Refer To：《Steve Jobs The Lost Interview 1995 - Full Transcript and Highlights》。
I’ve come across this interview of Steve Jobs in various small clips circulating the internet. But I never paid attention to watching it in its entirety. That is until Marty Cagan featured on Lenny’s Podcast and mentioned this interview.
我在互联网上看到过各种流传的小片段中出现的史蒂夫·乔布斯的这次采访。但我从未关注过完整观看。直到 Marty Cagan 在 Lenny 的播客中露面并提到了这次采访。
I was blown away. This interview took place in 1995. How has he predicted the future of technology so well? How does he have timeless insights about (software and hardware) product development in 1995? Even before the boom of the internet?
我感到非常震撼。这次采访发生在1995年。他是如何如此准确地预见技术的未来的？他又是如何在1995年就对（软件和硬件）产品开发有着永恒的洞见的？甚至是在互联网繁荣之前？
I decided to watch this interview and share the transcript below. I’ve divided this transcript into topics. Feel free to jump to a topic that you find interesting. I do recommend watching the interview at least once. I’ve also highlighted parts that I found most interesting in bold below. These highlights are saved on my Readwise to help me get the most out of this talk.
我决定观看这次采访并在下面分享文字记录。我已将这份记录按主题分段。你可以随意跳转到你感兴趣的主题。我确实建议至少观看一次这次采访。我还在下面用粗体突出标记了我觉得最有趣的部分。这些亮点保存在我的 Readwise 上，以帮助我充分领会这次谈话的精髓。
Introduction
介绍
Bob Cringely I’m Bob Cringely. Sixteen years ago, when I was making my television series, Triumph of the Nerds, I interviewed Steve Jobs. That was in 1995. Ten years earlier, Steve had left Apple, following a bruising struggle with John Sculley, the CEO he brought into the company. At the time of our interview, Steve was running NeXT, the niche computer company he founded after leaving Apple. Little did we know that within 18 months, he would sell NeXT to Apple, and six months later, he’d be running the place. The way things work in television, we used only a part of that interview in the series. And for years, we thought the interview was lost forever because the master tape went missing while being shipped from London to the US in the 1990s. Then, just a few days ago, series director Paul Sen found a VHS copy of that interview in his garage. There are very few TV interviews with Steve Jobs, and almost no good ones. They rarely show the charisma, candor, and vision that this interview does. And so, to honor an amazing man, here’s that interview in its entirety. Most of this has never been seen before.
我是 Bob Cringely。我是 Bob Cringely。十六年前，当我制作我的电视系列节目《书呆子的胜利》时，我采访了史蒂夫·乔布斯。那是在1995年。十年前，史蒂夫因与他引入公司的首席执行官约翰·斯库利激烈冲突而离开了苹果。在我们采访的时候，史蒂夫正在经营他离开苹果后创办的专业计算机公司 NeXT。我们万万没想到，不到18个月，他就会将 NeXT 卖给苹果，六个月后，他便掌管了整个公司。由于电视制作的特殊性，我们在该系列节目中只使用了那次采访的一部分。而多年来，我们以为那次采访永远失传了，因为母带在1990年代从伦敦运往美国时丢失了。直到几天前，系列导演 Paul Sen 在他的车库里发现了一份那次采访的 VHS 录影。关于史蒂夫·乔布斯的电视采访极为罕见，而且几乎没有哪一次是好的。它们很少展现出这次采访所具有的魅力、坦率和远见。为此，为了纪念这位了不起的人，这里呈现的是那次采访的全部内容。其中大部分内容从未公开过。
Job’s entry into personal computers
乔布斯进入个人电脑领域
Cringely: So how did you get involved with personal computers?
Cringely：那么你是如何涉足个人电脑领域的？
Jobs: Hmm. Well, um…I ran into my first computer when I was about 10 or 11. And it’s hard to remember back then. But I’m an old fossil now. I’m an old fossil. So when I was 10 or 11 was about 30 years ago. And no one had ever seen a computer. To the extent that they’d seen them in movies, and they were these big boxes with whirring…For some reason, they fixated on the tape drives as being the icon of what the computer was, or flashing lights somehow. And so nobody had ever seen one. They were very mysterious, very powerful things, that did something in the background. And so, to see one and actually get to use one was a real privilege back then. And I got into NASA, the Ames Research Center down here. I got to use a time-sharing terminal. So I didn’t actually see the computer, but I saw a time-sharing terminal. And in those days… Again, it’s hard to remember how primitive it was. There was no such thing as a computer with a graphics video display. It was literally a printer. It was a teletype printer with a keyboard on it. And so you would keyboard these commands in, and then you would wait for a while, and the thing would go… And it would tell you something out. But even with that, it was still remarkable, especially for a 10-year-old, that you could write a program in BASIC, let’s say, or FORTRAN. And actually, this machine would take your idea, and it would execute your idea and give you back some results. And if they were the results that you predicted, your program really worked. It was an incredibly thrilling experience. So, I became very captivated by a computer. And a computer, to me, was still a little mysterious,’cause it was at the other end of this wire, and I’d never really seen the actual computer itself. And then I got tours of computers after that, and saw the insides. And then I was part of this group at Hewlett-Packard. When I was 12, I called up Bill Hewlett, who lived in Hewlett-Packard at the time. And again, this dates me, but there was no such thing as an unlisted telephone number then. So I could just look in the book, and looked his name up. And he answered the phone, and I said, “Hi. My name’s Steve Jobs. You don’t know me, but I’m 12 years old, and I’m building a frequency counter, and I’d like some spare parts.” And so, he talked to me for about 20 minutes. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. And he gave me the parts, but he also gave me a job working at Hewlett-Packard that summer. And I was 12 years old then. And that really made a remarkable influence on me. Hewlett-Packard was really the only company I’d ever seen in my life at that age, and it formed my view of what a company was, and how well they treated their employees. They didn’t know about cholesterol back then. But at that time, they used to bring a big cartful of donuts and coffee out at 10 every morning. Everybody would take a coffee and donut break. And just little things like that, it was clear that the company recognized that its true value was its employees. So anyway, things led to things with Hewlett-Packard, and I started going up to their Palo Alto research labs every Tuesday night with a small group of people to meet some of their researchers and stuff, and I saw the first desktop computer ever made, which was the Hewlett-Packard 9100. It was about as big as a suitcase, but it actually had a small cathode-ray tube display in it, and it was completely self-contained. There was no wire going off behind the curtain somewhere. And I fell in love with it. And you could program it in BASIC and APL. And I would just, for hours, get a ride up to Hewlett-Packard and just hang around that machine and write programs for it. And so that was the early days. And I met Steve Wozniak around that time, too. Well, maybe a little earlier when I was about 14, 15 years old. And we immediately hit it off. He was the first person I’d met that knew more about electronics than I did, and so I was…I liked him a lot, and he was maybe five years older than I. He’d gone off to college and gotten kicked out for pulling pranks, and was living with his parents, and going to De Anza, the local junior college. So we became fast friends, and started doing projects together. We read about…We read about the story in Esquire magazine about this guy named Captain Crunch who could supposedly make free telephone calls. You’ve heard about this, I’m sure. And again, we were captivated. How could anybody do this? And we thought it must be a hoax. And we started looking through the libraries, looking for the secret tones that would allow you to do this. And it turned out, we were at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center one night, and way in the bowels of their technical library, way down at the last bookshelf, in the corner bottom rack, we found an AT&T technical journal that laid out the whole thing. And that’s another moment I’ll never forget. When we saw this journal, we thought, “My God! It’s all real.” And so, we set out to build a device to make these tones. And the way it worked was, you know when you make a long-distance call, you used to hear…(mimicking dial tones) Right? In the background? They were tones that sounded like the touch tone you could make on your phone, but they were a different frequency, so you couldn’t make them. It turned out that, that was the signal from one telephone computer to another controlling the computers in the network. And AT&T made a fatal flaw when they designed the original telephone network, digital telephone network, was they put the signaling from computer to computer in the same band as your voice, which meant that if you could make those same signals, you could put it right in through the handset. And literally, the entire AT&T international phone network would think you were an AT&T computer. So after three weeks we finally built a box like this that worked. And I remember, the first call we made was down to LA, one of Woz’s relatives down in Pasadena. We dialed the wrong number, but we woke some guy up in the middle of the night, and we were yelling at him like, “Don’t you understand we made this call for free?” And this person didn’t appreciate that. But it was miraculous, and we built these little boxes to do blue boxing, as it was called, and we put a little note in the bottom of them. Our logo was, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” And they worked. We built the best blue box in the world. It was all digital. No adjustments. And so you could go up to a pay phone and you could take a trunk over to White Plains, and then take a satellite over to Europe, and then go to Turkey, take a cable back to Atlanta. And you could go around the world. You could go around the world five or six times ‘cause we learned all the codes for how to get on the satellites and stuff. And then, you could call the pay phone next door, and so you could shout in the phone, and after about a minute, it would come out the other phone. It was… It was miraculous. And you might ask, “Well, what’s so interesting about that?” What’s so interesting is that we were young. And what we learned was that we could build something ourselves that could control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure in the world. That was what we learned, We didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing. And that was an incredible lesson. I don’t think there would have ever been an Apple computer had there not been blue boxing.
Jobs：嗯。嗯……大约在我10或11岁的时候，我第一次接触到了电脑，那时的情形已经很难回忆起来了，但我现在已经是个老古董了，真是个老古董。所以，当我10或11岁的时候，那大约是30年前。那时没人见过真正的电脑。即使在电影里出现的电脑，也只是一台台巨大、嗡嗡作响的盒子……不知为何，人们总是把磁带驱动器当作电脑的象征，或是某种闪烁的灯光。因此，真正见到电脑的人寥寥无几。它们神秘而强大，在后台默默运作。所以，见到并能亲自使用电脑在当时是一种无上的特权。我后来进入了NASA，这里是艾姆斯研究中心，得以使用分时终端。虽然我并未真正看到过整台电脑，但我看到了分时终端。那时……实在难以回忆那般原始的状态。那时根本不存在带图形视频显示的电脑，它简直就是一台打印机，一台带键盘的电传打字机。你需要在键盘上输入命令，然后等待一段时间，机器才会运行，并输出一些结果。即便如此，对于一个10岁的孩子来说，能够用BASIC或FORTRAN编写程序依然令人惊叹。事实上，这台机器接收了你的创意，执行它，并返回结果；如果结果符合你的预期，那程序就算成功了。这真是一种令人振奋的体验。因此，我深深被电脑吸引。而对我来说，电脑依旧带着神秘感，因为它在这根电线的另一端，我从未真正见过实物。后来，我参观了多台电脑，亲眼看到了它们的内部构造。接着，我加入了惠普的一支团队。12岁那年，我打电话联系了当时在惠普工作的比尔·惠利。这也证明了我的年纪，因为那时根本没有“非公开电话号码”这种说法，我只需查阅电话簿便可找到他的名字。他接起电话后，我说：“嗨，我叫史蒂夫·乔布斯，你可能不认识我，但我12岁了，我正在制作一个频率计，需要一些备用零件。”他和我聊了大约20分钟，那通电话我终生难忘。他不仅给了我零件，还在那个夏天给了我一份在惠普工作的机会。那时我12岁，这对我产生了深远的影响。惠普几乎是我那时唯一见过的公司，这也塑造了我对企业本质以及如何善待员工的看法。那时他们甚至还不了解胆固醇问题，但每天早上10点，他们会推出一大推甜甜圈和咖啡，供大家休息享用。正是这些细节，充分表明公司认识到其真正的财富在于员工。总之，机缘巧合使我与惠普结下了不解之缘，我开始每周二晚上和一小群人一起前往他们位于帕洛阿尔托的研究实验室，与他们的研究人员见面交流，我也看到了史上第一台台式电脑——惠普9100。那台电脑大约和手提箱一样大，但内置了一个小型阴极射线管显示器，并且完全独立，不像幕后隐藏着电线。我立刻爱上了它。你可以用BASIC和APL编程，我会连续几个小时去惠普，只为围绕那台机器编写程序。那就是早期的日子。大约在那时，我也认识了史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克，或者说更早些，当我大约14、15岁时，我们就一见如故。他是我遇到的第一个在电子学上比我更懂的人，所以我……我非常喜欢他，他大约比我大五岁。他上过大学，但因恶作剧而被开除，住在父母家中，并在当地的初级学院De Anza就读。于是，我们迅速成为了好朋友，并开始一起做项目。我们读到……我们在Esquire杂志上看到一篇关于名为Captain Crunch的人据说能免费打电话的报道，我相信你一定听说过。我们同样被深深吸引：怎么可能有人做到这一点呢？我们一度认为这肯定是个骗局。于是，我们开始在图书馆查找能够实现这一功能的秘密信号。结果有一天晚上，在斯坦福直线加速器中心，我们在其技术图书馆最深处、最后一个书架的角落底层发现了一本AT&T技术期刊，上面详细阐述了整个过程。这是我永远不会忘记的另一个时刻。当我们看到这本期刊时，我们心想：“天啊！这一切竟然都是真的。”于是，我们着手制造一种装置来产生这些信号。其工作原理是这样的：你知道当你打长途电话时，背景中会传来那种拨号音，对吧？那些音调听起来像你在电话上拨出的触摸音，但频率不同，所以你无法模拟出来。事实证明，那正是一个电话电脑向另一个电话电脑发送控制信号的信号。而AT&T在设计原始数字电话网络时犯了一个致命错误，他们将电脑之间的信令置于与语音相同的频段中，这意味着如果你能模拟出这些信号，就能直接通过听筒注入信号。结果，整个AT&T国际电话网络都会误认为你是一台AT&T的电脑。三周后，我们终于制造出一个能够正常工作的盒子。我记得，我们第一次拨打的电话是打给洛杉矶——沃兹在帕萨迪纳的一个亲戚那里。我们拨错了号码，把某个家伙半夜吵醒，然后对他大喊：“你难道不知道这通电话是免费的？”那人显然不领情。但这真是神奇极了，我们制造出这些被称为蓝盒的小装置，并在盒子底部留了张小纸条。我们的标语是：“他掌握着整个世界。”这些装置运行得非常出色。我们制造出了世界上最好的蓝盒，全数字化，无需调试。因此，你可以走到公用电话旁，经由中继打到惠特普莱恩，再通过卫星联系欧洲，然后到土耳其，再通过电缆回到亚特兰大。你可以环游世界，多达五六次，因为我们学会了所有接入卫星的代码。之后，你还可以拨打隔壁的公用电话，在电话里大声喊叫，过大约一分钟，声音就会从另一端传出。这真是……太神奇了。你可能会问：“这有什么好玩的？”有趣的是，我们那时还年轻。我们学到的是，我们可以自己制造出一个装置，来控制价值数十亿美元的基础设施。这就是我们的收获。我们知识有限，但却能制造出控制庞然大物的微小设备。这真是一次难以置信的教训。如果没有蓝盒技术，我认为世界上永远不会有苹果电脑。
Cringeley: Woz said you called the Pope?
Cringeley：沃兹说你给教皇打过电话？
Jobs: Yeah, we did call the Pope. He pretended to be Henry Kissinger. And we got the number of the Vatican, and we called the Pope. And they started waking people up in the hierarchy. I don’t know, cardinals and this and that. And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope when, finally, we just burst out laughing, and they realized that we weren’t Henry Kissinger. Yeah, and so, we never got to talk to the Pope, but it was very funny.
Jobs：是的，我们确实打过教皇的电话。他假扮成亨利·基辛格。我们拿到了梵蒂冈的电话号码，然后打给了教皇。他们开始在教会层级中叫醒各级人员，我不知道，比如枢机主教之类的。当我们最终忍不住大笑时，他们才意识到我们并不是亨利·基辛格。于是，我们没有真正和教皇通话，但那真的很有趣。
Cringeley: So…So the jump from blue boxes to personal computers, what sparked that?
Cringeley：那么……从蓝盒技术到个人电脑的转变，是什么促使了这一跳跃？
Jobs: Well…Necessity, in the sense that there was time-sharing computers available, and there was a time-sharing company in Mountain View that we could get free time on. So, uh… But we needed a terminal, and we couldn’t afford one, so we designed and built one. And that was the first thing we ever did. We built this terminal. And so, what an Apple I was, was really an extension of this terminal putting a microprocessor on the back end. That’s what it was. So first we built the terminal, and then we built the Apple I. And we really built it for ourselves because we couldn’t afford to buy anything. And we’d scavenge parts here and there and stuff, and we’d build these all by hand. They’d take 40 to 80 hours to build one, and then they’d always be breaking cause there’s all these tiny little wires. And so, it turned out, a lot of our friends wanted to build them, too. And although they could scavenge most of the parts as well, they didn’t have the skills to build them that we had acquired by training ourselves through building them. And so, we ended up helping them build most of their computers, and it was really taking up all of our time. And we thought if we could make what’s called a printed circuit board, which is a piece of fiberglass with copper on both sides that’s etched to form the wires so that you could build a computer…You could build an Apple I in a few hours instead of 40 hours. If we only had one of those, we could sell them to all our friends for as much as it cost us to make them, and make our money back. And everybody would be happy, and we’d get a life again. So we did that. I sold my Volkswagen Bus, and Steve sold his calculator, and we got enough money to pay a friend of oursto make the artwork to make a printed circuit board. And we made some printed circuit boards, and we sold some to our friends. And I was trying to sell the rest of them, so that we could get our Microbus and calculator back. And I walked into the first computer store in the world which was the Byte Shop of Mountain View, I think, on El Camino. It metamorphosized into an adult bookstore a few years later. But at this point, it was the Byte Shop. And the person that ran it, I think his name was Paul Terrell, he said, “I’ll take 50 of those.” I said, “This is great.” He said, “But I want them fully assembled.” We’d never thought of this before. So we then kicked this around, we thought, “Why not? Why not try this?” And so, I spent the next several days on the phone talking with electronics parts distributors. We didn’t know what we were doing. And we said, “Look, here’s the parts we need. “We figured we’d buy 100 sets of parts, build 50, sell them to the Byte Shop for twice what it cost us to build them, therefore paying for the whole 100, and then we’d have 50 left, and we could make our profits by selling those. So we convinced these distributors to give us the parts on net 30 days credit. We had no idea what that meant. “Net 30? Sure.” “Sign here.” And then, so we had 30 days to pay them. And so we bought the parts, we built the products, and we sold 50 of them to the Byte Shop in Palo Alto, and got paid in 29 days. And then went and paid off the parts people in 30 days, and so we were in business. But we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, in that our profit wasn’t in a liquid currency, our profit was in 50 computers sitting in the corner. So then, all of a sudden, we had to think,”Wow! How are we going to realize our profit?” And so we started thinking about distribution, “Are there any other computer stores?” And we started calling the other computer storesthat we’d heard of across the country, and we just eased into business that way.
Jobs：嗯……出于必要性，因为当时有分时电脑可用，而且在山景城有一家分时公司，我们可以免费使用他们的电脑时间。所以，呃……但我们需要一个终端，而我们买不起，于是我们设计并制造了一个。这是我们做的第一件事。我们造了这个终端。于是，苹果I其实就是这个终端的延伸，在后端加上了微处理器。就是这样。所以，我们先造了终端，然后造了苹果I。我们实际上是为自己制造它，因为我们买不起任何东西。我们会到处捡零件，然后全手工地组装。每台组装需要40到80个小时，而且总是会出故障，因为里面有许多细小的电线。结果，很多朋友也想自己组装，虽然他们也能搜集大部分零件，但没有我们通过反复制造积累的技能。于是，我们帮他们组装大部分电脑，这几乎占用了我们所有的时间。我们便想，如果能制造一种所谓的印刷电路板——一块两面镀铜的玻璃纤维板，经过蚀刻形成电线，这样你就能在几小时内组装出一台苹果I，而不需要40小时。如果我们能有这种电路板，我们就能以制造成本卖给所有朋友，回本之后大家都高兴，我们也能恢复正常生活。于是，我们照做了。我卖掉了我的大众巴士，史蒂夫卖掉了他的计算器，我们凑够了钱，请一个朋友帮忙设计印刷电路板的图样。我们制造了一些印刷电路板，并卖给了我们的朋友。我还试图卖掉剩下的，以便把巴士和计算器买回来。我走进了世界上第一家电脑店——我记得是在El Camino上的山景城的Byte Shop。几年后它变成了一家成人书店，但那时它还是Byte Shop。店主，我记得他叫Paul Terrell，说：“我买50个。”我说：“太好了。”他说：“但我要求它们是全组装好的。”我们以前从未考虑过这一点。于是，我们便讨论起来，想，“为什么不呢？试试看吧？”接下来的几天，我打电话与电子零件分销商交涉，我们完全不知道自己在做什么。我们说：“看，这是我们需要的零件。”我们打算购买100套零件，组装50台，以两倍于组装成本的价格卖给Byte Shop，从而支付全部100套零件的费用，然后剩下50台作为利润出售。于是，我们说服这些分销商给予我们30天账期的零件，我们完全不知道那意味着什么。“30天账期？当然。” “签个字。”于是，我们有30天时间付款。我们买了零件，组装了产品，把其中50台卖给了帕洛阿尔托的Byte Shop，并在29天内拿到钱，然后在30天内付清零件款，我们就开始做生意了。但我们遇到了典型的马克思式利润实现危机——我们的利润并不是以流动资金形式存在，而是体现在角落里那50台电脑上。突然之间，我们不得不思考，“哇！我们该如何实现我们的利润？”于是，我们开始考虑销售渠道，“还有其他电脑店吗？”我们开始联系全国各地听说的其他电脑店，就这样慢慢进入了生意。
On Mike Markkula’s investment in Apple
关于迈克·马克库拉对苹果公司的投资
Cringeley: The third key figure in the creation of Apple was former Intel executive Mike Markkula. I asked Steve how he came aboard.
Cringeley：苹果公司创立过程中的第三个关键人物是前英特尔高管迈克·马克库拉。我问史蒂夫他是如何加入的。
Jobs: We were designing the Apple II, and we really had much higher ambitions for the Apple II. Woz’s ambitions were, he wanted to add color graphics. My ambition was that…It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply, and the case and the keyboard, et cetera, and go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those, there were a thousand people that couldn’t do that, but wanted to mess around with programing. Software hobbyists. Just like I had been when I was 10, discovering that computer. And so my dream for the Apple II was to sell the first real packaged computer. Packaged personal computer where you didn’t have to be a hardware hobbyist at all. And so, combining both of those dreams, we actually designed the product. And I found a designer, and we designed the packaging and everything, and we wanted to make it out of plastic, and we had the whole thing ready to go. But we needed some money for tooling the case and things like that. We needed a few hundred thousand dollars. And this was way beyond our means, so I went looking for some venture capital. And I ran across one venture capitalist named Don Valentine who came over to the garage. And he later said I looked like a renegade from the human race. That was his famous quote. And he said he wasn’t willing to invest in us, but he recommended a few people that might, and one of them was Mike Markkula. So I called Mike on the phone, and Mike came over, and Mike had retired at about 30 or 31 from Intel. He was a product manager there and had gotten a little bit of stock, and made, like, a million bucks on stock options, which at that time, was quite a lot of money. And he’d been investing in oil and gas deals, and staying home and doing that sort of thing. And he, I think, was kind of antsy to get back into something, and Mike and I hit it off very well. And so Mike said, “Okay, I’ll invest after a few weeks.” And I said, “No. No. We don’t want your money. We want you.” So we convinced Mike to actually throw in with us as an equal partner. And so Mike put in some money, and Mike put in himself, and we took this design that was virtually done with the Apple II, and tooled it up and announced it a few months later at the West Coast Computer Faire.
Jobs：我们当时正在设计苹果II，并且对它抱有更高的雄心。沃兹的雄心是，他想加入彩色图形，而我的雄心则是……我很清楚，虽然有一群硬件爱好者能够组装自己的电脑，或者至少拿我们的主板，加上电源变压器、机箱、键盘等等，凑齐其他部件，但相对于他们来说，还有成千上万的人做不到这一点，却渴望玩弄编程——软件爱好者。就像我10岁时发现电脑那样。所以，我对苹果II的梦想是销售第一台真正意义上的整机包装电脑，一台你完全不需要具备硬件爱好知识的个人电脑。于是，结合这两个梦想，我们实际设计了产品。我找来了一位设计师，我们设计了包装和所有细节，并打算用塑料制造，整套设计都已准备就绪。但我们需要一些资金来制造机箱等工具设备，几乎需要几十万美元，这远远超出了我们的能力范围，于是我去寻找风险投资。我遇到了一位名叫唐·瓦伦丁的风险投资家，他来到我们的车库，后来他说我看起来像是一个脱离常规的人。这是他的名言。他表示不愿意投资我们，但推荐了几个人，其中一个就是迈克·马克库拉。于是我打电话给迈克，迈克来了，他在英特尔大约30或31岁时就退休了，曾任产品经理，并获得了一些股票，通过股票期权赚了一百万美元，那在当时可是相当多的钱。他当时一直在投资石油和天然气项目，在家里做那类事情，我想他已经迫不及待地想回到某个领域去了。迈克和我一拍即合，于是他表示，“好吧，我几周后会投资。”我说，“不，不，我们不需要你的钱，我们需要你。”于是我们说服迈克以平等合伙人的身份加入我们。迈克投入了一些资金，并亲自参与，我们将几乎完成的苹果II设计进行完善，并在几个月后于西海岸电脑展上正式发布。
Cringeley: What was that like?
Cringeley：那是什么感觉？
Jobs: It was great. We got the best. The West Coast Computer Faire was small at that time, but to us, it was very large. And so, we had this fantastic booth there. We had a projection television showing the Apple II, and showing its graphics, which today, look very crude, but at that time, were, by far, the most advanced graphics on a personal computer. And I think…My recollection is, we stole the show. And a lot of dealers and distributors started lining up, and we were off and running.
Jobs：那真是太棒了。虽然当时西海岸电脑展规模不大，但对我们来说，却显得意义非凡。我们在那里布置了一个极好的展台，用投影电视展示苹果II和它的图形效果，虽然现在看来很粗糙，但在当时绝对是个人电脑中最先进的图形表现。我记得……我们几乎称霸了整个展会。许多经销商和分销商纷纷排队上门，我们的事业就此起步。
The thinking behind running a succesful company
经营一家成功公司的思考
Cringeley: How old were you?
Cringeley：你多大了？
Jobs: 21.
Jobs：21岁。
Cringeley: You’re 21, you’re a big success. You’ve just done it by the seat of your pants. You don’t have any particular training in this. How do you learn to run a company?
Cringeley：你才21岁，就已经大获成功了。你完全凭直觉做到这一点，你没有接受过特别的训练。你是如何学会经营公司的？
Jobs: Throughout the years in business, I found something, which was, I’d always ask why you do things. And the answers you invariably get are, “Oh, that’s just the way it’s done.” Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That’s what I found. I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is’ in the garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accounting had this notion of a standard cost, where you’d set a standard cost, and at the end of a quarter, you’d adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, “Well, why do we do this?” And the answer was, “Well, that’s just the way it’s done.” And after about six months of digging into this, what I realized was, the reason you do it is because you don’t really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter, and the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough. But nobody said it that way. And so, later on, when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost to the second. So in business, a lot of things are… I call it folklore. They’re done because they were done yesterday and the day before. And so what that means is, if you’re willing to ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.
Jobs：在多年的商业实践中，我发现了一件事，那就是我总是会问“你为什么这么做”。而你得到的回答总是“哦，那就是这么做的方式。”没有人知道他们为什么要这么做，在商业中没人会去深究。这就是我的发现。举个例子，当我们在车库里组装我们的苹果电脑时，我们确切知道它们的成本。到了苹果II时代，我们进入工厂时，会计上有个标准成本的概念，即设定一个标准成本，然后在季度末通过偏差来调整。我不断地问：“那我们为什么这么做？”回答总是：“这就是常规做法。”大约经过六个月的深入研究，我意识到，我们之所以这么做，是因为我们没有足够好的控制手段来准确知道成本，所以只能先猜一个数，然后在季度末修正，而我们之所以不知道真正的成本，是因为我们的信息系统不够完善。但没有人会这样说。后来，当我们为Macintosh设计这座自动化工厂时，我们去除了许多这些陈旧的概念，能够精确到秒地知道成本。在商业中，许多事情我称之为“民间传说”，它们之所以沿用，是因为昨天和前天一直这么做。所以这意味着，如果你愿意多问问题、多思考、努力工作，你可以很快学会做生意。这并不是世界上最难的事，也不是火箭科学。
On why everyone should learn programming
论为什么每个人都应该学习编程
Cringeley: Now, when you were first coming in contact with these computers and inventing them, and before that, working on the HP 9100, you talked about writing programs. What sort of programs? What did people actually do with these things?
Cringeley：当你第一次接触这些电脑、发明它们，以及在此之前使用HP 9100时，你提到了编写程序。编写了什么样的程序？人们到底用这些东西做些什么？
Jobs: Hmm…See, what we did with them…Well, I’ll give you a simple example. When we were designing our blue box, we wrote a lot of custom programs to help us design it, and to do a lot of the dog work for using terms of calculating master frequencies with sub divisors to get other frequencies and things like that. We used the computer quite a bit. And to calculate how much error we would get in the frequencies, and how much could be tolerated. So, we used them in our work. But much more importantly, it had nothing to do with using them for anything practical. It had to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process, to actually learn how to think. It was, I think, the greatest value of learning how to…I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school. I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school would actually be useful ‘cause it teaches you how to think in a certain way. In the same way that computer programing teaches you, in a slightly different way, how to think. And so, I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something that everybody learns. Takes a year in their life, one of the courses they take is learning how to program.
Jobs：嗯……你看，我们使用它们时……举个简单的例子，当我们设计蓝盒时，我们编写了许多定制程序来帮助我们设计它，并完成很多繁琐的工作，比如用分频器计算主频和其他频率的关系。我们大量使用电脑，计算频率中可能出现的误差以及容忍的范围。所以，我们在工作中用了它们。但更重要的是，这与将它们用于实际用途无关，而是用它们作为你思维过程的镜子，真正学会如何思考。我认为，这就是学习编程的最大价值……我认为这个国家的每个人都应该学会编程，学会一种计算机语言，因为它教会你如何思考。这就像上法学院。我并不认为每个人都应该成为律师，但我觉得上法学院实际上很有用，因为它教你以某种方式思考。同样，计算机编程也以略有不同的方式教你如何思考。因此，我将计算机科学视为一门人文学科，每个人都应该学习。人生中花一年的时间，选一门课程来学编程。
Cringeley: Yeah, but I learned APL, which, obviously, is part of the reason why I’m going through life sideways.
Cringeley：是啊，但我学的是APL，显然这也是我人生轨迹怪异的部分原因。
Jobs: You look back and consider it an enriching experience that taught you to think in a different way, or not?
Jobs：回想起来，你认为那是一段丰富的经历，教会你以不同的方式思考，不是吗？
Cringeley: Uh, no. Not that particularly. Other languages perhaps more so, but I started with APL.
Cringeley：呃，不，并不特别。可能其他语言更有帮助，但我一开始学的是APL。
On what its like to get rich
关于致富的感受
Cringeley: So, obviously, the Apple II was a terrific success. Just incredibly so. And the company grew like Topsy, and eventually went public, and you guys got really rich. What’s it like to get rich?
Cringeley：显然，苹果II取得了巨大的成功。公司如日中天，最终上市，你们也因此变得非常富有。致富是什么感觉？
Jobs: It’s very interesting. I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25. And it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback and things like that. But especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were gonna enable people to do with these products, so I didn’t think about it a great deal. I never sold any stock. Just really believed that the company would do very well over the long term.
Jobs：非常有意思。我23岁时身价超过100万美元，24岁时超过1000万美元，25岁时超过1亿美元。但这些并不那么重要，因为我从来不是为了钱而努力。我认为金钱是一件美妙的东西，因为它能让你做很多事，它能让你投资那些没有短期回报的创意等等。但对我那时来说，最重要的不是钱，而是公司、本身的人、我们制造的产品以及这些产品能让人们做些什么，所以我并没有过多地去考虑钱的问题。我从未出售过任何股票，我真心相信公司在长期内会做得非常好。
The unforgettable visit to the Xerox PARC
难忘的参观施乐帕罗奥多研究中心
Cringeley: Central to the development of the personal computer was the pioneering work being done at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center which Steve first visited in 1979.
Cringeley：个人电脑发展的核心在于施乐帕罗奥多研究中心所进行的开创性工作，史蒂夫于1979年首次造访了那里。
Jobs: I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. They’d done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn’t know that at the time. But still, though, they had…The germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well. And within 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers might be, but you couldn’t argue about the inevitability. It was so obvious. You would have felt the same way had you been there.
Jobs：我有3到4个人一直缠着我，说我应该赶紧跑到施乐帕罗奥多研究中心看看他们在做什么，最后我去了。他们非常友好，向我展示了他们正在进行的工作，但我被他们展示的第一样东西给震撼住了——其中之一是面向对象编程。他们向我展示了这一点，但我几乎没注意到其它。接着他们展示的另一项是一个网络计算机系统。他们有100多台Alto电脑，全都联网，使用电子邮件等等，而我却没有注意到这些。我完全被他们首先展示的图形用户界面所吸引，我认为这是我一生中见过的最棒的东西。现在请记住，那东西虽然非常有缺陷，所见并不完整，他们做了很多错误的事情，但当时我们并不知道这些。然而，那个想法的雏形已经存在，而且他们做得非常出色。短短10分钟内，我就清楚地意识到，总有一天所有的电脑都会这样工作。这是不可争辩的，你可以争论需要多少年，可以争论谁将是赢家或输家，但不可否认的是这一切的必然性。如果你在场，你也会有同样的感觉。
Cringeley: Those are the exact words that Paul Allen used. It’s really interesting. You saw it, then you brought some people back with you? And what happened the next time? They made you cool your heels for a while?
Cringeley：这正是保罗·艾伦所说的话，真的很有意思。你看过之后，就带了一些人回去？下一次又发生了什么？他们让你在那里等了一会儿吗？
Jobs: No.
Jobs：没有。
Cringeley: No? Well, Adele Goldberg says otherwise. And she said that she argued against doing it for 3 hours and they took you other places and showed you other things while she was arguing.
Cringeley：没有？可是，阿黛尔·戈德堡却有不同的说法。她说她反对向你演示3个小时，他们还带你去了其他地方，展示了其他东西，而她却在争辩。
Jobs: Oh! Oh! You mean they were reluctant to show us the demo?
Jobs：哦！哦！你的意思是他们不太愿意给我们演示？
Cringeley: She was.
Cringeley：是的，她是这么说的。
Jobs: Oh, okay. Well, I have no idea. But they did show us. So…And it’s good that they showed us, because the technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
Jobs：哦，好吧。我不太清楚。但他们确实展示给我们看了。所以……他们展示给我们看真是太好了，因为施乐的技术最终崩溃了。
Cringeley: Yeah, why?
Cringeley：是啊，为什么？
On Xerox’s failure (ignoring the product people)
关于施乐的失败（忽视了产品团队）
Jobs: Oh, I actually thought a lot about that. And I learned more about that with John Sculley later on, and I think I understand it now pretty well. What happens is, like with John Sculley…John came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers. So that’s what happened at Xerox. The people at Xerox PARC used to call the people that ran Xerox “toner heads.” And they just had…These toner heads would come out to Xerox PARC, and they just had no clue about what they were seeing. Toner is what you put into a copier. The toner that you add to an industrial copier. So basically, they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been a company 10 times its size. Could have been IBM. Could have been the IBM of the ’90s. Could have been the Microsoft of the ’90s. So…But anyway, that’s all ancient history. It doesn’t really matter anymore.
Jobs：哦，关于这个问题我实际上思考了很多。后来和约翰·斯库利一起我学到了更多，我现在也算是相当理解了。问题在于，就像约翰·斯库利那样……约翰来自百事公司，他们最多每10年才会换一次产品。对他们来说，新产品不过是一种新瓶子，对吧？所以如果你是个产品人员，你对公司的方向影响有限。那么，谁决定了百事公司的成功？销售和市场人员。因此，他们才会被提拔，最终掌舵公司。对百事来说，这可能还行。但事实证明，在获得垄断地位的科技公司中也会发生同样的事情。比如，IBM和施乐。如果你是IBM或施乐的产品人员……你制造了更好的复印机或电脑，又能怎样？当你占据垄断市场份额时，公司就不会更成功。能够让公司更成功的人是销售和市场人员，他们最终掌控了公司，而产品人员则被排挤出决策圈。公司也就忘记了如何制造出伟大的产品。曾使公司达到垄断地位的产品敏感度和产品天才会被那些对好产品与坏产品毫无概念的人所腐蚀。他们通常对真正帮助客户没有任何热忱。所以，这就是施乐发生的情况。施乐帕罗奥多研究中心的人曾经称施乐的管理层为“碳粉头”。这些“碳粉头”到施乐帕罗奥多研究中心来时，对他们所看到的一切毫无头绪。碳粉是你放进复印机里的东西，是工业复印机中添加的碳粉。基本上，他们就是只懂复印机而对电脑或其能做什么全无了解的复印机迷。所以，他们就从电脑行业最伟大的胜利中抓住了失败。施乐本可以拥有整个电脑行业。它本可以成为规模是现在10倍的公司，本可以成为IBM，本可以成为90年代的IBM，本可以成为90年代的微软。但……无论如何，那都是久远的历史了，已经不再重要。
Cringeley: Sure. You mentioned IBM. When IBM entered the market, was that a daunting thing for you at Apple?
Cringeley：当然。你提到过IBM。当IBM进入市场时，对苹果来说那是否让你感到畏惧？
Jobs: Oh, sure. Here was Apple, a one-billion-dollar company. And here was IBM, at that time, probably about 30-some-odd-billion-dollar company entering the market. Sure, it was. It was very scary. We made a very big mistake, though. IBM’s first product was terrible. It was really bad. And we made a mistake of not realizing that a lot of other people had a very strong vested interest in helping IBM make it better. So if it had just been up to IBM, they would have crashed and burned. But IBM did have, I think, a genius in their approach, which was to have a lot of other people have a vested interest in their success. And that’s what saved them in the end.
Jobs：哦，当然。那时苹果是一家市值十亿美元的公司，而IBM当时进入市场时大概是个市值300多亿美元的公司。确实，那很吓人。但我们犯了一个大错误，没有意识到许多人对帮助IBM改进产品抱有强烈既得利益。如果全由IBM自己负责，他们早就会失败崩溃。但我认为IBM在战略上确实有一个天才之处，他们让许多人对其成功有既得利益，这最终拯救了他们。
On implementing vision and why some companies fail at it
关于实现愿景以及为何有些公司在这方面失败
Cringeley: So you came back from visiting Xerox PARC with a vision. And how did you implement the vision?
Cringeley：于是，你带着愿景从参观施乐帕罗奥多研究中心回来。那么你是如何实现这一愿景的？
Jobs: Well, I got our best people together and started to get them working on this. The problem was that we’d hired a bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard. And they didn’t get this idea. They didn’t get it. I remember having dramatic arguments with some of these people who thought the coolest thing in user interface was soft keys at the bottom of a screen. They had no concept of proportionally-spaced fonts, no concept of a mouse. As a matter of fact, I remember arguing with these folks, people screaming at me that it would take us five years to engineer a mouse and it would cost $300 to build. And I finally got fed up. I just went outside and found David Kelley Design, and asked him to design me a mouse. And in 90 days, we had a mouse we could build for 15 bucks that was phenomenally reliable. So I found that, in a way, Apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea in many ways. And there was a core team that did, but there was a larger team that mostly had come from Hewlett-Packard that didn’t have a clue.
Jobs：我召集了我们最优秀的人开始着手这件事。问题在于，我们雇佣了一大批来自惠普的人，他们并不理解这个想法，完全不懂。我记得曾与一些人激烈争论，他们认为用户界面最酷的地方是屏幕底部的软键。他们对按比例间隔的字体毫无概念，也不懂鼠标。实际上，我还记得有人对我嚷嚷，说我们设计一只鼠标要花五年时间，成本要300美元。我终于忍无可忍，走出去找到David Kelley Design，请他们帮我设计一只鼠标。结果90天内，我们就有了一只成本15美元、性能极其可靠的鼠标。由此我发现，在某种程度上，苹果并没有足够高水平的人才来全面把握这个想法。虽然有一个核心团队能做到，但大部分来自惠普的人根本一窍不通。
Cringeley: Well, there comes this issue of professionalism. There is a dark side and a light side to it, isn’t there?
Cringeley：那么，这就涉及到专业精神的问题。专业精神既有阴暗面也有光明面，不是吗？
Jobs: Well, no. You know what it is? No, it’s not dark and light. It’s that people get confused. Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, “Well, somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created.” So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content. And that’s, ultimately, the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. And that’s what happened a little bit at Apple, too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process. They just didn’t have a clue as to the content. And in my career, I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content, and they’re a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process. It’s content. So we had a little bit of that problem at Apple. And that problem eventually resulted in the Lisa, which had its moments of brilliance. In a way, it was very far ahead of its time, but there wasn’t enough fundamental content understanding. Apple drifted too far away from its roots. To these Hewlett-Packard guys, $10,000 was cheap. To our market, to our distribution channels, $10,000 was impossible. So we produced a product that was a complete mismatch for the culture of our company, for the image of our company, for the distribution channels of our company, for our current customers. None of them could afford a product like that. And it failed.
Jobs：不，不是那样。你知道问题出在哪里吗？不是阴暗与光明的问题，而是人们搞混了。公司也会搞混。当他们开始变大时，总想复制最初的成功，许多人认为“成功的过程本身有某种神奇之处”，于是他们试图在整个公司推行制度化流程。没过多久，人们就把流程当成了产品，这最终导致了IBM的衰落。IBM拥有世界上最优秀的流程管理人员，但他们却忘记了产品的重要性。苹果也有类似的问题。我们有许多人擅长管理流程，但对产品一窍不通。在我的职业生涯中，我发现最优秀的人是那些真正理解产品的人，虽然管理他们很麻烦，但你必须容忍，因为他们在产品上实在太出色了，而这正是造就伟大产品的关键，不是流程，而是产品。我们在苹果就有这样的问题，而这个问题最终导致了Lisa的诞生。Lisa曾有过辉煌的时刻，在某种程度上远远领先于时代，但缺乏足够的基础内容理解。苹果渐渐背离了自己的根基。对那些惠普人士来说，1万美元很便宜；但对我们的市场、我们的分销渠道来说，1万美元是无法接受的。所以我们生产的产品与公司文化、公司形象、分销渠道以及现有客户群完全不匹配，没人买得起，最终失败了。
Cringeley: Now you and John Couch fought for leadership of the Lisa. How did that come about?
Cringeley：现在你和约翰·库奇争夺Lisa项目的领导权。这是怎么发生的？
Jobs: Absolutely, and I lost. Well, I thought Lisa was in serious trouble. I thought Lisa was going off in this very bad direction as I’ve just described. And I could not convince enough people in the senior management of Apple that that was the case and we ran the place as a team for the most part. So I lost. And at that point in time… I brooded for a few months. But it was not very long after that that it really occurred to me that if we didn’t do something here…The Apple II was running out of gas, and we needed to do something with this technology fast or else Apple might cease to exist as the company that it was. And so I formed a small team to do the Macintosh, and we were on a mission from God to save Apple. No one else thought so, but it turned out we were right. And as we evolved the Mac, it became very clear that this was also a way of reinventing Apple. We reinvented everything. We reinvented manufacturing. I visited probably 80 automated factories in Japan, and we built the world’s first automated computer factory in the world in California here. So we adopted the 68,000 microprocessor that Lisa had. We negotiated a price that was a fifth of what Lisa was going to pay for it because we were going to use it in much higher volume. And we really started to design this product that could be sold for $1,000 called the Macintosh. And we didn’t make it. We could have sold it at $2,000. Although, we came out at $2,500. And we spent four years of our life doing that. We built the product. We built the automated factory, the machine to build the machine. We built a completely new distribution system. We built a completely different marketing approach. And I think it worked pretty well.
Jobs：绝对如此，而我输了。事实上，我认为Lisa项目陷入了严重困境，我认为Lisa正朝着我刚才所描述的那种糟糕方向发展。而我无法说服苹果高层足够多的人相信这一点，我们大部分时间都是以团队形式运营公司。所以我输了。在那时……我闷闷不乐了几个月。但不久之后，我突然意识到，如果我们不采取措施……苹果II的动力正在耗尽，我们必须迅速利用这项技术做点什么，否则苹果可能会失去曾经的辉煌。因此，我组建了一个小团队来开发Macintosh，我们仿佛肩负着上帝赋予的拯救苹果的使命。虽然别人不这么认为，但事实证明我们是对的。随着Mac的发展，越来越明显的是，这也是重塑苹果的一种方式。我们重新定义了一切，重新定义了制造业。我曾参观过日本大约80家自动化工厂，而我们在加州建造了世界上第一座自动化电脑工厂。于是我们采用了Lisa使用的68,000微处理器，我们还谈判出了一个价格，仅为Lisa原计划价格的五分之一，因为我们要大规模使用它。我们真正开始设计这样一款产品——名为Macintosh，售价可定在1,000美元。虽然我们本可以以2,000美元出售，但最后定价为2,500美元。我们为此花了四年的时间。我们打造了产品，建立了自动化工厂，即制造机器的机器，构建了全新的分销系统，采用了完全不同的营销策略。我认为这一切都运作得相当不错。
On execution and building a motivated team
关于执行和打造一支充满激情的团队
Cringeley: Now, you motivated this team. You had to guide them. Build the team, motivate it, guide them, deal with them. We’ve interviewed just lots and lots of people from your Macintosh team. And what it keeps coming down to is your passion, your vision, and…How do you order your priorities in there? What’s important to you in the development of a product?
Cringeley：现在，你激励了这支团队。你必须引导他们，打造团队，激发他们的热情，引导他们，处理各种问题。我们采访了你Macintosh团队的许多人，而归根结底，谈到的总是你的热情、你的愿景，以及……你如何排列你的优先事项？在产品开发中，对你来说什么最为重要？
Jobs: You know…One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease, and that disease… I’ve seen other people get it, too. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and that if you just tell all these other people, “Here is this great idea,” then, of course, they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there is tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new, that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic. And so we had a lot of great ideas when we started. But what I’ve always felt, that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like…When I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. And he was in his 80s. He was a little scary-looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he might have paid me to mow his lawn or something. And one day, he said, “Come on into my garage. I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty, old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “Come on with me.” We went out to the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular, old, ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder. And we closed the can up, and he turned this motor on, and he said, “Come back tomorrow.” And this can was making a racket as the stones went around. And I came back the next day, and we opened the can, and we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks. And that’s always been, in my mind, my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about is that it’s through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones. So it’s hard to explain, and it’s certainly not the result of one person. People like symbols, so I’m the symbol of certain things. But it really was a team effort on the Mac. Now, in my life, I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which…I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I’ve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and best is at most 2-1. If you go to New York City, and you get an average taxicab driver versus the best taxicab driver, you’re probably going to get to your destination with the best taxicab maybe 30% faster. In an automobile, what’s the difference between average and the best? Maybe 20%. The best CD player and an average CD player? I don’t know. 20%. 2-1 is a big dynamic range in most of life. In software, and it used to be the case in hardware, too, the difference between average and the best is 50-to-1, maybe 100-to-1. Very few things in life are like this. But what I was lucky enough to spend my life in, is like this. And so I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for B and C players but really going for the A players, and I found something. I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players. And so it becomes self-policing, and they only want to hire more A players, and so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates. And that’s what the Mac team was like. They were all A players. And these were extraordinarily talented people.
Jobs：你知道……真正伤害苹果的一件事是，在我离开后，约翰·斯库利患上了一种严重的疾病，我见过其他人也患上了这种病。这种病就是认为一个伟大的创意占据了工作量的90%，只要把这个伟大的创意告诉别人，“这是个好主意”，他们自然就能把它实现。而问题在于，一个伟大的创意和一个伟大的产品之间，需要经过大量精湛的工艺。随着你不断完善这个伟大创意，它会不断变化和成长。它从未像最初那样呈现出来，因为在你深入到它的细微之处时，你学到了更多，同时也发现必须做出大量的权衡取舍。总有一些事情，你无法让电子按照你的意愿运转，无法让塑料、玻璃、工厂或机器人完全按照你的要求运作。当你设计一款产品时，你得把5000个概念同时装在脑子里，将它们整合在一起，并不断尝试以新颖、不同的方式组合以达到你想要的效果。每天你都会发现新的东西——新的问题或新的机会，以稍微不同的方式将这些东西组合在一起。这整个过程，就是魔力所在。所以我们一开始有很多伟大的创意。但我一直觉得，一个团队如果在做他们真心相信的事，就像……我小时候，街上住着一位鳏夫，他已年过八十，看起来有点吓人，我稍微和他熟悉了一下，我记得他可能付钱让我帮他割草。有一天，他说：“进来我的车库，我要给你看点东西。”他拿出一个满是灰尘的旧石头研磨机——一个电机、一只咖啡罐和中间的一条小带子。他说：“跟我来。”我们走到后面，只拿了一些石头，就是些普通、老旧、丑陋的石头。我们把它们放进罐子里，加上一点液体和一点砂砾粉，然后把罐子盖好，他启动了电机，说：“明天再来。”当石头在罐子里不断碰撞摩擦、制造出噪音时，罐子响个不停。第二天我再去，我们打开罐子，取出那些令人惊叹的美丽抛光石。那些原本普通的石头经过相互摩擦，产生了摩擦和噪音，最后变成了美丽的抛光石。在我看来，这正是团队共同努力的隐喻：一群极具天赋的人因为充满激情，在相互碰撞、争论、甚至争吵、制造噪音并一起努力中，他们相互磨砺，磨砺了创意，最终产出那些真正美丽的成果。所以，这很难解释，也绝非某一个人的功劳。人们喜欢象征，因此我成了某些事物的象征，但Mac项目真的是团队的努力。我在苹果很早就观察到一件事……那时我不知道怎么解释，但后来思考了很多。生活中，大多数事物从平均到最佳的差距最多是2:1。如果你去纽约市，普通的出租车司机与最好的出租车司机相比，可能最快能让你到达目的地快30%。在汽车中，普通与最好的差距可能20%；最好的CD播放器与普通的CD播放器呢？我不知道，大约20%。而在大部分生活领域，2:1的差距已经很大了。但在软件领域，以前硬件领域也是如此，普通与最好的差距可能是50:1，甚至100:1。生活中很少有事情是这样的。但我有幸度过的一生，就是这样的环境。所以，我的很多成功都建立在寻找那些真正有天赋的人之上，我不满足于B级或C级人才，而是追求A级人才。我发现，当你聚集足够多的A级人才，当你经过艰难努力找到其中的五位，他们真的喜欢互相合作，因为他们以前从未有过这样的机会，他们也不愿和B级或C级人才共事。于是，这种自我约束就形成了，他们只愿意再招聘A级人才，进而形成了这些A级人才的小集体，并不断壮大。这正是Mac团队的写照，他们都是A级人才，极其出色。
On giving feedback to the team
关于向团队提供反馈意见
Cringeley: But they’re also people who now say that they don’t have the energy anymore to work for you.
Cringeley：但他们也会说，现在已经没有精力为你工作了。
Jobs: Sure. Oh, I think if you talk to a lot of people on the Mac team, they will tell you it was the hardest they’ve ever worked in their life. Some of them will tell you that it was the happiest they’ve ever been in their life. But I think all of them will tell you that is certainly one of the most intense and cherished experiences they will ever have in their life. You know, it’s…Some of those things are not sustainable for some people.
Jobs：当然。我想如果你跟Mac团队的很多人聊过，他们会告诉你，那是他们一生中工作最辛苦的时光；有些人还会说，那是他们一生中最快乐的时刻。但我认为他们都会说，这绝对是他们生命中最激烈、最珍贵的经历之一。你知道，有些事情对某些人来说确实难以持续。
Cringeley: What does it mean when you tell someone their work is shit?
Cringeley：当你跟某人说他们的工作“烂透了”，这是什么意思？
Jobs: It usually means their work is shit. Sometimes, it means, “I think your work is shit, and I’m wrong.” But usually, it means their work is not anywhere near good enough.
Jobs：通常意味着他们的工作确实很糟。有时候，也可能意味着“我认为你的工作烂透了，但也许我错了。”但大多数时候，就是在说他们的工作远远达不到要求。
Cringeley: I had this great quote from Bill Atkinson who says, when you say someone’s work is shit, you really mean, “I don’t quite understand it. Would you please explain it to me?”
Cringeley：我听过比尔·阿特金森的一句精彩的话，他说，当你说某人的工作“烂透了”，其实你真正想表达的是，“我不太明白，你能给我解释一下吗？”
Jobs: No, that’s not usually what I meant. When you get really good people, they know they’re really good, and you don’t have to baby people’s egos so much, and what really matters is the work. And everybody knows that. That’s all that matters is the work. People are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing, I think, you can do for somebody who is really good and who’s really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough. And to do it very clearly and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not too much room for interpretation that the work that they have done for this particular thing is not good enough to support the goal of the team. And that’s a hard thing to do. And I’ve always taken a very direct approach. And I think if you talk to people that have worked with me, the really good people have found it beneficial. Some people have hated it. And I’m also one of these people that I don’t really care about being right. I just care about success. So, you’ll find a lot of people that will tell you that I had a very strong opinion and they presented evidence to the contrary, and five minutes later, I completely changed my mind. Because I’m like that. I don’t mind being wrong. I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.
Jobs：不，我通常不是那个意思。当你面对真正优秀的人时，他们知道自己有多优秀，你就无需太过顾及他们的自尊，真正重要的是工作本身，而大家都知道这一点。最关键的是，每个人在承担着拼图中的特定部分。我认为，对于那些真正出色且被寄予厚望的人来说，最重要的事情就是在他们的工作达不到要求时直截了当地指出来，并清楚地说明原因，让他们重新回到正轨。你需要以一种既不质疑你对他们能力的信心，又不会给人留下太多解释空间的方式来做这件事，明确表明他们在某项工作上的成果不足以支撑团队目标。这并不容易，而我一直采取非常直接的方式。我想，如果你问过和我共事过的人，真正优秀的人都觉得这样做是有益的，虽然也有人讨厌这种方式。我自己也是那种不太在意是否总是正确的人，我只在乎成功。所以，你会听到很多人说我曾有非常坚定的意见，但在有人提出相反证据后，仅仅五分钟，我就完全改变了看法。因为我就是这样，我不介意犯错，我经常承认自己错了，这对我来说并不重要，重要的是我们做对了事。
Apple’s entry into desktop publishing
苹果进军桌面出版
Cringeley: So how and why did Apple get into desktop publishing which would become the Mac’s killer app?
Cringeley：那么，苹果是如何以及为什么进军桌面出版这一将成为Mac杀手级应用的领域？
Jobs: I don’t know if you know this, but we got the first Canon laser printer engine shipped in the United States at Apple, and we had it hooked up to a Lisa, actually imaging pages before anybody. Before HP. Long before HP, long before Adobe. But I heard a few times, people would tell me, “Hey, there are these guys over in this garage that left Xerox PARC. You ought to go see them.” And I finally went and saw them, and I saw what they were doing, and it was better than what we were doing. And they were gonna be a hardware company. They wanted to make printers and the whole thing. And so I talked them into being a software company. And we had canceled our internal project. And a bunch of people wanted to kill me over this, but we did it. And I had cut a deal with Adobe to use their software, and we bought 19.9% of Adobe at Apple. They needed some financing. We wanted a little bit of control. And we were off to the races, and so we got the engines from Canon. We designed the first laser printer controller at Apple. And we got the software from Adobe, and we introduced the LaserWriter. And no one at the company wanted to do it but a few of us in the Mac group. Everybody thought a $7,000 printer was crazy. What they didn’t understand was you could share it with AppleTalk. They understood it intellectually, but they didn’t understand it viscerally because the last really expensive thing we tried to sell was Lisa. So we pushed this thing through. And I had to basically do it over a few dead bodies, but we pushed this thing through, and it was the first laser printer on the market, as you know, and the rest is history. When I left Apple, Apple was the largest printer company measured by revenue in the world. It lost that distinction to Hewlett-Packard after I left, unfortunately. But when I left, it was the largest printer company in the world.
Jobs：你可能不知道，我们在苹果得到了美国首个由佳能提供的激光打印机引擎，并将其接入Lisa，实现了页面成像，领先于任何人——领先于惠普，远早于惠普，更早于Adobe。但我多次听人说，“嘿，那边车库里有些家伙刚从施乐帕罗奥多研究中心离开，你应该去看看他们。”最终我去了，见识了他们在做什么，发现他们的做法比我们更好。他们原本打算做硬件公司，想制造打印机及相关产品。于是，我说服他们转型为软件公司，同时我们也取消了内部项目。很多人因此想要置我于死地，但我们还是做到了。我还和Adobe达成协议使用他们的软件，并在苹果购买了Adobe 19.9%的股份。他们需要融资，而我们则希望获得一定的控制权。随后，我们开始行动，从佳能获得了激光打印机引擎，在苹果设计了第一款激光打印机控制器，并从Adobe获得了软件支持，推出了LaserWriter。公司里除了我们Mac团队的少数几个人外，没人愿意推动这个项目。大家都认为一台7,000美元的打印机简直疯狂。他们在理论上理解可以通过AppleTalk共享这台打印机，但他们并未真正体会到这一点，因为我们上一次尝试销售的昂贵产品正是Lisa。所以，我们强行推行了这个项目，我基本上是以牺牲几个人为代价，但我们还是成功了。正如你所知，这是市场上第一台激光打印机，剩下的便成了历史。当我离开苹果时，苹果是全球按收入计最大的打印机公司。遗憾的是，我离开后这一荣誉被惠普夺走，但当时它确实是全球最大的打印机公司。
Cringeley: Did you envision desktop publishing? Was that a no-brainer?
Cringeley：你当时预见到了桌面出版吗？这是不是不言而喻的选择？
Jobs: You know…Yes. But… We also envisioned really a networked office. And so, in January of 1985, when we had our annual meeting and introduced our new products, I made probably the largest marketing blunder of my career by announcing the Macintosh Office instead of just desktop publishing. And we had desktop publishing as a major component of that, but we announced a bunch of other stuff as well, and I think we should have just focused on desktop publishing at that time.
Jobs：你知道……是的，但……我们其实还预见到了一个网络化办公的未来。因此，在1985年1月，当我们举行年度会议并推出新产品时，我可能犯下了我职业生涯中最大的营销错误——我宣布了“Macintosh Office”，而不仅仅是桌面出版。虽然桌面出版是其中的一个重要组成部分，但我们同时还宣布了许多其他内容，我认为当时我们本应只专注于桌面出版。
On the departure from Apple
关于离开苹果公司
Cringeley: After serious disagreements with Apple CEO John Sculley, Steve left the company in 1985. Tell us about your departure from Apple.
Cringeley：在与苹果CEO约翰·斯库利发生严重分歧后，史蒂夫于1985年离开了公司。请谈谈你离开苹果的经历。
Jobs: Oh, it was very painful. I’m not even sure I want to talk about it. What can I say? I hired the wrong guy (Sculley). And he destroyed everything I’d spent 10 years working for. Starting with me, but that wasn’t the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I’d wanted it to. He basically got on a rocket ship that was about to leave the pad. And the rocket ship left the pad. And it kind of went to his head. He got confused, and thought that he built the rocket ship. And then he changed the trajectory so that it was inevitably going to crash into the ground.
Jobs：哦，那真是太痛苦了。我甚至不确定是否想提起这段往事。我能说什么呢？我雇错了人（斯库利），他毁掉了我花了10年时间努力建立的一切——不仅是我个人，还有我们共同的成果，但这还不是最令人伤心的部分。如果苹果能按照我设想的那样发展，我早就乐意离开了。他基本上搭上了一艘即将腾空的火箭，而火箭确实腾空了，这让他有些飘飘然，开始混淆视听，认为自己才是造出这艘火箭的人，进而改变了火箭的轨迹，导致它不可避免地坠落。
Cringeley: But it was always the…In the pre-Macintosh days, and the early Macintosh days, it was always the Steve and John show. the hip for a while there. And then something happened to split you. What was that catalyst?
Cringeley：但在Macintosh出现之前以及早期的Macintosh时代，总是“史蒂夫与约翰”的表演，一度风靡一时。后来发生了什么，促使你们分道扬镳？那个催化剂是什么？
Jobs: Well, what happened was that the industry went into a recession in late 1984. Sales started seriously contracting. And John didn’t know what to do. He had not a clue. And there was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple. There were fairly strong general managers running the divisions. I was running the Macintosh division, somebody else was running the Apple II division, et cetera. There were some problems with some of the divisions. There was a person running the storage division that was completely out to lunch. And a bunch of things that needed to be changed. But all those problems got put in a pressure cooker because of this contraction in the market place. And there was no leadership. John was in a situation where the board was not happy and where he was probably not long for the company. And one thing I did not ever see about John until that time was he had an incredible survival instinct. Somebody once told me, “This guy didn’t get to be the president of PepsiCo without these kinds of instincts.” And it was true. And John decided that a really good person to be the root of all these problems would be me. And so, we came to loggerheads. And John had cultivated a very close relationship with the board. And they believed him. So, that’s what happened.
Jobs：事情是这样的，1984年末行业进入了衰退，销售额开始大幅下滑，而约翰完全不知道该怎么办，毫无头绪。苹果高层出现了领导真空，各个部门虽然由相当强悍的总经理负责，但问题接踵而来：我负责Macintosh部门，其他人负责苹果II部门等等，部分部门甚至有个别负责人完全懈怠，加上还有许多需要改变的问题。所有这些问题因为市场萎缩而像在高压锅中一样爆发，领导力严重不足。约翰处于董事会不满、可能命悬一线的境地。我从未见过的一个他，就是那种惊人的生存本能。有人曾对我说：“没有这种本能，他根本不可能成为百事公司的总裁。”事实正是如此。于是，约翰认为解决这一切问题的最佳人选应该是我，我们因此针锋相对，而约翰又与董事会保持了极为密切的关系，董事会都信任他。这就是事情的经过。
Cringeley: So there were competing visions for the company?
Cringeley：所以，公司内部存在着竞争性的愿景吗？
Jobs: Oh, clearly. Well, not so much competing visions for the company, ‘cause I don’t think John had a vision for the company.
Jobs：哦，当然。但实际上并不是公司有竞争性的愿景，因为我认为约翰根本没有什么真正的愿景。
Cringeley: Well, I guess I’m asking, what was your vision that lost out in this instance?
Cringeley：好吧，我的意思是，你的愿景到底是什么，为什么在这次分歧中败下阵来？
Jobs: It wasn’t an issue of vision. It was an issue of execution. In the sense that my belief was that Apple needed much stronger leadership, to unite these various factions that we had created with the divisions, that the Macintosh was the future of Apple, that we needed to rein back expenses dramatically in the Apple II area, that we needed to be spending very heavily in the Macintosh area. Things like that. And John’s vision was that he should remain the CEO of the company. And anything that would help him do that would be acceptable. I think that Apple was in a state of paralysis in the early part of 1985. And I wasn’t, at that time, capable, I don’t think, of running the company as a whole. I was 30 years old. And I don’t think I had enough experience to run $2 billion company. Unfortunately, John didn’t either. So anyway, I was told, in no uncertain terms, that there was no job for me. It would have been far smarter for Apple to let me work on the next…I volunteered. I said, “Why don’t I start a research division?” And give me a few million bucks a year and I’ll go hire some really great people. “We’ll do the next great thing.” And I was told there was no opportunity to do that. So, my office was taken away. It was… I’ll get real emotional if we keep talking about this. Anyway… But that’s irrelevant. I’m just one person, and the company was a lot more people than me. So that’s not the important part. The important part was the values of Apple over the next several years were systematically destroyed.
Jobs：问题不在于愿景，而在于执行。我的看法是，苹果需要更强的领导力来团结我们这些各自为政的部门，Macintosh代表了苹果的未来，我们需要大幅削减苹果II部门的开支，而在Macintosh部门则要大举投入。而约翰的愿景只是他自己应该继续担任CEO，任何有助于他留任的东西都可以接受。我认为1985年初，苹果处于一种瘫痪状态，而那时我也不具备管理一家20亿美元公司的能力，我当时30岁，经验明显不足。不幸的是，约翰也一样。所以，无可争辩地，我被告知没有适合我的职位。实际上，如果苹果能像我希望的那样发展，我早就自愿离开了。我提议，“为何不让我成立一个研发部门？”给我每年几百万美元，我去招聘一些真正优秀的人，“我们来打造下一个伟大的产品。”但他们告诉我没有这样的机会。于是，我的办公室被夺走了……如果继续谈这个话题，我会非常激动。不过，这已经不再重要，我只是一个人，而公司远比我多得多。真正重要的是，苹果在接下来的几年里，其核心价值观被系统性地摧毁了。
Cringeley: I then asked Steve for his thoughts on the state of Apple. Remember, this was 1995, a year before he would go back to Apple. Remember, too, that when Apple bought NeXT a year after this interview, Steve immediately sold the Apple stock he received as part of the sale.
Cringeley：接着，我问了史蒂夫对苹果现状的看法。记住，这是1995年，就在他重返苹果前一年。还要记住，在这次采访一年后，苹果收购NeXT时，史蒂夫立即卖掉了他作为交易一部分获得的苹果股票。
Jobs: Apple’s dying today. Apple’s dying a very painful death. It’s on a glide slope to die. And the reason is because…When I walked out the door at Apple, we had a 10-year lead on everybody else in the industry. Macintosh was 10 years ahead. We watched Microsoft take 10 years to catch up with it. Well, the reason that they could catch up with it was because Apple stood still. The Macintosh that’s shipping today is 25% different than the day I left. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D. A total of, probably, $5 billion on R&D. What did they get for it? I don’t know. But it was…What happened was the understanding of how to move these things forward and how to create these new products somehow evaporated. And I think a lot of the good people stuck around for a while. But there wasn’t an opportunity to get together and do this ‘cause there wasn’t any leadership to do that. So, what’s happened with Apple now is that they’ve fallen behind in many respects, certainly in market share. And most importantly, their differentiation has been eroded by Microsoft. And so, what they have now is, they have their installed base. Which is not growing, and which is shrinking slowly, but will provide a good revenue stream for several years. But it’s a glide slope that’s just gonna go like this. So, it’s unfortunate. And I don’t really think it’s reversible at this point in time.
Jobs：苹果现在正在走向衰亡，以一种非常痛苦的方式在死去，正走在一条必然陨落的下坡路上。原因是……当我离开苹果时，我们在业内领先了整整10年，Macintosh领先了10年。我们看着微软用了10年才赶上来。而他们之所以能够赶上，是因为苹果原地踏步。如今出货的Macintosh与我离开时相比，已改变了25%。他们每年在研发上投入了数亿美元，总计可能达到50亿美元。那得到了什么回报？我不知道。但实际上，推动技术进步和创造新产品的理解不知何时消失了。我觉得许多优秀人才曾一度留下来，但由于缺乏领导，大家无法齐心协力。所以，苹果现在在许多方面落后了，尤其是在市场份额上。最重要的是，他们的差异化优势被微软侵蚀了。于是，他们现在只有庞大的安装基数，虽然这个基数既不增长，也在缓慢缩小，但未来几年还能提供不错的收入流。但这注定是一条不断下滑的道路，真是令人遗憾，我也不认为在现阶段能扭转局面。
On Microsoft
关于微软
Cringeley: What about Microsoft? That’s the juggernaut now. And it’s a Ford LTD going into the future. It’s definitely not a Cadillac. It’s not a BMW. It’s just…What’s going on there? How did those guys do that?
Cringeley：那微软呢？如今它已成为一股不可阻挡的力量，未来更像是一辆福特LTD，而绝非凯迪拉克或宝马。到底是怎么回事？那些家伙是怎么做到的？
Jobs: Well, Microsoft’s orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM. And I know Bill would get upset with me for saying this, but of course it was true. And much to Bill and Microsoft’s credit, they used that fantastic opportunity to create more opportunity for themselves. Most people don’t remember, but until 1984 with the Mac, Microsoft was not in the applications business. It was dominated by Lotus. And Microsoft took a big gamble to write for the Mac. And they came out with applications that were terrible. But they kept at it and they made them better, and eventually, they dominated the Macintosh application market. And then used a springboard of Windows to get into the PC market with those same applications. And now they dominate the applications in the PC space, too. I think they’re very strong opportunists, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. They just keep on coming. They were able to do that because of the revenue stream from the IBM deal. But nonetheless, they made the most of it, and I give them a lot of credit for that. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is…I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say, “Well, why is that important?” Well, proportionally-spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. And so, I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. Their products have no spirit or enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either. But the way that we’re going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody, so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft’s just… It’s McDonald’s. So that’s what saddens me. Not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft’s products don’t display…more insight and more creativity.
Jobs：嗯，微软之所以能崛起，是因为有一枚名为IBM的土星五号助推器为其奠定了轨道。我知道比尔听了可能会不高兴，但这确实是事实。值得赞赏的是，比尔和微软利用了这一绝佳机会为自己创造了更多机遇。大多数人可能不记得，在1984年Mac推出之前，微软并未涉足应用软件市场，那时市场由Lotus主导。微软为了为Mac编写软件，下了很大的赌注，最初推出的应用程序糟糕透顶。但他们坚持不懈，不断改进，最终主导了Macintosh应用程序市场；随后，他们又借助Windows这一跳板，利用相同的应用程序打入PC市场，现在他们在PC应用领域也占据了主导地位。我认为他们是极强的机会主义者，这绝非贬义，他们总是不断抓住机遇。他们之所以能做到这一点，是得益于IBM协议带来的稳定收入流。尽管如此，他们还是充分利用了这一机会，我对他们很是佩服。唯一的问题在于，微软根本没有品味，绝对没有品味。这不仅仅是小问题，而是根本性的：他们不注重原创想法，也不将文化融入产品中。你可能会问，“那为什么重要？”因为按比例排版的字体源自排版艺术和精美的书籍，那才是激发灵感的来源。如果不是Mac，他们的产品永远不会有这种东西。所以，我并非为微软的成功而难过，我对他们的成功毫无异议，他们基本上是靠自己赢得的。但令我遗憾的是，他们制造的产品实在是三流——毫无灵魂，没有任何启迪，平淡无奇。而令人悲哀的是，大多数消费者也缺乏那种精神。但提升我们这一物种的方法在于，把最好的东西传播给每个人，让大家都能接触到更好的产品，从而理解这些优质产品的精妙之处。而微软的产品……就像麦当劳一样。这让我感到难过的，并不是微软赢了，而是他们的产品缺乏更多洞察力和创造力。
On the origins of NeXT
关于NeXT的起源
Cringeley: So, what are you doing about it? Tell us about NeXT.
Cringeley：那么，你打算怎么做呢？跟我们谈谈NeXT吧。
Jobs: Well, I’m not doing anything about it. Because NeXT is too small of a company to do anything about that. I’m just watching it. And there is really nothing I can do about it.
Jobs：嗯，我并没有对此做什么。因为NeXT太小，根本无力做些什么，我只能旁观。实际上，我也无能为力。
Cringeley: Next, we talked about NeXT, the company Steve was running in 1995 which Apple was soon to buy. NeXT software would become the heart of the Mac in the form of OS X.
Cringeley：接下来，我们谈到了NeXT，这家史蒂夫在1995年经营的公司，苹果不久后就收购了它。NeXT的软件后来以OS X的形式成为Mac的核心。
Jobs: Well, maybe the best thing, since we don’t have much time, is I just tell you what NeXT is today. The innovation in the industry is in software. And there hasn’t ever been a real revolution in how we created software. Certainly not in the last 20 years. Matter of fact, it’s gotten worse. While the Macintosh was a revolution for the end user to make it easier to use, it was the opposite for the developer. The developer paid the price. And software got much more complicated to write as it became easier to use for the end user. So, software is infiltrating everything we do these days. In businesses, software is one of the most potent competitive weapons. The most successful business war was MCI’s Friends and Family in the last 10 years. And what was that? It was a brilliant idea and it was custom billing software. AT&T didn’t respond for 18 months, yielding billions of dollars’ worth of market share to MCI, not because they were stupid but because they couldn’t get the billing software done. So in ways like that and smaller ways, software is becoming an incredible force in this world. To provide new goods and services to people, whether it’s over the Internet or what have you. Software is going to be a major enabler in our society. We have taken another one of those brilliant original ideas at Xerox PARC that I saw in 1979, but didn’t see really clearly then, called object-oriented technology. And we have perfected it and commercialized it here and become the biggest supplier of it to the market. And this object technology lets you build software 10 times faster and is better. And so that’s what we do. And we’ve got a small-to-medium-sized business and we’re the largest supplier of objects. We’re a 50-to-75-million-dollar company. Got about 300 people. And that’s what we do.
Jobs：嗯，或许既然时间不多，我就直接告诉你，今天的NeXT是怎样的。整个行业的创新在于软件，而我们对软件的创造方式从未经历过真正的革命，过去20年尤为如此。事实上，情况变得更糟了。Macintosh对终端用户来说是一场革命，使其使用变得更简单，但对开发者而言则相反，开发者付出了代价。随着终端用户使用的便捷，软件的编写反而变得更加复杂。因此，如今软件渗透到我们所做的一切中。在商业中，软件是最强大的竞争武器之一。过去10年中最成功的商业竞争战役是MCI的“亲友计划”。那是什么呢？那是个绝妙的创意，是定制计费软件。AT&T在18个月内没有做出回应，结果将价值数十亿美元的市场份额拱手让给了MCI，这不是因为他们愚蠢，而是因为他们无法完成计费软件的开发。因此，无论是在大处还是小处，软件正在成为这个世界上一股不可思议的力量，用来为人们提供新产品和服务，无论是通过互联网还是其他方式。软件将在我们的社会中发挥重大作用。我们采纳了另一项我1979年在施乐帕罗奥多研究中心看到的、当时没能真正看清楚的绝妙创意——面向对象技术。我们在这里将其完善并商业化，成为市场上最大的供应商。这项面向对象技术能让你以10倍的速度构建软件，并且效果更佳。这就是我们的业务。我们的公司规模虽小到中等，市值在5000万到7500万美元左右，约有300人，但我们是对象技术最大的供应商，这就是我们的事业。
Vision for Web
愿景：关于网络
Cringeley: The end of the third show, actually is the one moment where we do look into the future…as Channel 4 has asked us to do that. And so what’s your vision of 10 years from now with this technology that you’re developing?
Cringeley：第三场节目的尾声，其实正是我们展望未来的时刻……正如第四频道要求我们那样。那么，你对未来10年你所开发的这项技术有什么愿景？
Jobs: Well, I think the Internet and the Web… in software and in computing today. I think one is objects, but the other one is the Web. The Web is incredibly exciting because it is the fulfilment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation but metamorphosize into a device for communication. And with the Web, that’s finally happening. And secondly, it’s exciting because Microsoft doesn’t own it, and therefore, there’s a tremendous amount of innovation happening. So I think that the Web is going to be profound in what it does to our society. As you know, about 15% of the goods and services in the US are sold via catalogs or over the television. All that is gonna go on the Web and more. Billions and billions. Soon tens of billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services are gonna be sold on the Web. A way to think about it is that it is the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel. Another way to think about it is the smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company in the world on the Web. So I think the Web…As we look back 10 years from now, the Web is going to be the defining technology. The defining social moment for computing. And I think it’s going to be huge. I think it’s breathed a whole new generation of life into personal computing. And I think it’s going to be huge. Just forget about what we’re doing. Just as an industry, the Web is gonna open a whole new door to this industry.
Jobs：嗯，我认为如今在软件和计算领域，一个世界是面向对象技术，而另一个世界则是网络。网络极其令人兴奋，因为它实现了我们许多梦想——让电脑最终不仅仅是计算设备，而是转变为沟通工具。而借助网络，这一切终于正在发生。其次，这令人振奋的原因在于微软并不垄断它，因此创新层出不穷。我认为，网络将在改变我们社会方面发挥深远影响。如你所知，美国大约15%的商品和服务是通过目录或电视销售的，而这些以及更多东西都将转移到网络上，涉及数十亿美元的商品和服务销售。可以这样看，它是终极的直达客户的分销渠道。换句话说，即使是世界上最小的公司，在网络上也能与最大的公司平起平坐。所以，我认为……回望未来10年，网络将成为定义性的技术，成为计算领域具有决定性意义的社会时刻，我相信它将会非常巨大。我认为，它为个人计算注入了全新一代的生命力，将会非常巨大。抛开我们现在所做的事情不谈，整个行业中，网络将为这一领域开启一扇全新的大门。
Cringeley: And it’s another one of those things that it’s obvious once it happens, but five years ago, who would have guessed?
Cringeley：而且这又是那种一旦发生就显而易见，但五年前谁能猜到的事？
Jobs: Right. That’s right. Isn’t this a wonderful place we live in?
Jobs：对，没错。我们生活的这个世界不是太美好吗？
Talking about his passion
谈论他的热情
Cringeley: I was keen to know about Steve’s passion. What drove him?
Cringeley：我很想知道史蒂夫的热情所在。是什么激励着他？
Jobs: I read an article when I was very young in Scientific American, and it measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. So for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish. How many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured, too. And the condor won. It was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. Blew away the condor. All the way off the charts. And I remember, this really had an impact on me. I really remember this that humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. And to me…We actually ran an ad like this very early at Apple. The personal computer was the bicycle of the mind. And I believe that with every bone in my body that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near, if not at, the top as history unfolds and we look back. And it is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented, and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form. And as you know, when you set a vector off in space, if you can change its direction a little bit at the beginning, it’s dramatic when it gets a few miles out in space. I feel we are still, really, at the beginning of that vector. And if we can nudge it in the right directions, it will be a much better thing as it progresses on. I think we’ve had a chance to do that a few times, and it brings all of us associated with it tremendous satisfaction.
Jobs：我年轻时在《科学美国人》上读过一篇文章，测量了地球上各种生物的运动效率，比如熊、黑猩猩、浣熊、鸟类和鱼类，每移动一公里消耗多少千卡。而人类也被测量了，结果秃鹰最有效率，位居榜首；而被誉为造物之冠的人类却仅排在大约三分之一的位置。但有人有远见，测试了骑自行车的人，结果远远超过了秃鹰，彻底刷新了记录。我记得，这对我产生了深远的影响，我深刻体会到人类是工具的创造者，我们制造工具能够极大地放大我们与生俱来的能力。对我来说……我们早在苹果初期就曾打出这样的广告：个人电脑是心智的自行车。我坚信，凭借我全身每一根骨头，我认为在人类所有发明中，电脑将在历史展开、回望往昔时位居前列，甚至可以说是最顶尖的发明。这是我们曾经发明过的最了不起的工具，我感到无比幸运，正处于硅谷这个绝佳的地理位置和历史上恰当的时刻，见证了这一发明的形成。正如你所知，当你在太空中设定一个向量时，如果一开始能稍微改变一下方向，那么当它飞出几英里时，效果将十分戏剧化。我觉得我们实际上还处于那个向量的起点，如果能把它正确地引导，它随着时间的推进会变得更好。我认为我们曾有几次这样的机会，这给我们所有参与其中的人带来了巨大的满足感。
Cringeley: But how do you know what’s the right direction?
Cringeley：但是你怎么知道哪个方向是正确的呢？
Jobs: Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you are doing. Picasso had a saying. He said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been for computer science, these people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them, we all bought to this effort, a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in these other fields into this field. And I don’t think you get that if you’re very narrow.
Jobs：归根到底，这要归结为品味，归结为品味。关键在于让自己接触到人类所创造的最佳成果，然后把那些东西融入到你正在做的事情中。毕加索曾说，“好的艺术家抄、优秀的艺术家偷。”我们一直毫无顾忌地借鉴伟大的创意。我认为，使Macintosh卓越的一部分原因在于，参与其中的人既有音乐家、诗人、艺术家、动物学家和历史学家，又恰好是世界上最优秀的计算机科学家。但如果没有计算机科学，这些人本可能在其他领域大放异彩。他们带来了一种浓厚的人文精神，一种博雅的态度，我们希望把在其他领域中看到的最佳成果引入这一领域。如果你的视野过于狭窄，是得不到这种效果的。
On being a hippie
关于成为嬉皮士
Cringeley: One of the questions I asked everyone in the series was, “Are you a hippie or a nerd?”
Cringeley：在整个系列节目中，我问过每个人的一个问题是，“你是嬉皮士还是书呆子？”
Jobs: Oh, if I had to pick one I’m clearly a hippie. All the people I worked with were clearly in that category, too.
Jobs：哦，如果非要选一个，我显然是嬉皮士。我共事的所有人也都显然属于这个范畴。
Cringeley: Really? Why? Do you seek out hippies, or are they attracted to you?
Cringeley：真的吗？为什么？是你主动寻找嬉皮士，还是他们被你吸引？
Jobs: Well, ask yourself, “What is a hippie?” This is an old word that has a lot of connotations, but to me, ‘cause I grew up… Remember that the ’60s happened in the early ’70s, right? So we have to remember that. And that’s sort of when I came of age, so I saw a lot of this. And a lot of it happened right in our backyard here. So, to me, the spark of that was that there was something beyond what you see every day. There is something going on here in life… Beyond just a job, and a family, and there is something more going on. There is another side of the coin that we don’t talk about much, and we experience it when there’s gaps, when we just aren’t really… When everything is not ordered and perfect, when there is a gap, you experience this inrush of something. And a lot of people have said all throughout history, you find out what that was. Whether it’s Thoreau, or whether it’s some Indian mystics, or whoever it might be, and the hippie movement got a little bit of that, and they wanted to find out what that was about, and that life wasn’t about what they saw their parents doing. And of course, the pendulum swung too far the other way, and it was crazy, but there was a germ of something there. And it’s the same thing that causes people to wanna be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people, and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. You don’t hear people loving products very often. Really. But you could feel it in there. There was something really wonderful there. So, I don’t think that most of the really best people that I’ve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They’ve worked with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have, that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in school or before school, and said, “Hey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in.”
Jobs：嗯，问问你自己，“什么是嬉皮士？”这个词历史悠久，带有很多内涵，但对我来说，因为我成长的年代……记住，60年代实际上在70年代初发生，对吧？那正是我成熟的时候，我见识了很多那样的东西，而且很多都发生在我们身边。所以，对我而言，这种火花在于：总有超出你日常所见的东西在发生。生活中不仅仅只有工作和家庭，还存在更多的东西。还有硬币的另一面，我们很少谈论，但当一切都不再井然有序、完美无缺时，当出现空隙时，你会体验到某种东西的涌入。历史上很多人都说过，你最终会发现那到底是什么。不管是梭罗，还是某些印度神秘主义者，或者其他什么人，嬉皮士运动就稍带了那种东西，他们想弄清楚那是什么，他们认为生活不该只是重复父母的生活。当然，这个钟摆后来摆得有点过头，变得疯狂，但那里面总有一丝萌芽。这正是促使人们想成为诗人而非银行家的原因。我认为这是件美妙的事，我相信这种精神同样可以融入产品中，然后这些产品被制造出来传递给人们，人们能够感受到那种精神。如果你和使用Macintosh的人聊过，他们都非常热爱它。你很少听到人们如此钟爱一件产品，真的，但你能感受到其中的魅力。所以，我不认为我所共事过的那些真正优秀的人，是为了工作而工作，他们使用电脑是因为电脑是最能传达你内心感受、你想与他人分享情感的媒介。在发明这些东西之前，他们可能会在其他领域有所作为。但电脑发明出来了，这些人因此产生了兴趣，不论是在学校还是在学校之前，他们都说，“嘿，我觉得这是一种我可以表达自己思想的媒介。”
Conclusion
结论
In 1996, a year after this interview, Steve Jobs sold NeXT to Apple. He then took control of his old company at a time when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. What followed was a corporate renaissance unparalleled in American business history. With innovative products like iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Stores, Jobs turned an almost bankrupt Apple into the most valuable company in America. As he said in this interview, he took the best and spread it around ‘so that everybody grows up with better things’.
1996年，也就是这次采访一年后，史蒂夫·乔布斯将NeXT卖给了苹果。随后，他在公司距离破产仅剩90天的时候重新掌控了他的老东家。接下来发生的，是美国商业史上无与伦比的企业复兴。凭借iMac、iPod、iTunes、iPhone、iPad以及苹果零售店等创新产品，乔布斯将一家几乎破产的苹果转变成了美国最有价值的公司。正如他在这次采访中所说，他将最好的东西传播开来，“让每个人都能拥有更好的生活。”