《名人传记》之乔布斯最后一件事

Nobody had ever tested it, But at this point, I tested it.

没有人试过，但是在那个节骨眼上，我试了

I marched past him and I wrote on the whiteboard,

我走过去然后在白板上写字,

And he said, "y-y-you can't do that.

然后他说, "你你你.你不能那样做

And I said, "what? Write on a whiteboard?"

我说 "神马?在白板上写字?"

And he stormed out of the room,

然后他摔门而去

And then I was in shock for the next week or moths.

这件事让我起码惊吓了一周到一个月

I just didn't know what had happened.

我都不知道发生了什么

Everyone in steve jobs' life went through 3 phases

在史蒂夫乔布斯人生中有三类人

They were either being seduced, ignored, or scourged,

他们或被引诱吸引着，或者无视，或者根本就痛斥他

And it all depended upon whether he needed you or not.

这一切全部在于与他是否需要你

If he needed you, he was your best friend,

如果他需要你，他就是你最好的朋友，

And he would seduce you,

并且他能够吸引你

And then you would work like a dog,

然后你就会想狗一样工作

And if you weren't working hard enough, he would scourge you,

如果你工作的不够努力，他就会折磨鞭笞你

And ultimately he would throw you away.

然后最终他会把你甩到一边

On the personal level, it was not fun,

在个人层面，这并不好玩，

It was not the way I want to be treated by another human being.

这不是其他人应该效仿的为人处事的方式

Steve ultimately betrayed everyone.

史蒂夫几乎背叛了所有人

and some said the new steve jobs wasn't afraid Of claiming all the credit, too.

甚至有些人说，新的史蒂夫乔布斯一点信用也没有了

disney took "toy story" and another one

迪斯尼带着玩具总动员和另外一部

Of their movies to new york for the critics to see,

他们自己的电影 去纽约参展

And the critics just they didn't even look at the other movie.

那些影评人甚至，他们甚至没有看另外一部电影

They just went nuts when they saw "toy story,"

当他们看到玩具总动员的时候简直疯掉了

And they came back and basically told steve

他们纷纷告诉乔布斯，

That it was going to be a huge success,

这将会取得巨大的成功

And that's when he that's the point his ability to see

而看到将来即将要发生的事情，

Something spectacular is about to happen.

就是他特别的能力

He just moved just in and exploited that right to the hilt,

他进来然后进行了恰当好处的解释

And I must say he did a great job.

不得不说那真的是很棒

He became a billionaire from it.

他因此成为亿万富翁.

awesome.

难以置信.

So steve's genius is to move when he has a good idea.

史蒂夫的天才之处在于他能将自己的想法立刻付诸行动.

I don't think they're necessarily his ideas,

我不认为他们都懂得他的想法，

But, boy, does he know how to move

但是只要他知道如何去实行

And market them like crazy.

并且像疯子一样驱动他们实现这想法就够了

He the world's genius marketeer,

他是这世上最有天赋的商人

Including of his own self-image.

即使他自己也这么想象.

but the best was yet to come for jobs.

但是最好的事情之后才走向乔布斯

Apple was in trouble.

苹果公司有麻烦了

They wanted him back.

他们想要他回来.

they were begging him to come back

他们祈求他回来

Because they knew he could fix it,

因为他们知道他能挽救这些

And he did come back, and he fixed it,

然后他真的回来了，并且他真的修复了苹果公司

And the rest is history.

其他的都成为了历史.

《乔布斯传》第十八章 NeXT 自由的普罗米修斯117

Then he turned to a feature that would prove more prescient. “What we’ve done is made the first real digital books,” he said, noting the inclusion of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare and other tomes. “There has not been an advancement in the state of the art of printed book technology since Gutenberg.”

接着，他开始介绍另一个功能——能更好地证明乔布斯的先见之明。“我们做出了第一批真正的电子书。”他说，并提到电脑里包含了牛津版的莎士比亚和其他大部头，“自古腾堡以来，印刷书本的技术还未出现过进步。”

At times he could be amusingly aware of his own foibles, and he used the electronic book demonstration to poke fun at himself. “A word that’s sometimes used to describe me is ‘mercurial,’” he said, then paused. The audience laughed knowingly, especially those in the front rows, which were filled with NeXT employees and former members of the Macintosh team. Then he pulled up the word in the computer’s dictionary and read the first definition: “Of or relating to, or born under the planet Mercury.” Scrolling down, he said, “I think the third one is the one they mean: ‘Characterized by unpredictable changeableness of mood.’” There was a bit more laughter. “If we scroll down the thesaurus, though, we see that the antonym is ‘saturnine.’ Well what’s that? By simply double-clicking on it, we immediately look that up in the dictionary, and here it is: ‘Cold and steady in moods. Slow to act or change. Of a gloomy or surly disposition.’” A little smile came across his face as he waited for the ripple of laughter. “Well,” he concluded, “I don’t think ‘mercurial’ is so bad after all.” After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.

有时，乔布斯会幽默地展示自己的自知之明，他用电子书演示来取笑自己。“有一个词有时会被用来形容我，‘mercurial’。”他说道，然后顿了顿。观众们会意地笑了，尤其是那些坐在前排的人，多是NeXT的雇员和原麦金塔团队的成员。接着，他把这个词输进了电脑的词典，读出了第一条释义。“水星的，与水星有关的或来自水星的。”他边把页面往下拉边说，“我想他们说的应该是第三种意思：‘情绪多变’。”笑声更多了。“如果我们继续往下拉，就能看到它的反义词‘saturnine’。这个词又是什么意思呢？只要双击一下这个词，我们就能马上查到它，来看看：‘情绪冷淡稳定。行动或改变迟缓。阴郁或阴沉的性格。’”在等待观众的笑声平息之时，乔布斯脸上出现了一点儿笑容。“好吧，”他总结道，“这么看来，我觉得‘mercurial’这个词也不是那么糟。”掌声过后，他用《牛津引语词典》展示了更巧妙的一点，关于他的现实扭曲力场观点。他选用的引语来自刘易斯·卡洛尔的《爱丽丝镜中奇遇记》（ThroughtheLookingGlass）②。当爱丽丝感叹，不管自己多么努力尝试，都无法相信不可能的事情。白皇后反驳道：“为什么，有时我都来得及在早餐前想通六件不可能的事。”又是一阵会意的笑声，尤其是前排的观众。

All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or distract attention from, the bad news. When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being “worth thousands and thousands of dollars,” and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education a single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was scattered applause. But his panel of academic advisors had long pushed to keep the price to between $2,000 and $3,000, and they thought that Jobs had promised to do so. Some of them were appalled. This was especially true once they discovered that the optional printer would cost another $2,000, and the slowness of the optical disk would make the purchase of a $2,500 external hard disk advisable.

这些欢呼声都是糖衣炮弹，为了转移观众对于坏消息的注意力。当宣布新机器的价格时，乔布斯采用了自己在产品演示中的常用伎俩：一口气说出产品众多的特点，将它们描述成“价值成千上万美元”的东西，让观众想象这个产品真的该有多贵。这样抬髙观众的心理预期后，他就开始宣布定好的价格，让产品的真实价格看起来比较低。“我们打算以每台6500美元的价格卖给髙等教育人士。”大厅里晌起了稀稀拉拉的掌声，来自忠实的追随者。但是，他的学术顾问小组一直在努力将价格维持在2000~3000美元；而且他们认为乔布斯也承诺过。他们中有些人震惊了。一旦他们发现可供选购的打印机又得花2000美元，并且，由于光驱速度缓慢，最好再配一个外部硬盘，这又需要2500美元时，大家会更吃惊的。

There was another disappointment that he tried to downplay: “Early next year, we will have our 0.9 release, which is for software developers and aggressive end users.” There was a bit of nervous laughter. What he was saying was that the real release of the machine and its software, known as the 1.0 release, would not actually be happening in early 1989. In fact he didn’t set a hard date. He merely suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman’s pushback, from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear it would be more than two years later.

而NeXT还有一个令人失望之处，最后乔布斯竭力含糊其辞。“明年初，我们将会推出0.9版，适于软件开发者和勇于尝鮮的终端用户。”乔布斯紧张地笑了笑。他的意思是，机器和软件的真正发布，即1.0版，不是1989年初。事实上，他还没有设定确切日期。乔布斯只是表示，1.0版将会在1989年第二季度推出。1985年底第一次NeXT外出集思会回来时，乔布斯曾拒绝乔安娜·霍夫曼推后发布日期的提议，他承诺要在1987年初完成机器。现在，很明显，这款电脑的发布会要推迟两年多。

The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally. Jobs brought onstage a violinist from the San Francisco Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto in a duet with the NeXT computer onstage. People erupted in jubilant applause. The price and the delayed release were forgotten in the frenzy. When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”

某种意义上讲，发布会在一个较为乐观的基调中结束了。乔布斯请来一位旧金山交响乐团的小提琴手，同台上的NeXT—起演奏巴赫的《A小调小提琴协奏曲》。人群爆发出欢快的掌声。狂热中，人们忘记了价格和推迟发布的不愉快。就在此后，一位记者问乔布斯为什么这款电脑会推迟这么久，乔布斯回答说：“并不迟，它领先了时代5年。”

As would become his standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive” interviews to anointed publications in return for their promising to put the story on the cover. This time he went one “exclusive” too far, though it didn’t really hurt. He agreed to a request from Business Week’s Katie Hafner for exclusive access to him before the launch, but he also made a similar deal with Newsweek and then with Fortune. What he didn’t consider was that one of Fortune’s top editors, Susan Fraker, was married to Newsweek’s editor Maynard Parker. At the Fortune story conference, when they were talking excitedly about their exclusive, Fraker mentioned that she happened to know that Newsweek had also been promised an exclusive, and it would be coming out a few days before Fortune. So Jobs ended up that week on only two magazine covers. Newsweek used the cover line “Mr. Chips” and showed him leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it proclaimed to be “the most exciting machine in years.” Business Week showed him looking angelic in a dark suit, fingertips pressed together like a preacher or professor. But Hafner pointedly reported on the manipulation that surrounded her exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled out interviews with its staff and suppliers, monitoring them with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That strategy worked, but at a price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and relentless—displayed the side of Steve Jobs that so hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is Jobs’s need to control events.”

乔布斯和媒体打交道已经有了自己的标准做法，他给自己钦点的媒体提供“独家”采访，但条件是把关于他的报道放在封面。不过，这一次他的“独家”手段太过分了，虽然并没有造成真正的伤害。他在产品发布之前，答应了《商业周刊》的凯蒂·哈夫纳（KatieHafner）独家专访的请求；他也和《新闻周刊》和《财富》杂志达成了同样的协议。但是，他没想到的是，《财富》杂志的高级编辑苏珊·弗雷克（SusanFraker）和《新闻周刊》的梅纳德·帕克（MaynardParker）是夫妻。在《财富》的选题会上，当人们正兴冲冲地谈论乔布斯的独家新闻时，弗雷克不安地开口了，说自己碰巧了解到《新闻周刊》也拿到了乔布斯的独家承诺，而且将会比《财富》杂志的报道提前几天出来。结果，乔布斯只上了两家杂志的封面。《新闻周刊》称他为“芯片先生”，并刊出了一张他俯身靠近美丽的NeXT电脑的图片，并宣称这是“数年内最激动人心的机器”。《商业周刊》放了一张乔布斯身着深色西服的照片，他看上去像个天使，十指相扣如同传教士和教授那样。但是，哈夫纳尖锐地报道了关于乔布斯对独家新闻的操纵。“NeXT谨慎地分配着媒体对员工和供应商的采访，通过审查来控制采访报道的内容，”她写道，“这个策略奏效，伹也付出了代价；这种行为显示出史蒂夫·乔布斯自利和无情的一面，也正是这点让他在苹果深受伤害。乔布斯最突出的特征就是需要控制权。”

When the hype died down, the reaction to the NeXT computer was muted, especially since it was not yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry chief scientist at rival Sun Microsystems, called it “the first Yuppie workstation,” which was not an unalloyed compliment. Bill Gates, as might be expected, continued to be publicly dismissive. “Frankly, I’m disappointed,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Back in 1981, we were truly excited by the Macintosh when Steve showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-side with another computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.” The NeXT machine was not like that. “In the grand scope of things, most of these features are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft would continue its plans not to write software for the NeXT. Right after the announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been completely suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever wrote.”

当宣传炒作平息下来后，市场对NeXT电脑的反应平淡，尤其是它还未上市销售。比尔·乔伊（BillJoy）是竞争对手Sim公司的首席科学家，聪明幽默，他称NeXT为“第一款雅皮士终端”，这应该是有保留的恭维。比尔·盖茨一如既往地对NeXT进行公开批驳。“坦白地说，我很失望。”他告诉《华尔街日报》，“1981年，当乔布斯向我们展示麦金塔的时候，我们真的因此而激动，因为当你把它和别的电脑放在一起时，它不同于以往任何机器。”NeXT电脑不是这样。“整体来看，它的大部分功能都真的无足轻重。”他说，微软将继续其计划，不为NeXT编写软件。在NeXT的发布会后，盖茨给自己的员工写了一封诙谐的邮件。“所有现实都被完全搁置。”邮件开头写道。回想起这封邮件，盖茨笑着说这可能是“我写过的最好的邮件”。

When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed to churn out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four hundred a month. The beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and NeXT continued to hemorrhage cash.

1989年中，NeXT电脑终于开始销售了，工厂已经准备好每月生产10000台——结果这款电脑每月的销量只有约400台。漂亮的工厂机器人被喷刷得很好，却只能着，而NeXT还在继续烧钱——

注释：

①安德鲁·劳埃德·韦伯，世界知名音乐剧作家。

②《爱丽丝梦游仙境》的续作。