I don’t think of the world that way. I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

我并不以那种方式看待世界。我是一个工具制造者。这就是我对自己的看法。我想制造出真正好的工具，我在内心深处知道它们会有价值。然后，无论发生什么……你无法准确预测会发生什么，但你可以感受到我们前进的方向。这就是你能接近的程度。然后你只需退后，放手让这些事情自行发展。

SJ: Apple was this incredible journey. I mean we did some amazing things there. The thing that bound us together at Apple was the ability to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important. We were all pretty young. The average age in the company was mid-to-late twenties. Hardly anybody had families at the beginning and we all worked like maniacs and the greatest joy was that we felt we were fashioning collective works of art much like twentieth century physics. Something important that would last, that people contributed to and then could give to more people; the amplification factor was very large.

SJ：苹果是一段不可思议的旅程。我是说，我们在那里做了一些惊人的事情。在苹果把我们凝聚在一起的，是那种能够制造出将改变世界的产品的能力，这非常重要。我们都还很年轻，公司平均年龄在二十多岁末。最初几乎没人有家庭，我们都像疯子一样工作，而最大的快乐是我们觉得自己在打造集体艺术品，就像二十世纪的物理学那样，创造出持久的重要成果，人们为之贡献，然后能传递给更多人；这种放大效应非常显著。

SJ: In doing the Macintosh, for example, there was a core group of less than a hundred people, and yet Apple shipped over ten million of them. Of course everybody's copied it and it's hundreds of millions now. That's pretty large amplification, a million to one. It's not often in your life that you get that opportunity to amplify your values a hundred to one, let alone a million to one. That's really what we were doing. If you look at what we tried to do, it was to say "Computation and how it relates to people is really in its infancy here. We are in the right place at the right time to change the course of that vector a little bit." What's interesting is that if you change the course of a vector near its origin, by the time it gets a few miles out its course is radically different. We were very cognizant of this fact. From almost the beginning at Apple we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time. The contributions we tried to make embodied values not only of technical excellence and innovation--which I think we did our share of--but innovation of a more humanistic kind.

SJ：以Macintosh为例，核心团队不到一百人，但苹果出货量却超过了一千万台。当然，后来大家纷纷模仿，现在已经达到数亿台。这是一种极大的放大效应，约为一百万比一。在你的一生中，很少有机会能把你的价值放大一百倍，更别说一百万倍了。这正是我们所做的。如果你看看我们的努力，我们在说“计算及其与人类的关系还处于初级阶段，我们正处于一个合适的时机，可以稍微改变这一发展方向。”有趣的是，如果你在向量的起点就改变它的方向，当它行进几英里后，其轨迹将截然不同。我们非常清楚这一点。几乎从苹果成立之初，出于某种难以置信的幸运，我们就处在了正确的时机。我们所做的贡献不仅体现了技术卓越和创新——我认为我们做出了不少贡献——还体现了一种更具人文精神的创新。

SJ: The things I'm most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came together, as it did in publishing for example. The Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically--those two things came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I'm the most proud of. It happened on the Apple II and it happened on the Lisa, although there were other problems with the Lisa that caused it to be a market failure; and then it happened again big time on the Macintosh.

SJ：我在苹果最自豪的事情，是技术与人文精神的融合，就像在出版领域那样。Macintosh基本上彻底革新了出版和印刷业。排版艺术与将其以电子方式实现的技术理解和卓越相结合——这两者结合在一起，使人们能够使用电脑而无需理解那些晦涩的电脑命令。这种结合正是我最自豪的地方。它先后在苹果II和Lisa上出现过，尽管Lisa由于其他问题而市场失败；随后在Macintosh上又大幅实现了这一点。

DM: You used an interesting word in describing what you were doing. You were talking about art not engineering, not science. Tell me about that.

DM：你在描述你的工作时用了一个有趣的词。你谈论的是艺术，而非工程，也不是科学。请谈谈这方面。

SJ: I actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest calibre. I've never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They've just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it.

SJ：我其实认为，最高水平的艺术家与科学家或工程师之间几乎没有区别。在我看来，我从未将这两类人区分开来。他们只是走着不同的道路，但基本上都朝着同一个目标努力，那就是表达他们所感知到的真理，让别人从中受益。

DM: And the artistry is in the elegance of the solution, like chess playing or mathematics?

DM：那么这种艺术性体现在解决方案的优雅上吗，就像下棋或数学那样？

SJ: No. I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. I think that a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing that and did exactly that. If you study these people a little bit more what you'll find is that in this particular time, in the 70's and the 80's the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. Almost all of them were musicians. A lot of them were poets on the side. They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter. Many of the people were introspective, inward people who expressed how they felt about other people or the rest of humanity in general into their work, work that other people would use. People put a lot of love into these products, and a lot of expression of their appreciation came to these things. It's hard to explain.

SJ：不，我认为艺术性在于对周围事物的深刻洞察。通常是以一种别人从未尝试过的方式把事物组合在一起，并找到一种方法向那些没有这种洞察力的人表达，从而让他们也能获得那种感受或者能够做某件事。我认为Macintosh团队中的许多人正是具备并实现了这种能力。如果你更仔细地研究这些人，你会发现，在70年代和80年代，计算机领域最优秀的人本来往往是诗人、作家和音乐家，几乎全都是音乐家，很多人还兼职写诗。他们进入计算机领域是因为那实在太吸引人，新鲜而独特，是他们展现创意才能的新媒介。人们在其中投入的情感和热情，与诗人或画家完全无异。许多人内省、内向，把自己对他人或整个人类的感受融入到他们的作品中，而这些作品正是供别人使用的。人们对这些产品倾注了大量的爱，而这种感激之情也充分体现出来。这真的难以形容。

DM: It's passion in the truest sense of the word.

DM：这是真正意义上的激情。

SJ: The computer industry is at a very critical juncture where those people are clearly leaving the field.

SJ：计算机行业正处于一个非常关键的转折点，那些才华横溢的人显然正在离开这个领域。

DM: What are they doing?

DM：他们在做什么呢？

SJ: Hard to say. They're not being attracted by something else. They're being driven out of the computer business. They're being driven out because the computer business is becoming a monopoly with Microsoft. Without getting into whether Microsoft gained its position legally or not--who cares? The end product of the position is that the ability to innovate in the industry is being sucked dry. I think the smartest people have already seen the writing on the wall. I think some of the smartest young people are questioning whether they'll really get in it. Hopefully things will change. It's kind of a dark period right now or about to enter.

SJ：很难说。他们不是被其他东西吸引，而是被迫退出计算机行业。之所以被迫退出，是因为计算机行业正逐渐被微软垄断。至于微软是否合法获得这种地位——谁在乎呢？最终的结果就是，行业的创新能力正被榨干。我认为最聪明的人已经看到了前景，有些最聪明的年轻人正在质疑自己是否真的应该进入这个领域。希望情况会改变，现在或即将进入一个相当黑暗的时期。

DM: Apple had a reputation as a company that absolutely broke the mold and set its own course. Looking back from where you are today with NeXT, do you think that, as Apple grew larger, it could have sustained that original approach? Or was it destined to become a big standard American company?

DM：苹果曾以打破常规、走自己路而著称。从你现在在NeXT的角度回顾，你认为随着苹果变大，它能否保持最初的方式？还是说它注定要成为一家庞大的标准美式公司？