobs plants one bobbing knee on a chair across from me and begins:
乔布斯精力充沛地将一条腿搭在我对面的椅子上，膝盖上下晃动着，开始说道：
You want to talk about our marketing strategy? Good. I want to talk about that too, since you’re confused.
你想谈谈我们的营销策略？很好。我也想谈谈这个，因为你感到困惑。
I want to start out by telling you that I'm on your side.
首先，我想告诉你，我是站在你这边的。
Oh, I know that. Even if you’re kicking us in the butt, I know it’s because you want us to win.
哦，我明白这一点。即使你在踢我们的屁股，我也知道这是因为你希望我们赢。
But I have questions that I get asked all the time, and rather — than putting myself in the position of trying to second-guess what your answers would be...
但我经常会被问到一些问题，与其让我自己去猜测你的答案会是什么……
The only thing I would say is...since we don’t have the largest marketing budgets in the world to run advertisements, there are a lot of times when we learn something, and we shift our strategy, and it actually will be working in the marketplace, but there’s a lag of several months before people catch on. So sometimes people’s impressions are a little out of date with what’s really going on. We can use this as an opportunity, I can tell you what we think’s going on.
我唯一想说的是……由于我们没有世界上最大的营销预算来投放广告，很多时候当我们学到一些东西并调整策略后，它实际上已经在市场上发挥作用了，但人们通常需要几个月的时间才能意识到。因此，有时候人们对我们的印象会与实际情况有些滞后。我们可以利用这个机会，我可以告诉你我们认为正在发生的事情。
Well, all right, since we’re already there, let’s talk about current marketing strategy at NeXT.
好吧，既然我们已经谈到这里，那就聊聊 NeXT 目前的营销策略吧。
Maybe the best way to explain it is with an analogy I’ve used before that seemed to work: Believe it or not, when we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing. We didn’t. We put the bit-mapped display in place, we put the printer in place, but we never anticipated PageMaker.
也许用我以前用过的一个比喻来解释最合适：信不信由你，当我们开发 Macintosh 时，我们从未预料到桌面出版的出现。确实没有。我们设置了位图显示器，配备了打印机，但我们从未预见到 PageMaker 的诞生。
We weren’t smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it happening nine or twelve months later. We seized that, and we changed our whole business strategy to focus on desktop publishing, even though the Mac was quite good at other things too. Desktop publishing became the Trojan Horse that got Macs into corporate America, and it was successful.
我们当时并不够聪明，但我们足够聪明，能在九到十二个月后意识到这一点。我们抓住了机会，将整个业务战略转向桌面出版，尽管 Mac 在其他方面也表现出色。桌面出版成为了让 Mac 进入美国企业市场的特洛伊木马，并取得了成功。
Jump to when we created the NexT computer. When we created our computer, we did not initially view it as a workstation because of the blinders of our history. We viewed it as more of a PC on steroids, if you will, than a workstation. Maybe more important, even—when we created NeXTstep, the goal was to make it be five to ten times faster to create applications on NeXTstep than anything else. [Someone once compared conversing with Steve Jobs to sipping from a fire hose. At this point, I began to see what they meant.]
回到我们创建 NeXT 电脑的时候。当我们创造这台电脑时，由于历史的局限性，我们最初并未将其视作工作站。如果你愿意的话，我们更倾向于将它看作一台强化版的个人电脑，而非工作站。也许更重要的是，当我们开发 NeXTstep 时，我们的目标是使在 NeXTstep 上创建应用程序的速度比其他任何平台快五到十倍。[曾有人将与史蒂夫·乔布斯的交谈比作用消防水管喝水。此刻，我开始明白他们的意思了。]
That was clear at the time.
当时这一点很清楚。
That was clear, and I think we succeeded at that. But the target customer for NeXTstep, the beneficiary, was the shrink-wrap third-party software developer. The Lotuses, the WordPerfects, the Adobes. And indeed it worked. We have a joke: The good news is we have the third-best suite of productivity apps in the world. The bad news is we have the third-best suite of productivity apps in the world. [laughs]
这一点很明确，我认为我们成功做到了。但 NeXTstep 的目标客户，也就是受益者，是那些开发盒装第三方软件的公司，比如 Lotus、WordPerfect 和 Adobe。事实上，这个策略奏效了。我们有个笑话：“好消息是，我们拥有世界上排名第三的生产力应用套件。坏消息是，我们拥有世界上排名第三的生产力应用套件。”[笑]
But we really have an incredible investment in software. And tons of packages shipping, two hundred and something of them now. Much more so than any other workstation. We blow Sun’s productivity software suite away. Even if you compare us to the PC and the Mac, we now actually have best-of-breed apps in most categories. We have the best version of WordPerfect, and yet compatible with all the others. We have the best version of Adobe Illustrator. We have the best version of this and that. With Concurrence we have the best presentation program now. So we're not doing bad.
但我们在软件方面确实投入巨大。目前已有大量的软件包上市，大约两百多个，远超其他任何工作站。我们的生产力软件套件远胜于 Sun 公司。即使与 PC 和 Mac 相比，我们现在在大多数类别中也拥有同类最佳的应用程序。我们拥有最好的 WordPerfect 版本，并且与其他版本兼容。我们拥有最好的 Adobe Illustrator 版本。我们在各个方面都有最好的版本。通过 Concurrence，我们现在拥有最好的演示程序。所以我们的表现并不差。
You have other applications that don’t exist anywhere, like Diagram, which is an extraordinary piece of work.
你们还有其他一些别处不存在的应用程序，比如 Diagram，这是一个非凡的作品。
Or like the Boss Logic stuff.
或者像 Boss Logic 那些东西。
So, anyway, it basically worked...
所以，总之，它基本上奏效了……
But an interesting thing happened. When we started selling a lot of our second-generation product, the NeXTstations, this year, we turned around in June and said, “Who's buying all these?” Because remember last year we were 80% higher education. When we turned around in June, the majority of our customers were large- and medium-sized corporations.
但有趣的事情发生了。今年，当我们的第二代产品 NeXTstations 开始大量销售时，我们在六月回头看了一下，说：“是谁在买这些产品？” 因为记得去年我们的客户中有 80% 是高等教育机构。但到了六月，我们发现大部分客户已经变成了大中型企业。
And we said, “Why are they buying it?” We went and asked them, and it was very clear. They'd discovered NeXTstep. And they were using it to write their in-house mission-critical custom apps five to ten times faster.
我们问：“他们为什么要买？”于是我们去询问了他们，答案非常明确。他们发现了 NeXTstep，并用它以快五到十倍的速度开发内部关键任务的定制应用程序。
This was a discovery, not a plan? Really?
这是个发现，而非计划？真的吗？
Oh yeah, absolutely. It was not a planned thing.
哦，是的，绝对如此。这并不是计划好的事情。
The concept that all big companies have a ton of mission-critical custom apps they want to write—that they’re all downsizing off of mainframes and that they all want to write them on these desktop platforms now—was something that never occurred to us.
所有大公司都有大量关键任务的定制应用程序需要开发——它们都在从大型机缩减规模，现在都希望在这些桌面平台上开发这些应用程序——这种想法我们以前从未想到过。
Well, gee, there’s been a hell of a dBASE market for a long time now...
嗯，哎呀，dBASE 市场已经火了很长一段时间了……
Right. Well, when we started thinking about it, within a month it became obvious. People used to write custom apps on their mainframes and their minis. Along came the personal computer, and rather than wait three years for your MIS department to write something, you could write a little bit of it yourself, using 1-2-3 macros and dBASE. The problem was that kind of ran out of gas a few years ago, topped out. And one could ask the question now, “What do you do now to get competitive advantage when all your competitors have PCs on their desk too, and they can buy the same shrink-wrapped stuff you can?”
对。当我们开始思考这个问题时，不到一个月就变得很明显了。过去人们习惯在大型机和小型机上编写定制应用程序。后来个人电脑出现了，你不必再等三年让你的 MIS 部门去开发某个程序，而是可以自己用 1-2-3 宏和 dBASE 快速编写一些简单的东西。但问题是，这种方式几年前就已经失去了动力，达到了瓶颈。现在人们可能会问：“当你的竞争对手桌上也都有了个人电脑，他们也能买到和你一样的现成软件时，你该如何获得竞争优势呢？”
The answer is to write a mission-critical custom app!
答案就是编写一个关键任务的定制应用程序！
We weren't smart enough to see this. Our customers taught us this. We have redone our entire marketing strategy this summer, the August-September timeframe, to focus on mission-critical custom apps. And that is our Trojan Horse that is getting us into corporate America.
我们当时并没有足够聪明地意识到这一点，而是我们的客户教会了我们。今年夏天，大约八九月份，我们重新制定了整个营销战略，专注于关键任务的定制应用程序。这就是我们进入美国企业市场的特洛伊木马。
Now when we first explained this to our third-party application developers, their initial reaction was to freak. They thought, “Oh my God, you're abandoning productivity!” Turned out that it couldn’t have been further from the truth. What happens is that we’re now selling NeXT computers in clumps—the smallest clumps are usually like twenty-five, the largest clumps, we just closed our first order for over a thousand systems. And we have a lot of clumps that we sold for hundreds of systems, one to five hundred. We get orders for one to five hundred systems now, routinely.
当我们最初向第三方应用开发商解释这一点时，他们的第一反应是惊慌失措。他们想：“天哪，你们要放弃生产力了！”结果事实完全相反。现在的情况是，我们以批量方式销售 NeXT 电脑——最小的批量通常是二十五台左右，最大的批量，我们刚刚完成了首个超过一千台系统的订单。此外，我们还有很多几百台规模的订单，一到五百台的订单现在已是家常便饭。
Well, guess what? All these customers want a bag of productivity apps to go on those several hundred systems, which can interoperate with their custom apps. We’ve got one customer down in LA who’s buying a thousand copies of about six or seven apps. You should see all the developers lining up—” What do you need to do to make mine one of them?” So our app developers have been more successful in the last six months than they’ve ever been. Jumping out of this Trojan Horse, if you will, once we get it in there.
你猜怎么着？所有这些客户都希望在那几百套系统上配备一整套生产力应用程序，并能与他们的定制应用程序互操作。我们在洛杉矶有个客户，一次性购买了大约六七个应用程序的一千份授权。你应该看看那些开发者们排着队问：“我需要做些什么才能让我的应用成为其中之一？”因此，我们的应用开发者在过去六个月里取得了前所未有的成功。一旦我们把这个“特洛伊木马”送进去，他们就会从中脱颖而出。
What we’ve seen is that even though our apps maybe 50%, even 100%, better than what you can get on a PC, you need something that’s even more of a compelling advantage to get people to switch. Being twice as good ain’t good enough.
我们发现，即使我们的应用程序可能比 PC 上的好 50%，甚至 100%，你仍然需要更具吸引力的优势才能让人们转而使用。仅仅好一倍还不够。
People are willing to go on dancing with the devil they know for a long time, or DOS would not still be the standard.
人们愿意长期与他们熟悉的魔鬼共舞，否则 DOS 就不会仍然是标准了。
OpenAI取得优势后其他竞争者要赶超的难度会很大。
Right. And they’re willing to listen to how this other company’s going to have this in two years, why not wait, blah-blah-blah.
对。而且他们愿意听另一家公司如何在两年内实现这个，为什么不等等看，诸如此类的话。
So what we found is that with mission-critical custom apps, we’re not 50% or 100% better, we’re like 1000% better. And it’s over that threshold where somebody’s willing to take a gamble on us as a young company, because we're five to ten times better. And that’s what’s getting us into these big accounts, and that’s who’s then buying all the productivity software.
因此我们发现，对于关键任务的定制应用，我们并不是好 50%或 100%，而是好 1000%。正是超过了这个门槛，才使得客户愿意冒险选择我们这样一家年轻的公司，因为我们的表现要好五到十倍。这正是我们能够进入这些大客户的原因，而这些客户随后也会购买所有的生产力软件。
So our business has flip-flopped. We’re only about 25% higher ed now. We’re 75% commercial and government.
因此，我们的业务发生了转变。现在高等教育领域只占约 25%，商业和政府领域占 75%。
Okay, but I guess I still have a couple of concerns here. I agree with you that this is a good way to go, it makes a lot of sense, and it has the advantage of being a Trojan Horse that heads in through the front office rather than the art department.
好的，但我想我这里仍然有一些顾虑。我同意你的看法，这是个不错的方向，很有道理，而且它的优势在于像一匹特洛伊木马一样，通过前台办公室而不是美术部门进入。
That’s right. We're getting called in by the ClOs of these companies. Which is a new experience. [laughs]
没错。我们现在被这些公司的首席信息官们请去，这可是个新体验。[笑]
Right. But I’m trying to figure out where that’s going to leave the individual customer. There are a lot of people who are disaffected with IBM’s latest Macintosh, and are really anxious to try something else. I feel that this is a market that is not being addressed at this point.
对。但我正试图弄清楚这对个人用户意味着什么。有很多人对 IBM 最新的 Macintosh 感到不满，并且非常渴望尝试其他产品。我觉得这个市场目前还没有得到关注。
Welllll...I think you're right.
嗯……我觉得你是对的。
We saw Apple start off with individuals and then pound on the door of corporate America and gradually get in a little bit through the back door. They’re not even in that far now. But they got in through the back door.
我们看到苹果公司最初从个人用户起步，然后敲响了美国企业的大门，并逐渐从后门进入了一点点。即使到现在，他们也还没有深入进去，但他们确实是从后门进入的。
We saw IBM walk in the front door of corporate America and not pay any attention to individuals, and gradually over time grab the dominant share of individual use.
我们看到 IBM 从美国企业界的正门进入，完全不关注个人用户，但随着时间推移，却逐渐占据了个人用户的主导份额。
So our path, for good or bad, is going to be more like IBM’s. We’re going to get our company very successful by selling to corporations. And then hopefully as we can drive the prices of our products down over time, we can become more desirable for individuals.
因此，无论好坏，我们的道路将更接近 IBM 的模式。我们将通过向企业销售使公司取得巨大成功。然后，随着时间推移，我们希望能逐步降低产品价格，从而对个人用户更具吸引力。
We still do have a very strong commitment to higher education, however, and we still do sell our products at a pretty deep discount to higher ed. We’re doing very well there.
不过，我们对高等教育仍然有着非常坚定的承诺，我们仍以相当大的折扣向高等教育机构销售产品。在这一领域，我们表现得非常好。
The other thing that’s happened is that in our industry we’ve seen radical changes in the distribution channel. What happened was that the dealers...
另一件发生的事情是，我们的行业在分销渠道上经历了巨大的变化。发生的情况是经销商……
Which are a moribund species, I think.
我认为这些是濒临灭绝的物种。
It’s over. What happened, though, if you go back and analyze it, was that corporate America needed the dealers five or six years ago. They didn’t know much about PCs, they didn’t know much about networking. The dealers helped them a lot, and the dealers, you know, charged for that. And there were some companies like Businessland that even built their whole business just focusing on that.
这已经结束了。不过，如果你回头分析一下，会发现五六年前美国企业确实需要经销商。当时他们对个人电脑和网络了解不多，经销商给了他们很大的帮助，当然经销商也因此收费。一些公司，比如 Businessland，甚至完全以此为业务核心。
They didn’t actually add much value.
他们实际上并未增加多少价值。
Oh, I think they did, five or six years ago. I think they did. What happened was, the MIS departments started hiring really smart people. I used to joke about how bad they were. You go to them now— they’re full of really bright people.
哦，我认为他们确实做到了，大概在五六年前。我觉得他们做到了。当时的情况是，MIS 部门开始雇佣真正聪明的人。我以前常开玩笑说他们有多糟糕。但现在你再去看看，他们那里全是非常聪明的人。
These people had the advantage that they were paid a little more than the dealers, so they didn’t turn over much. They knew a lot about the internal workings of the companies, and the dealers didn’t, and they were generally quite smart. So one day the purchasing manager at a big company woke up for the first time and said, “Why are we paying for support twice? We’re paying our internal group, and we're paying this dealer.” And they changed their priorities for purchasing PCs to price, price, price.
这些人的优势在于，他们的薪资比经销商略高，因此人员流动不大。他们对公司内部运作非常了解，而经销商却不了解，而且他们通常都很聪明。因此，有一天，一家大公司的采购经理首次意识到：“我们为什么要为支持服务付两次钱？我们既支付给内部团队，又支付给经销商。”于是他们将采购个人电脑的优先考虑因素改为价格、价格、还是价格。
And all of the margin got driven out of the dealer channel, which meant that all the people who knew how to create demand—like go give a good demo, tell you how to make it work when you had a problem—these people left, because the channel-couldn’t afford them. The channel became demand fulfillment, versus demand creation and fulfillment.
而且所有的利润空间都被从经销渠道中挤出，这意味着那些懂得如何创造需求的人——比如提供精彩的演示，在你遇到问题时告诉你如何解决的人——都离开了，因为渠道负担不起他们。渠道变成了需求满足，而不是需求创造与满足。
What’s happened now is, since the channel’s become just fulfillment, somebody woke up one day and said “Why can’t we do this over the phone with Federal Express?” And in my opinion, all of the demand fulfillment is headed towards mail order.
现在的情况是，由于渠道已经变成了单纯的订单履行，有人某天醒悟过来说：“我们为什么不能通过电话和联邦快递来做这件事呢？”在我看来，所有的需求履行都将走向邮购方式。
So why can’t NexT do that?
那么为什么 NexT 做不到呢？
Well, let me keep going.
好吧，让我继续说下去。
All the demand fulfillment is going to be in the Dell model. Telebusiness. In my opinion, superstores are just a pit stop on the way to telemarketing. I don’t even see a reason to have a superstore. Why get in my car and drive somewhere and pick it up when I can have it delivered to my house tomorrow?
所有的需求满足都将采用戴尔模式，即电话商务。在我看来，大型超市只是通往电话营销途中的一个临时站点。我甚至看不到开设大型超市的理由。当我可以明天就送货上门时，为什么还要开车去某个地方取货呢？
So I think that the channel has been cetera and that all commodity products will be fulfilled through telebusiness.
因此，我认为渠道已经发生了变化，所有商品都将通过远程商务来实现。
Now the big question is, what about innovative new products, where demand still needs to be created? You can’t create demand through telemarketing. You can’t create demand in a superstore. You can’t even create demand much in the existing few dealers that are left.
现在最大的问题是，那些创新的新产品怎么办？它们的需求仍需被创造出来。你无法通过电话营销创造需求，也无法在大型超市创造需求，甚至在现存为数不多的经销商那里也很难创造需求。
Especially for a product like yours, which is an environment. You have to actually experience that environment.
尤其是对于像你们这种作为一种环境的产品，你必须亲自体验那个环境。
You have to have somebody show you.
你必须得有人教你。
And you have to be there for a while.
而且你必须在那里待上一段时间。
Right. Yes. I agree. And you have to have a little hand-holding while you make the transition.
对，是的，我同意。在进行转变时，你需要一些帮助和引导。
The learning curve has a cliff right at the bottom, but it’s actually a pretty smooth climb after that.
学习曲线一开始就像悬崖一样陡峭，但之后实际上会变得相当平缓。
Right. I agree. But how do you create demand in a channel that’s purely optimizing for demand fulfillment? We saw Compaq come out with their SystemPros and fall right on their face. Because even their dealers, which were some of the best ones, couldn't create demand anymore.
对。我同意。但你如何在一个纯粹以满足需求为目标的渠道中创造需求呢？我们看到康柏推出了他们的 SystemPros，却遭遇了惨败。因为即使是他们那些最好的经销商，也再无法创造需求了。
Well, I think the answer, for good or bad, is a direct sales force. We saw Sun grow a three billion-dollar company in the last five-six years, off a direct sales force creating demand for their products. And our model of selling has changed—we are selling our products primarily with our direct sales force. We have 120 professionals in the field.
嗯，我认为无论好坏，答案都是直销团队。我们看到 Sun 公司在过去五六年里通过直销团队创造了对其产品的需求，成长为一家市值 30 亿美元的公司。而我们的销售模式也发生了变化——我们主要通过自己的直销团队销售产品。我们在现场拥有 120 名专业人员。
So it sounds as if I’ve been trying to get you to do something you're already doing. I’m trying to convince you to sell direct, and you're going to direct sales.
听起来好像我一直在试图让你做你已经在做的事情。我试图说服你直接销售，而你本来就打算直接销售。
We are. We have fifty reps, fifty SEs, and twenty management people and support people in the field. And that’s how we are selling most of our products today.
是的。我们有五十名销售代表、五十名系统工程师，以及二十名管理和现场支持人员。这就是我们目前销售大部分产品的方式。
Now the direct sales people don’t all have to work for us, so we’re signing on VARs, who have direct sales forces, to augment our direct sales forces. And we then have some high-énd dealers, almost VADs more than VARs.
现在，直销人员不一定都要为我们工作，因此我们正在签约拥有直销团队的增值经销商（VARs），以增强我们的直销力量。此外，我们还有一些高端经销商，他们更接近增值分销商（VADs）而非增值经销商（VARs）。
We did a really smart thing. We commission our direct salespeople for any product that lands in their territory, no matter what channel it came through. So they can sell it themselves, a VAR can sell it, or a dealer can sell it. They make the same amount of money. So when they get an order for ten, twenty systems, they call up the dealer and give it to them. Because they don’t want to take their expensive time, they’d rather go focus on a hundred-unit order.
我们做了一件非常聪明的事。我们为直接销售人员提供佣金，只要产品进入他们的区域，无论通过何种渠道。他们自己销售、增值经销商销售或经销商销售都可以，他们赚取的金额是一样的。因此，当他们收到十台、二十台系统的订单时，他们会打电话给经销商，把订单交给他们。因为他们不想浪费自己宝贵的时间，他们更愿意专注于一百台的订单。
So it’s actually working pretty well between the dealers and the VARs and our direct sales people, because we eliminated channel conflict.
因此，经销商、增值经销商和我们的直销人员之间的合作实际上相当顺畅，因为我们消除了渠道冲突。
Okay, but what happens if somebody calls me up—as they do like every other day—and says, “Where do I buy a NeXT?” And they’re calling from Pittsburgh, and I don’t know if there’s a dealer in Pittsburgh, and chances are if there is, he doesn’t know what the NeXT he’s selling really is...
好吧，但如果有人给我打电话——这种情况几乎隔天就会发生一次——问我：“我在哪儿能买到一台 NeXT？”而他们是从匹兹堡打来的，我不知道匹兹堡有没有经销商，即使有的话，很可能那个经销商自己也不清楚他卖的 NeXT 到底是什么……
I guess the corollary to this question is: What does somebody who is a devout NeXT user and advocate do to help NeXT? I see a great deal of frustration and disaffection in the NeXT user community, which is about as rabidly devoted as anything I’ve seen outside a religious group, and they just don’t feel like there’s anything they can do.
我想这个问题的推论是：一个忠实的 NeXT 用户和支持者能做些什么来帮助 NeXT？我看到 NeXT 用户群体中存在着大量的挫败感和不满情绪，这个群体的狂热程度几乎可以媲美宗教团体，但他们却觉得自己无能为力。
Well, to make NeXT successful, we’ve got to make NeXT successful in corporate America.
要让 NeXT 成功，我们必须让 NeXT 在美国企业界取得成功。
You’re probably quite right about that, but I have one caveat. As Mitch Kapor [founder of Lotus] learned, eventually a company resembles its market more than its maker.
你对此可能是完全正确的，但我有一点保留意见。正如米奇·卡普尔（Lotus 创始人）所认识到的那样，一家公司最终会更像它的市场，而不是它的创始人。
[Long pause. He smiles thoughtfully.]
[长时间停顿。他若有所思地微笑。]
We'll see. 我们拭目以待。
We'll see. 我们拭目以待。
And I guess I’ve met a lot of people in corporate America that I wouldn’t mind NeXT resembling. There’s a lot of good people out there. As an example, there’s a company called O’Connor that has hundreds of our machines; they’re in Chicago. These are a bunch of young bright kids who have gone and out performed almost every old-line firm in the financial services industry. They are great. They look like us, they talk like us, they live in Chicago, they started this commodities trading firm, and they cleaned up in their industry by bringing technology into that.
我想我在美国企业界遇到过很多人，我并不介意 NeXT 像他们一样。那里有很多优秀的人。举个例子，有一家名为 O'Connor 的公司，他们拥有数百台我们的机器，位于芝加哥。这是一群年轻聪明的年轻人，他们的表现几乎超过了金融服务行业中所有传统公司。他们很棒。他们看起来像我们，说话像我们，住在芝加哥，他们创办了这家商品交易公司，通过引入技术在行业中取得了巨大成功。
Well, look, I’m a Republican. I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to business, but there are elements of the corporate environment that... You actually led a revolution that empowered individuals in corporate America...
嗯，你看，我是共和党人。我对商业并没有本能的反感，但企业环境中确实存在一些因素……实际上，你领导了一场革命，让美国企业中的个人获得了力量……
Mm-hm. 嗯哼。
...And I keep worrying about the possibility that the network is the mainframe’s revenge. That you’re going to be leading the counter-revolution whether you want to or not.
……我一直担心网络可能会成为大型机的复仇。不管你愿不愿意，你都可能会领导一场反革命。
No, I don’t see it that way. We make computers that you can disconnect from the network any time you want.
不，我不这么认为。我们制造的电脑可以让你随时从网络断开连接。
But I guess I view the network as so important now, that it’s just becoming ubiquitous. And the reason is because computers are being used more and more to communicate than they are to compute. Just like we burned a ton of CPU cycles to make the user interface great on Macintosh, we’re burning a ton of CPU cycles now to help people communicate: That’s profound to me, and I don’t think it’s bad.
但我想，我现在认为网络非常重要，它正变得无处不在。原因是计算机越来越多地被用于沟通，而不是计算。就像我们曾经在 Macintosh 上耗费大量 CPU 周期来打造出色的用户界面一样，我们现在也在耗费大量 CPU 周期来帮助人们沟通：对我来说，这一点意义深远，我也不认为这是坏事。
I mean, I subscribe to a lot of your ideas. [Referring to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.] It's got to be open, it’s got to be pervasive, and there can’t be economic barriers to people hooking onto this network. But] think the network, the concept of the network to connect us all together with the right tools, is definitely the next big step in our industry.
我的意思是，我赞同你们的很多观点。[指的是电子前沿基金会。] 网络必须是开放的，必须是普及的，不能存在经济障碍阻碍人们接入这个网络。我认为网络这个概念，用合适的工具将我们所有人连接在一起，绝对是我们行业的下一个重大步骤。
Well, I agree. I suppose my main mission is to connect everything to everything else.
嗯，我同意。我想我的主要使命是将所有事物彼此连接起来。
Right. 对。
So I don’t see that as the mainframe’s revenge. I don’t.
因此，我并不认为这是大型机的复仇。我不这么看。
But there remains a sort of totalitarian potential in networked computing that concerns me...
但联网计算中仍存在一种令我担忧的极权主义潜在可能性……
Well, I view it as very important that you always ought to be able to go off under a tree by yourself with your computer and do something. But I don’t think it’s going to be very long before your computer’s got to have some radio net or something in it, because it’s going to be impossible to do anything without being hooked to that net. Sort of like having a telephone that’s not plugged in, that’s not a cellular phone, and going out and sitting under that tree. It’s just not going to be too useful.
嗯，我认为你始终应该能够独自带着电脑到树下去做点事情，这一点非常重要。但我觉得不久之后，你的电脑就必须内置某种无线网络或类似的东西，因为如果不连接到网络，将无法完成任何事情。这就像拿着一部既未插线又不是手机的电话，跑到树下坐着一样，那样根本没什么用处。
Another aspect of your marketing strategy which concerns me is that I wouldn’t want to see the SIGGRAPH bunch left out. Or the music types. There’s a wonderful hybridization that takes place between the nerds and the artists—more juice there than any place else in this culture.
你的营销策略中另一个让我关心的方面是，我不希望看到 SIGGRAPH 那群人被忽视，或者音乐圈的人被忽视。在技术宅和艺术家之间存在着一种奇妙的融合，这种融合所产生的活力比这个文化中其他任何地方都要强烈。
Well, look at our actions, and I think you'll see we’re not leaving any of that stuff behind. I think Wall Street’s going to love [Pixar’s] RenderMan; but we’re doing it for a lot of other reasons than that.
嗯，看看我们的行动，我想你会发现我们并没有放弃任何这些东西。我认为华尔街会喜欢[皮克斯的] RenderMan；但我们这么做还有很多其他原因。
Still, 1 wouldn’t want to see this elegant thing become the faithful servant of MIS and nothing else.
不过，我仍然不希望看到这样一件优雅的东西仅仅沦为管理信息系统（MIS）的忠实仆人，而别无他用。
Right. But you should see the people buying these things. Let me give you an example that’s kind of not too traditional.
没错。但你应该看看购买这些东西的人。我给你举个不太传统的例子。
Bozell Jacobs is about the tenth-largest ad agency in the country; their biggest customers are Chrysler and American Airlines. They bought several hundred of our computers, and we figured they were just using them for productivity until we met the art director down there, who was one of the key people that made the decision to go with NeXT.
Bozell Jacobs 是美国排名约第十的广告公司，他们最大的客户是克莱斯勒和美国航空公司。他们购买了我们数百台电脑，我们原以为他们只是用来提高生产力，直到我们遇到了那里的艺术总监，他是决定采用 NeXT 的关键人物之一。
He said, “Well, that’s one of the things, but that’s not why we bought them.” We said, “Why did you buy them?” He said, “Well, did you ever see these ads for American Airlines in the newspaper that list all the flights and the prices for the next day?”
他说：“嗯，这是原因之一，但这并不是我们收购他们的真正原因。”我们问：“那你们为什么要购买他们呢？”他说：“嗯，你有没有在报纸上看到过美国航空公司的那些广告，上面列出了第二天所有航班和价格？”
“Yean... " “是啊……”
“Well, there’s 150 of those that run every night around the country, and they’re all different because of different cities. You know how we make those? We get onto the SABRE system manually every night, we typeset them all manually. We’re writing a custom NeXTstep app that logs onto the SABRE system automatically, grabs the data, typesets it automatically into the app, sends them onto the network around the country, and prints them locally at the local cities.”
嗯，全国每晚有 150 份这样的文件在运行，由于城市不同，每份都不一样。你知道我们是怎么做的吗？我们每晚手动登录 SABRE 系统，手动排版所有内容。我们正在编写一个定制的 NeXTstep 应用程序，它能自动登录 SABRE 系统，自动获取数据并进行排版，然后通过网络发送到全国各地，并在当地城市本地打印出来。
There’s an art director writing this app. This is because of PostScript and because of your database stuff. We used to think about art directors getting competitive advantage by getting a Macintosh and some page layout program. The world’s moving beyond that.
有一位艺术总监正在编写这个应用程序。这是因为 PostScript 和你们的数据库技术。我们过去认为艺术总监通过购买一台 Macintosh 和一些页面排版软件就能获得竞争优势。但世界已经超越了这一点。
So I think we’ve got to be careful when we say, “Let’s not lose traditional multifaceted markets.” Those multifaceted markets tomorrow are not what they were yesterday. And that’s why we think we are able to give some of them what they need to take the next step.
因此，我认为当我们说“不要失去传统的多元化市场”时，必须谨慎。这些多元化市场的未来与过去并不相同。这也是为什么我们认为自己能够为其中一些市场提供他们迈出下一步所需的东西。
This is especially true in multimedia, where a lot of people who have never given the Mac much thought are suddenly going to find themselves trying to send video postcards.
在多媒体领域尤其如此，许多以前从未认真考虑过 Mac 的人会突然发现自己开始尝试发送视频明信片。
Hey, I’ll give you an example of multimedia. You know, one of our most multimedia-intensive customers is the Canadian Mounted Police in Toronto. [laughs] They’re using NeXT systems to manage their whole police department. Multimedia out the wazoo.
嘿，我给你举个多媒体的例子。你知道吗，我们多媒体应用最密集的客户之一是多伦多的加拿大皇家骑警。[笑] 他们正在用 NeXT 系统管理整个警察部门。多媒体用得铺天盖地。
This is another one of these areas where I worry about the maker and the market.
这是另一个让我担心制造者与市场的领域。
Yeah, I know. [laughs] I know. It’s funny, though.
是的，我知道。[笑] 我知道。不过，这很有趣。
Actually, the Mounted Police don’t bother me anything like as much as my recent discovery that the CIA is one of your biggest customers.
事实上，比起骑警，更让我困扰的是我最近发现中央情报局竟然是你们最大的客户之一。
I can’t comment on that.
我对此无法置评。
From the March 2, 1992 issue of MicroTimes magazine
摘自 1992 年 3 月 2 日出版的《MicroTimes》杂志
NeXT In The Real World
现实世界中的 NeXT
Part II Of The MicroTimes Interview With Steve JOBS - By John Perry Barlow
MicroTimes 对史蒂夫·乔布斯采访的第二部分 - 作者：约翰·佩里·巴洛
EVERYTHING IS CHANGING ALL THE TIME.
一切都在不断变化。
At that point in early December when I had the following conversation with Steve Jobs (the first half of which was published in MicroTimes last month), the world around NeXT looked different to me in a lot of subtle ways.
在 12 月初我与史蒂夫·乔布斯进行以下对话时（前半部分已于上个月刊登在《MicroTimes》杂志上），我感觉到 NeXT 周围的世界在许多微妙之处显得不同了。
For one thing, I was still somewhat unpersuaded that their bold, new marketing plan—selling NeXTstep as an environment for developing custom applications—wasn’t yet another way to shovel smoke. After all, NeXT has had, depending on how you count ‘em, at least five bold, new marketing plans over its existence, each touted with equal fervor, and each more ineffectual than the last.
首先，我仍然有些怀疑他们大胆的新营销计划——将 NeXTstep 作为开发定制应用程序的环境来销售——是否又是一次虚张声势。毕竟，根据你的计算方式，NeXT 自成立以来至少推出过五个大胆的新营销计划，每个都被热情地宣传过，但每个都比上一个更加无效。
Then there was Jobs himself, who, in his actions leading up to this conversation, seemed as compulsively elusive and manipulative as he is sometimes reputed to be.
然后是乔布斯本人，他在此次对话之前的行为中，似乎一如他有时被传闻的那样，表现得难以捉摸且善于操控。
But I’m writing these words toward the end of January, in the immediate afterglow of NeXTworld Expo. During the course of this event, a couple of things became clear to me.
但我写下这些文字时已是 1 月底，正值 NeXTworld 博览会刚刚结束之际。在此次活动期间，我逐渐明白了一些事情。
NeXT is going to make it, and possibly make it big
NeXT 将会成功，而且可能会大获成功
Their perceived new market actually does exist, and, more to the point, it knows that they exist. NeXTworld was crawling with sober, suited individuals who gave no appearance of being there on some kind of cyber-cultural lark. In evidence were all the warning signs of MIS. While my own personal enthusiasm for their arrival was restrained by my blind prejudice against suits, they’re like the 7th Cavalry as far as NeXT is concerned.
他们所感知到的新市场实际上确实存在，更重要的是，这个市场也知道他们的存在。NeXTworld 里到处都是严肃、穿着西装的人士，他们看起来并不像是为了某种网络文化的玩乐而来。现场出现了所有管理信息系统（MIS）的预警信号。尽管我个人对他们的到来并不热情，因为我对西装人士抱有盲目的偏见，但对 NeXT 而言，他们就像是第七骑兵团一样重要。
Furthermore, assuming that their port of NeXTstep to the Intel architecture really does work as seamlessly as it appears to, they may be able to grab a commanding lead in the Operating System of the Future contest before the systems heretofore regarded as the Real Contenders—Big Pink, Windows NT, and Solaris—have condensed out of their current vapors.
此外，假设他们将 NeXTstep 移植到英特尔架构的工作确实如表面看起来那样顺畅，那么在被视为真正竞争者的系统——Big Pink、Windows NT 和 Solaris——尚未从当前的迷雾中凝聚成型之前，他们或许能够在“未来操作系统”的竞争中占据主导地位。
In general, NeXTworld, and the product announcements it showcased, made NeXT seem like a much more credible and mature company than the kind of company which might, for example, actually expect to sell computers without floppy disk drives.
总体而言，NeXTworld 及其展示的产品发布使 NeXT 看起来更像一家可信且成熟的公司，而不像是一家会真正期望销售没有软盘驱动器的电脑的公司。
There is, once again, a New Steve Jobs
又一次，一个全新的史蒂夫·乔布斯出现了
Over the course of his career, this shape-changer has gone through more metamorphic revisions than one generally achieves outside the insect kingdom, but he has finally entered one in which he is starting to look comfortable.
在他的职业生涯中，这位善于变革的人经历了比昆虫界之外一般生物更多的蜕变，但他终于进入了一个开始显得自在的阶段。
His two-and-a-half-hour presentation at NeXTworld still contained some auto-Barnumizing. At one point, the respected Mac pundit in the seat next to mine muttered, “If this guy had been born in Alabama, he would have been bigger than Swaggart.” And I didn’t have to ask him what he meant by that.
他在 NeXTworld 长达两个半小时的演讲中仍然带有一些自我吹嘘的成分。有一次，坐在我旁边的一位受人尊敬的 Mac 评论家低声说道：“如果这家伙出生在阿拉巴马州，他会比斯瓦加特还红。”我甚至不用问他这话是什么意思。
“And yet... And yet what amounted to the third NeXT product introduction contained little of the Wagnernian theatricality which caused the first two to feel less like a computer intro than Albert Speer’s staging for the Rally at Nuremburg. This time, there was a lot more steak than sizzle. Jobs was calm, relaxed, conversational. He didn’t appear to be hiding much behind the glitz of his presentation.
然而……然而，这场相当于 NeXT 第三次产品发布的活动，却几乎没有了前两次那种瓦格纳式的戏剧效果——前两次的发布会更像是阿尔伯特·施佩尔为纽伦堡集会所设计的舞台，而不像是电脑产品的发布。这一次，实质内容远多于表面噱头。乔布斯表现得冷静、放松、谈吐自然。他似乎并未在华丽的演示背后隐藏太多东西。
The products themselves were certainly meat and potatoes. There was v3.0 of NeXTstep, which contained advanced abilities for transparent group endeavors over EtherTalk and Novell networks, a highly adaptable database tool kit, 3-D modeling support based on Pixar’s Renderman, and system integrated ISDN so that one’s NeXT at home could feel part of the office network, even though connected to it by nothing but standard copper phone cabling. There were many other incremental improvements too small to detail here, which will nonetheless solidly enhance the already well integrated NeXT working environment.
这些产品本身确实是实实在在的。有 NeXTstep 的 3.0 版本，其中包括通过 EtherTalk 和 Novell 网络实现透明群组协作的高级功能、高度灵活的数据库工具包、基于皮克斯 Renderman 的三维建模支持，以及系统集成的 ISDN，使得家中的 NeXT 计算机即使仅通过标准铜质电话线连接，也能感觉像是办公室网络的一部分。此外还有许多其他细微的改进，这里不再赘述，但它们无疑将进一步巩固已经高度集成的 NeXT 工作环境。
He also introduced a great and inexpensive ($3500) color printer using PostScript 2 and Pantone colors, a 40% increase in hardware performance (with a 33MHz ’040 CPU) at no additional cost, and a new CD-ROM drive to be used, among other purposes, for loading the new system software. All pretty prosaic stuff by NeXT standards, but, well, grown up.
他还推出了一款出色且价格低廉（3500 美元）的彩色打印机，采用 PostScript 2 和潘通色彩，硬件性能提升了 40%（配备 33MHz 的'040 CPU），但价格不变；此外还有一款新的 CD-ROM 驱动器，用于加载新的系统软件等用途。以 NeXT 的标准来看，这些都是相当平凡的东西，但却显得更加成熟了。
Which is pretty much how this new Steve Jobs comes across. He is, after all, a brand new father, a condition which usually stimulates the maturity glands. On the second day of NeXTworld, Jobs spent the afternoon wandering the show floor, openly available to anyone who sought his ordinarily hard-gained company. He was amiable and engaged. And obviously very happy with the way things were going.
这基本上就是这位全新的史蒂夫·乔布斯给人的印象。毕竟，他刚刚成为一名父亲，而这种身份通常会激发人的成熟感。在 NeXTworld 展会的第二天，乔布斯整个下午都在展厅里闲逛，任何想要接近他的人都能轻松地与他交流，而平时他的陪伴却很难获得。他表现得亲切而投入，并且显然对事情的发展感到非常满意。
Though this conversation took place much earlier, some of that genuine confidence is in evidence here.
尽管这次对话发生得更早一些，但其中仍体现出了一些真正的自信。
With the greatest reluctance, I recently ordered a PowerBook 170. I hated to do that, since my Macintosh has been reduced to being sort of a dedicated QuickDex server, but my NexT...
我最近极不情愿地订购了一台 PowerBook 170。我很不情愿这么做，因为我的 Macintosh 已经沦为专门的 QuickDex 服务器，而我的 NeXT……
But you need a portable.
但你需要一台便携设备。
Exactly. Can you give me any sense of where we stand there?
没错。你能告诉我我们现在的情况如何吗？
I can. Stay tuned. We’re working on some stuff in the lab. There are a few directions we're going in.
我可以。敬请关注。我们正在实验室里进行一些研究，有几个方向正在探索中。
What most of our customers tell us is that they don’t need it to run on batteries, they just need it to be really transportable.
大多数客户告诉我们，他们并不需要它用电池运行，只需要它真正便于携带。
Just transportable. That’s how I feel.
只是便于携带。我就是这种感觉。
That’s pretty much our philosophy right now. There are a lot of things that are the enemy of running on batteries, like a big screen. Like a bigger hard disk that uses more power. Like a faster CPU that uses more power. Things like that.
这基本上就是我们现在的理念。有很多因素会妨碍电池续航，比如大屏幕，比如耗电更多的大容量硬盘，比如耗电更多的更快的 CPU，诸如此类。
So what our customers are telling us is that they want to be mobile, but they can live tethered to a 110V outlet.
因此，我们的客户告诉我们，他们希望能够移动使用，但可以接受连接到 110 伏电源插座。
Let me shift to connectivity and standards for connectivity. I'm concerned that the market doesn’t realize the extent to which you’re already meeting standards.
让我转向连接性和连接标准。我担心市场尚未意识到你们已经在多大程度上符合了标准。
I agree. 我同意。
I mean this looks like a good document [referring to a PR document about NeXT and standards], but I get skeptical questions about this every day. For example, I hear things like: “Objective C is a dead language, regardless of its merits. NeXT has bet on Objective C.” Or they'll say, “NeXT Berkeley UNIX is not exactly parallel to Sun Berkeley UNIX.” I haven't run across anything that won’t compile yet, but I hear these things... Is this all just idle slander and gossip, or is there something to it?
我的意思是，这看起来是一份不错的文件[指的是一份关于 NeXT 和标准的公关文件]，但我每天都会遇到对此持怀疑态度的问题。例如，我听到类似：“不管 Objective C 有什么优点，它都是一种已经过时的语言，而 NeXT 却押注于 Objective C。”或者他们会说：“NeXT 的伯克利 UNIX 与 Sun 的伯克利 UNIX 并不完全一致。”虽然我还没遇到过什么编译不了的情况，但我确实听到过这些说法……这些都只是毫无根据的诽谤和流言，还是确有其事？
The two biggest things you hear in the industry are “which chip are you using?” and “which version of UNIX do you have?” Then there are minor ones beyond that.
你在行业中听到的两个最大问题是：“你用的是哪种芯片？”和“你用的是哪个版本的 UNIX？”除此之外还有一些次要的问题。
And my view is that these are the battlegrounds of five years ago. It really mattered what chip you used five years ago. It really mattered what version of UNIX you had five years ago. Those things are not the battlegrounds of today.
我的看法是，这些都是五年前的战场。五年前你用什么芯片确实很重要，五年前你用哪个版本的 UNIX 也确实很重要。但这些东西已不再是今天的战场。
When you write an application for NeXT, 5% of what you see is UNIX. Ninety-five percent of what you see is NeXT step. Open/close, read/write commands are the same in every version of UNIX, and that’s about all you see in NeXTstep. So it doesn’t matter what version of UNIX you're running any more, and it doesn’t matter what chip it’s running on. NeXTstep’s running on several processors right now. What matters is, what does the application developer see? What’s your application development environment?
当你为 NeXT 编写应用程序时，你所看到的内容中只有 5%是 UNIX，95%是 NeXTstep。打开/关闭、读/写命令在每个版本的 UNIX 中都是一样的，而这几乎就是你在 NeXTstep 中所能看到的全部。因此，你运行的是哪个版本的 UNIX 已经不再重要，运行在哪种芯片上也不再重要。目前 NeXTstep 已经可以在多种处理器上运行。重要的是，应用程序开发者看到的是什么？你的应用程序开发环境是什么？
This is my point of view. You couldn’t even tell me what operating system Macintosh used, right? So I guess to me the people that are worried about these things... well, they don’t seem to be the customers, because we don’t run into these problems with customers at all. And if we do, we have them talk to a technical person for a few hours and their concerns evaporate. It seems to be people on the sidelines who have these five-year-old ideas stuck in their brain. Their light bulb hasn’t gone on, in terms of what’s really important today.
这是我的观点。你甚至都说不出 Macintosh 使用的是什么操作系统，对吧？所以在我看来，那些担心这些事情的人……嗯，他们似乎并不是客户，因为我们在客户那里根本不会遇到这些问题。即使遇到了，我们也只需让他们与技术人员交谈几个小时，他们的顾虑就会烟消云散。似乎只有那些站在一旁的人，脑子里还停留着五年前的观念。他们还没有意识到如今真正重要的是什么。
I think you may be fundamentally right about the irrelevance of these distinctions, but as you have seen many times, there’s an amazing willingness in the computer industry to adhere to blind fashion.
我认为你对这些区别的无关紧要性可能从根本上是正确的，但正如你多次看到的那样，计算机行业中存在着一种惊人的盲目跟风的意愿。
But see, that’s not who our customers are going to be. Our customers are going to be early adopter corporate and government workstation customers. And we shouldn't spend our time trying to persuade every last person that we're using the right chip or that we’re using the right version of UNIX. What we should do is go with those early adopter customers who can grow our company to a half-a-billion to a billion-dollar company, and let our success demonstrate that those issues don’t matter any more.
但是，你看，那并不是我们未来的客户群体。我们的客户将是企业和政府工作站领域的早期采用者。我们不应该花费时间去说服每一个人我们使用了正确的芯片或正确版本的 UNIX。我们应该做的是与那些早期采用者客户合作，他们能帮助我们公司成长为一家年收入五亿到十亿美元的企业，并通过我们的成功证明那些问题已经不再重要。
That’s our strategy. Our strategy shouldn’t be to convince the world. It should be to convince the 1% of the world that can grow us to a half-a-billion to a billion-dollar company. And let our success illuminate our strategy for the rest of them.
这就是我们的战略。我们的战略不应是说服全世界，而应是说服世界上那 1%的人，他们能帮助我们成长为一家五亿到十亿美元的公司。然后用我们的成功向其他人展示我们的战略。
Corporate customers started buying workstations two or three years ago. They started buying Suns, as did the government. And they bought them to write their mission-critical custom apps on. You don’t buy a Sun to run productivity software on, right? Wall Street was one of the first early adopters. And we’re walking in right now, and 90% of the time we compete against Sun we’re winning.
企业客户在两三年前开始购买工作站。他们开始购买 Sun 的产品，政府也是如此。他们购买这些设备是为了开发关键任务的定制应用程序。你不会为了运行生产力软件而去买 Sun，对吧？华尔街是最早的一批用户之一。而现在我们进入市场时，在与 Sun 的竞争中，我们 90%的情况下都能获胜。
Why? Because what do you buy a Sun for? To develop custom apps on. NeXT can do it five to ten times better. So we’re winning right and left. Not in the scientific and engineering world—we don’t know anything about that. But in the commercial and government arena, we're winning right and left.
为什么？因为你买 Sun 是为了开发定制应用程序，而 NeXT 能做到比它好五到十倍。所以我们到处都在赢。不是在科学和工程领域——我们对那个领域一无所知。但在商业和政府领域，我们正四处取胜。
I worry about things like this, though. [Waving a copy of Networking Today at him.] There’s an article in here called something like “Will UNIX ever succeed on the desktop?” They are basically telling their readers in corporate networking to wait for whatever comes out of Big Pink and Solaris, because that’s what you’ve got to have. And they’re touting all the virtues that will be derived from Solaris and Big Pink someday, and not saying anything about NexTstep, which is shipping with them now.
不过，我确实担心这样的事情。[向他挥动着一本《Networking Today》杂志。] 这里面有一篇文章，大意是“UNIX 能否在桌面领域取得成功？”他们基本上是在告诉企业网络领域的读者，要等待 Big Pink 和 Solaris 的成果，因为那才是你们需要的。他们大肆宣扬未来 Solaris 和 Big Pink 可能带来的各种好处，却对现在已经向他们发货的 NexTstep 只字不提。
Give me that magazine. We'll call them up. [Grabs magazine and reads the whole thing in about 15 seconds.]
把那本杂志给我。我们给他们打电话。[拿起杂志，大约用 15 秒钟看完了整篇内容。]
I was alarmed by this. Because this is really your market, in many respects, and they don’t know that you exist.
我对此感到震惊。因为从很多方面来说，这确实是你们的市场，而他们却不知道你们的存在。
Well, this magazine doesn’t know that we exist. But our market is starting to hear about us. But we’ll call these guys up. This is wonderful. We’ll fix it.
嗯，这本杂志还不知道我们的存在。但我们的市场已经开始注意到我们了。不过我们会联系这些人。这太好了。我们会解决的。
But to get back to the chip issues, I was on a plane recently with one of Intel’s main men. He said, “You ever see Steve Jobs?” I told him about this interview coming up and he said, “Well, I would be appreciative if he would come around and pay us a visit. We’ve got something that he really ought to be using.”
不过回到芯片问题上，我最近在飞机上遇到了英特尔的一位主要负责人。他问我：“你见过史蒂夫·乔布斯吗？”我告诉他即将进行这次采访，他说：“嗯，如果他能过来拜访一下我们，我会很感激。我们有一些他确实应该用的东西。”
What is that?
那是什么？
A chip under development.
正在开发中的芯片。
The 586. Yeah. Sure. Intel’s over here once every month talking to us about that. We knew about the 586 a long time ago.
586，是的，没错。英特尔每个月都会来这里和我们谈这个。我们很早以前就知道 586 了。
Well, I knew you knew about it, but apparently he doesn’t realize there’s been this kind of conversation.
嗯，我知道你已经了解了，但显然他并未意识到有过这样的对话。
[Intel CEO] Andy Grove and I have known each other for fifteen years. And we talk a lot. We’re very aware of that stuff.
[Intel CEO] 安迪·格罗夫和我相识已有十五年了。我们经常交谈，对这些事情非常清楚。
I think a lot of people are concerned that CISC chips in general have reached a point where they can’t go much further.
我认为很多人担心 CISC 芯片总体上已经达到一个无法再有太多进步的地步。
Well, the 586 is a CISC chip, for the most part. It’s sort of a combination. So’s the ’040. They’re all combinations. The RISC/CISC stuff is 90% marketing and 10% reality.
嗯，586 基本上是一个 CISC 芯片。它有点像一种组合，040 也是如此。它们都是组合型的。RISC 和 CISC 的说法 90%是营销，只有 10%是真实情况。
I think we evaluate things on one simple benchmark—how fast is it? I don’t care if it’s a little hamster in there on a treadmill—how fast is it?
我认为我们评估事物只有一个简单的标准——它有多快？我不在乎里面是不是一只踩着跑步机的小仓鼠——它到底有多快？
So far you’re running faster than most garden-variety SPARCstations.
到目前为止，你的运行速度已经超过了大多数普通的 SPARC 工作站。
Well, and you'll see us very shortly catch up with SPARCstation 2’s. Very shortly. So the 040 is a fine chip. It runs as fast as the SPARC stuff. Yes, there are faster chips, and you'll see us do things with other processors in the future. But they’ll all run NeXTstep.
嗯，你很快就会看到我们赶上 SPARCstation 2 的水平，非常快。040 是一款很好的芯片，它的运行速度与 SPARC 系列一样快。没错，还有更快的芯片，将来你会看到我们使用其他处理器。但它们都会运行 NeXTstep。
How do you deal with something like the Indigo? I gather that that’s now a sort of orthogonal consideration.
你如何应对像 Indigo 这样的东西？我认为那现在算是一种正交的考量。
We never see the Indigo out competing in the real world. We’ve never seen the Indigo in one corporate account, competing. I think the Indigo’s selling to [SGI’s] traditional base.
我们从未见过 Indigo 在现实世界中参与竞争。我们从未在任何企业客户中看到 Indigo 参与竞争。我认为 Indigo 只是在向[SGI 的]传统客户群销售。
Right. The SIGGRAPH types.
对，就是 SIGGRAPH 那类人。
The 3-D modeling types. Yeah.
三维建模类型。是的。
Which is another question I’ve got. You’ve got a relationship with Pixar—
我还有另一个问题。你和皮克斯有合作关系——
Right. 对。
And I keep thinking that there’s an obvious tie-in at some point along the line. Not just for professional 3-D graphics. It seems like the interface themselves are getting increasingly three-dimensional.
我一直认为，在某个阶段显然会出现关联点。不仅仅是针对专业的三维图形，似乎界面本身也正变得越来越立体化。
I agree with you. Our NeXTstep release 3.0—which is going to ship in March or April—is going to come bundled with several things. One is our DBkit, our database kit. Another is Novell client support, so you can hook up to any Novell network and automatically map that right into the UNIX filesystem. Ethertalk, which we’ve written ourselves, so you can just hook it right up to an Ethertalk network and we map that all into UNIX—nobody’s ever done these things before, by the way. That all comes in the box.
我同意你的看法。我们即将在三月或四月发布的 NeXTstep 3.0 版本将捆绑多个功能。其中之一是我们的数据库工具包 DBkit。另一个是 Novell 客户端支持，因此你可以连接到任何 Novell 网络，并自动将其映射到 UNIX 文件系统中。还有我们自己开发的 Ethertalk，你可以直接连接到 Ethertalk 网络，我们会将其全部映射到 UNIX 中——顺便说一下，以前从未有人做过这些事情。这些功能都会随产品一同提供。
Another thing that comes in the box is Renderman. Photorealistic Renderman is bundled.
包装盒里还有另一件东西是 Renderman。附带了 Photorealistic Renderman。
With an interface? 带有界面吗？
Well, let me keep going. Photorealistic Renderman is bundled, so that you can use it to do photorealistic rendering, the same thing you pay a lot of money for on other platforms. We’ve got all the printing and everything working with it, so you don’t have to think about that, which is something nobody else has done.
好吧，让我继续说下去。Photorealistic Renderman 已经捆绑在内，因此你可以用它进行照片级真实感渲染，而在其他平台上你需要为此支付大量费用。我们已经实现了所有打印功能及相关的一切，因此你无需为此操心，这是其他任何人都没有做到的。
But we did something else that’s quite nice. As you recall, when we did the Mac we had QuickDraw for the screen and PostScript for the printer, and that was a real problem.
但我们还做了另一件相当不错的事情。你可能记得，当我们开发 Mac 时，屏幕使用的是 QuickDraw，打印机使用的是 PostScript，这造成了很大的问题。
It continues to be. 它仍然如此。
It continues to be. So when we did NeXT, we adopted a unified imaging model for 2-D geometric graphics in PostScript. That solved an enormous number of problems. One of the biggest problems it solved was that it saved developers months of time, because they don’t have to translate between one and the other and read these two big, thick manuals to get something to print.
这种情况仍在继续。因此，当我们开发 NeXT 时，我们在 PostScript 中采用了统一的二维几何图形成像模型。这解决了大量的问题。其中一个最大的好处是，它为开发人员节省了数月的时间，因为他们不再需要在不同系统之间进行转换，也不必阅读两本厚厚的手册才能实现打印功能。
Well, the same sort of dichotomy exists in the 3-D marketplace. You can have PHIGS for interactive graphics, or GL. But these are very primitive standards. You should be able to do better than those now, but in the future it gets worse. Because ten years from now we'll have the CPU performance to run photorealistic Renderman in real time. So during that ten years we want to incrementally get better.
同样的二分现象也存在于三维市场中。你可以使用 PHIGS 或 GL 进行交互式图形处理，但这些都是非常原始的标准。现在你应该能够做得比这些更好，但未来情况会变得更糟。因为十年后，我们将拥有足够的 CPU 性能来实时运行照片级真实感的 Renderman。因此，在这十年间，我们希望逐步改进。
Well, PHIGS and GL and that stuff will not get better. The architectures are not going to get much better. So you’re going to have to throw them out and get better 3-D packages a few times during the ’90s, and every time you throw the package out you throw all your apps out.
嗯，PHIGS、GL 之类的东西不会变得更好了。这些架构不会有太大改进。因此，在 90 年代，你将不得不多次抛弃它们，换用更好的 3D 软件包，而每次你抛弃软件包时，也意味着你要抛弃所有的应用程序。
So we thought, what would be the right solution? The right solution would be to have an interactive Renderman, and then as the ’90s progressed, leave a few more of the switches on that can run in real time, until eventually all of the switches are on. So we went to Pixar just like we went to Adobe, and we worked with them to create an interactive Renderman, and it’s bundled with 3.0. It’s wireframe on the 040s, and it gets more interesting on other products.
因此我们就在想，什么才是正确的解决方案呢？正确的方案应该是拥有一个交互式的 Renderman，然后随着 90 年代的发展，逐步开启更多能够实时运行的功能开关，直到最终所有的开关都打开。因此，我们就像之前与 Adobe 合作一样，去找了 Pixar，与他们合作开发了一个交互式的 Renderman，并将其捆绑在 3.0 版本中。在 040 处理器上它是线框模式，而在其他产品上则会更有趣。
That’s not modelers. We’re not going to write a modeler, because we don’t want to compete with the third parties. But all the underpinnings are there to do some wonderful things in 3-D in the next few years.
那不是建模工具。我们不会去开发建模工具，因为我们不想与第三方竞争。但所有的基础设施都已具备，未来几年可以在三维领域做出一些精彩的成果。
Let me talk to you a little about multimedia. I just interviewed John Sculley. He talked about Kaleida and their intention to develop a set of authoring and architectural standards that anybody could plug into.
让我和你稍微谈谈多媒体。我刚刚采访了约翰·斯卡利。他谈到了 Kaleida，以及他们打算开发一套任何人都可以接入的创作和架构标准。
Uh-huh. But see, standards are actually developed.
嗯哼。但要知道，标准实际上是被开发出来的。
Well, I understand that...
嗯，我明白……
Like fifty million CD players shipped. That’s a pretty compelling standard. MPEG is a pretty compelling standard.
比如五千万台 CD 播放器的出货量，这是一个相当有说服力的标准。MPEG 也是一个相当有说服力的标准。
But there are also twenty-four different formats that a multi-media author could choose to publish in at the moment, which divides up a pretty small market.
但目前多媒体作者可以选择发布的格式也有二十四种之多，这进一步分割了本已相当狭小的市场。
Oh, I agree with that. But the actual data representations are chosen more by the consumer products industry than they are by the computer industry. MPEG is an example. It’s going to be a pretty compelling video format.
哦，我同意这一点。但实际的数据表现形式更多是由消费产品行业决定的，而不是计算机行业。MPEG 就是一个例子，它将成为一种相当有吸引力的视频格式。
This gets us to something! I wanted to ask you about—I'd still like to see that compression chip on the NeXtdimension board.
这让我们谈到了一些事情！我想问你的是——我仍然希望在 NeXtdimension 主板上看到那个压缩芯片。
Well, as you know, C-Cube conked out. We now have the boards—the hardware boards are done, and they’ve given them to our software group, and as soon as they get some software up on them, you'll see it as a product. But we have some much more exciting stuff than that in the lab. We'll do all of it.
嗯，如你所知，C-Cube 出问题了。现在我们的板卡——硬件板卡已经完成，并交给了软件团队。一旦他们在上面运行起一些软件，你就会看到它成为产品。但我们实验室里还有比这更令人兴奋的东西。我们会把这些都做出来。
I actually think the QuickTime stuff is not a bad idea, but the, implementation is very poor.
我实际上认为 QuickTime 的想法并不差，但实现得非常糟糕。
It’s trying to do too much in software on a machine that doesn’t have the juice to do it.
它试图在一台性能不足的机器上用软件完成太多事情。
Or they took the wrong software algorithmic approach on it entirely.
或者他们完全采用了错误的软件算法方法。
That maybe. Well, would you be willing to support something like QuickTime?
也许吧。那么，你愿意支持像 QuickTime 这样的东西吗？
QuickTime will never reach the kind of quality that people are going to look for. The algorithms of implementation are fundamentally flawed. The concept of having an open system like that is something we support entirely—as a matter of fact many people have come to us asking us to license some of our existing multimedia technology, and in almost every case we do. Sun’s sound compression formats are the same as our current ones, although we’re rolling in a new one for 3.0. We found a way to compress CD sound to data rates that are Codec data rate. Imperceptibly. You can take stereo CD sound, compress it down to Codec data rates, and you can’t tell the difference. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s never been done before, all in software.
QuickTime 永远无法达到人们所期望的那种质量。它的实现算法存在根本性的缺陷。但我们完全支持这种开放系统的理念——事实上，许多人曾找我们要求授权使用我们现有的一些多媒体技术，而几乎每次我们都会同意。Sun 的声音压缩格式与我们当前的格式相同，不过我们将在 3.0 版本中引入一种新的格式。我们找到了一种方法，可以将 CD 音质压缩到 Codec 数据速率，且听觉上毫无差别。你可以将立体声 CD 音质压缩到 Codec 数据速率，而你根本听不出区别。这是一件了不起的事情，以前从未有人仅通过软件实现过。
We unified all our sound formats into one format. We don’t need all those different quality level ones now, because our best quality now has the data rate of our lowest quality one. So we’re unifying all that into one format, which is going to simplify our lives enormously. We'll be willing to license that, as we have a lot of others.
我们将所有的声音格式统一为一种格式。我们现在不再需要那些不同质量等级的格式了，因为我们现在的最高质量格式的数据速率已经达到了过去最低质量格式的水平。因此，我们将所有这些统一为一种格式，这将极大地简化我们的工作。我们愿意像其他许多技术一样对其进行授权。
I think you’re going to see video over the Net fairly soon, and it’s probably going to be in a QuickTime format, to start out with. I mean, if all you’re trying to do is get a video box to pop — out of your email, you’re willing to suffer some crudity.
我认为你很快就会在网络上看到视频，最初可能会采用 QuickTime 格式。我的意思是，如果你只是想让一个视频窗口从你的电子邮件中弹出来，你会愿意忍受一些粗糙之处。
Unless you can have something quite a bit better.
除非你能拥有更好的东西。
Yeah. If you can have something quite a bit better that you can actually communicate with somebody else on...
是的。如果你能拥有一个更好的东西，能真正用来与别人交流……
Well, right now QuickTime only runs on the Mac, so it’s the same problem
嗯，目前 QuickTime 只在 Mac 上运行，所以问题是一样的
Right. But there are a lot of Macs out there.
没错。但市面上有很多 Mac 电脑。
Sure there are. 当然有。
Of course, if your vision is achieved, there'll be a lot of NexTs out there.
当然，如果你的愿景实现了，将会有很多类似 NeXT 的公司出现。
We're going to be willing to license our stuff in the same way, and my guess is it’ll be substantially higher quality.
我们也愿意以同样的方式授权我们的产品，而且我猜测我们的产品质量会明显更高。
Well, it is now, for whatever that’s worth. What I can do with a video camera and a NeXTdimension board, even without the compression chip, is pretty extraordinary.
嗯，现在确实如此，不管这意味着什么。我用一台摄像机和一块 NeXTdimension 板，即使没有压缩芯片，也能做到相当出色的效果。
Just wait. 等着瞧吧。
This relates to a problem I have with NeXTmail. I love NeXTmail, but I constantly feel like I’ve got a great operatic voice in the country of the deaf. I want to be able to communicate with everybody in NeXTmail, but I can’t. For example, I have no ability to communicate with people on Sun workstations...
这涉及我在使用 NeXTmail 时遇到的一个问题。我很喜欢 NeXTmail，但我总是感觉自己像是在聋人的国度里拥有一副出色的歌剧嗓音。我希望能够通过 NeXTmail 与所有人交流，但却做不到。例如，我无法与使用 Sun 工作站的人交流……
Well, you do with text.
嗯，你用文本来做。
I do with text, but I want more.
我处理文本，但我想要更多。
But see, Sun can’t play the music. And Sun can’t open the Improv files. So what else do you hope to do?
但是你看，Sun 无法播放音乐，也无法打开 Improv 文件。那么你还希望做些什么呢？
If we could change the file format around, let’s say we could instantly change it to whatever you want, what would you do with the information once you got it to your Sun?
如果我们能改变文件格式，比如说可以立即将其转换成你想要的任何格式，那么一旦你把信息传到你的 Sun 电脑上，你会如何处理这些信息？
Well, I would hope that there would be some joint effort between companies like Sun and NeXT, to find a lingua franca.
嗯，我希望像 Sun 和 NeXT 这样的公司之间能有一些合作，共同寻找一种通用语言。
We are open to that.
我们对此持开放态度。
Perhaps something like Carousel, Adobe’s new document description language...
也许类似于 Carousel，Adobe 的新文档描述语言……
Oh, of course we will support that. That’s just a subset of PostScript, so we'll be the first company to support that, because we already do.
哦，我们当然会支持那个。这只是 PostScript 的一个子集，因此我们将成为首家支持它的公司，因为我们已经在这么做了。
We’ve held out the olive branch to Sun and said we’d love to work together with them on this stuff. So go ask them.
我们已经向 Sun 伸出了橄榄枝，并表示很乐意在这些方面与他们合作。所以你去问问他们吧。
You’re a brand-new father.
你刚刚成为父亲。
Yeah. 是的。
When that happened to me, it redefined my whole sense of a purpose in life. What is your mission now, in the broad sense of the word?
当这件事发生在我身上时，它重新定义了我对人生目标的整体认知。从广义上讲，你现在的使命是什么？
What is my mission? 我的使命是什么？
What kind of world do you want to help create for your kid?
你想为你的孩子创造一个怎样的世界？
I have felt for most of my adult life that I’m a tool-builder. The things I have chosen to build are not things that can be done by a sole artist. That’s a wonderful thing—many times I am envious of people that have chosen those paths, because one can be a perfectionist and have complete control of something yourself.
在我成年后的大部分时间里，我一直觉得自己是一个工具创造者。我选择创造的东西并非单个艺术家所能完成。这是一件美妙的事——很多时候，我很羡慕那些选择了那种道路的人，因为那样你可以成为一个完美主义者，完全掌控某件事物。
But what I’ve chosen to do requires the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. So I consider myself the tool-builder that works with a large team of people to build tools.
但我选择做的事情需要数百人甚至数千人的努力。因此，我认为自己是一个工具的创造者，与一个庞大的团队合作来打造工具。
I’ve been through a few generations of tools in my adult life—the Apple II, the Macintosh, and some in between that didn’t work out so well. This is our third generation of tool.
在我的成年生活中，我经历了几代工具——Apple II、Macintosh，以及一些介于两者之间但表现不佳的产品。这是我们的第三代工具。
And unlike a lot of people who think the computer industry’s maturing, I think it’s in its infancy. I think there are technological breakthroughs that happen once every ten years, maybe. Sometimes a little more frequent, but not too much. And that those technological breakthroughs have the force to reshape the tools that we build, and to reshape the industry along with them, as certain companies pay attention to them earlier and certain companies wake up fairly late.
与许多人认为计算机行业已趋成熟不同，我认为它仍处于初期阶段。我认为技术突破大约每十年才会发生一次，有时可能稍微频繁一些，但不会太多。这些技术突破有能力重塑我们所创造的工具，并随之重塑整个行业，因为某些公司较早关注这些突破，而另一些公司则醒悟得相当晚。
So my mission right now is to try to help seize these new technological breakthroughs that we’ve had, and to steer them right, into some wonderful tools for people to use. Sort of the third generation of tools out there, the first being the character mode PCs, the Apple II, and then the IBM PC. The second being the graphical, pretty much standalone computers, like Macintosh and now Windows. And the third being these highly networked environments where expressing your desire in a custom app is going to be a lot less painful than it’s ever been before. And these things interoperating together.
因此，我现在的使命是努力帮助抓住我们所取得的这些新的技术突破，并将它们正确地引导为人们可用的一些出色工具。这可以说是第三代工具，第一代是字符模式的个人电脑，比如 Apple II 和 IBM PC；第二代是图形化的、基本独立运行的电脑，比如 Macintosh 以及现在的 Windows；第三代则是高度网络化的环境，在这种环境下，通过定制应用程序表达你的需求将比以往任何时候都更加轻松，而这些工具之间也能实现互操作。
I don’t even fully understand it yet, just like we didn’t fully understand Mac in 1984. But you get the feeling, and you recognize it after it’s happened a few times, that you’re on to something really big.
我甚至还没有完全理解它，就像我们在 1984 年并未完全理解 Mac 一样。但你会有一种感觉，当这种情况发生过几次后，你就会意识到自己正在接触某种真正重大的东西。
And that’s how I feel right now.
这就是我现在的感受。
So our goal is to try to fashion this stuff into the most wonderful tools we can. And then to listen to the people using them—maybe more than we have in the past—to let them help us.
因此，我们的目标是尽力将这些东西打造成我们所能创造出的最出色的工具。然后倾听用户的意见——也许比过去更加用心——让他们帮助我们。
That’s what we're trying to do. We'll see where it goes.
这正是我们正在努力做的事情。我们会看看它的发展方向。
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Steve left Apple in September 1985, after losing a power struggle with CEO John Sculley. The departure was officially a resignation, but Steve considered it a betrayal. A few weeks later, he spoke to Newsweek. 史蒂夫在 1985 年 9 ...1984-05 Steve Jobs.Interview with Michael Moritz
Steve and Michael Moritz, a reporter who would soon switch careers and become a venture capitalist, spoke at Steve’s office at Apple in May 1984. They covered a wide range of topics, including Steve’s thoughts on product design. 史蒂夫和迈克尔·莫里茨（Michael ...1977 Steve Jobs.Interview with The New Yorker
“It’s a domesticated computer.” "这是一台驯化的电脑" Steve’s first appearance in a national publication came in a 1977 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine sent a reporter to the First Annual Personal Computing Expo, held in the New York Coliseum. Most ...1983-10 Steve Jobs.Was George Orwell right about 1984?
Speech to Apple Employees 对苹果员工的演讲 “Was George Orwell right about 1984?” "乔治-奥威尔对《1984》的看法对吗？" Steve introduced the Macintosh and its iconic commercial, which ran during the 1984 Super Bowl, at an Apple sales meeting in October 1983. 在 1983 年 10 ...1995-10-01 Steve Jobs.I have changed my position 180 degrees.
Email Exchange Between Steve, Intel CEO Andy Grove, and an Intel Engineer 史蒂夫、英特尔首席执行官安迪-格鲁夫和一位英特尔工程师之间的电子邮件交流 “I have changed my position 180 degrees.” "我已经180度改变了立场"。 As Pixar became a leader in graphics, Steve and his mentor, Intel CEO Andy Grove, ...