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茫茫戈壁
2000-01-01 加入
【按】断断续续在iPhone上看完了《乔布斯传》中文版。很喜欢结尾部分乔布斯的这段自述，整理了一个中英文对照的版本。
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
我一心期望建立一个不朽的公司，激励员工去创造伟大的产品，其他一切都是次要的。确实，赚钱很重要，有钱才能去创造伟大的产品。但动力是创造产品而不是利润。斯卡利优先考虑的目标是赚钱。看似微小的差异，带来的结果完全不同，会体现在你雇佣的员工、提拔的人以及会议上讨论的内容。
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
有人会说：“顾客想要什么产品就提供什么产品。”但这不是我的做事方式。我的职责是在人们还没意识到需求之前就研制出他们想要的。亨利·福特曾说：“如果你问顾客想要什么交通工具，他们可能会回答‘一匹跑得更快的马！’”直到你把产品摆在他们面前，人们才确切知道需要什么。这就是为什么我从不依赖市场调研。我们的任务就是去搞清楚那些还没有形成定论的事情。
Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’ s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.
宝丽来的埃德温·兰德讨论过关于人文与科技的融合。我喜欢这种融合。它能产生神奇的东西。创新不是我事业的主要特点，许多人也在创新。苹果能激起人们的共鸣主要是我们在创新当中还蕴藏着深切的人文关怀。我认为伟大的艺术家和伟大的工程师是相似的，他们都有展现自己的渴望。为早期Mac工作的一些顶尖人才也可以说是一些诗人和音乐家。20世纪70年代，电脑成为了人们展示创造力的一个途径。像列奥纳多·达·芬奇和米开朗基罗这样伟大艺术家在科学上也有很高的造诣。米开朗基罗不仅精于雕塑，还懂得如何去开采石头。
People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.
人们付钱给我们为其集成产品，因为他们没时间每天从早到晚想这些事情。一旦你有强烈的激情去创造伟大的产品，就会迫使你去整合，去打通硬件、软件和内容管理。要开创新局面，就都得自己做。允许产品开放给其他的硬件或软件，就会迫使你放弃一些你的理念。
At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett- Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.
过去不同的时期，硅谷都有作为典范的公司。很长的时期里是惠普。在半导体时代是仙童和英特尔。我想有一段时间是苹果，后来它没落了。现在，我想是苹果和谷歌，而且苹果更胜一些。我认为苹果经历了时间的考验，苹果领导时代潮流已经有相当一段时间了。
It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.
要说微软的坏话很容易。他们明显从统治地位跌落了，已变得无关紧要。我可以理解他们所做的一切以及付出的努力。他们非常善于做生意，但是在产品方面却从来没有应有的雄心。比尔喜欢把自己扮成做产品的人，实际上他不是，他是个商人，赢得生意远比制造伟大产品重要。他成了世界上最富有的人，如果这是他的目标，他实现了。但这从来不是我的目标，我猜这应该也不是他最终的目标。我钦佩他建立了一个了不起的公司，而且我也乐于与他共事。他开朗，也很有幽默感。但微软真的从未有人文和艺术的基因，即使看到了Ｍac，他们也模仿不好，他们完全没整明白。
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.
IBM和微软这样的公司为什么会衰落，我有我的看法。这些公司干得很出色，开拓创新，在某一领域取得了或接近了垄断地位。然后，产品的质量就变得不那么重要了。公司开始重视优秀的推销员，因为是他们推动收入增长而不是工程师和设计师，于是营销人员最后主导了公司。IBM的约翰·埃克斯是一个聪明的、能说会道的、优秀的营销人员，但他根本不懂制造。同样的事情发生在施乐。当营销人员主导了公司，生产技术人员就不受重视，许多人会选择离开。斯卡利来苹果的时候就发生了这种状况，这是我的错。鲍尔默掌管的微软也是同样的情形。苹果幸运地复兴了。但我认为只要鲍尔默还在，微软就难有起色。
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.
我讨厌那些自称为企业家，实际上创办企业只是为了卖掉或上市，然后拿钱走人。他们不愿去做建设真正的公司所需做的工作，那些是经营中最艰苦的工作，就是看你在前人留下的遗产的基础上，真正做出了多少有益的贡献。你要建一个过几代以后还有存在价值的公司。沃特·迪斯尼就是这样的做的，还有休利特和帕卡德，以及英特尔的创立者。他们不仅是为了赚钱，而是为了建立不朽的公司。这也是希望我对苹果的期望。
I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some rip-roaring arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying “Ron, that store looks like shit” in front of everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the engineering on this” in front of the person that’s responsible. That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.
我不认为我待人冷酷无情，有事情搞砸了，我会当面责骂。我的责任就是说实话。我对我所说的非常确信，而且事实通常也证明我是对的。我试图创建这样一种文化。我们相互坦诚近乎残忍。任何人都可以说我是一堆狗屎，我也一样可以说他们。我们有多次扯开喉咙，争吵辩论，相互咆哮，这也是我的一些美好时光。我觉得在其他人面前这样说很爽：“罗恩，那商店看起来就是狗屎。”我也会在负责工程的人面前说“上帝，这技术真他妈的差劲”。在这里就得有心里准备：你必须能够做到极致的坦诚。也许有更好的方式，在绅士俱乐部，全都打着领带，用高雅的语言，说着娓娓动听的话，但我不懂这种方式，因为我是来自加利福尼亚的中产阶级。
I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.
有时我对人很严厉，可能有些过头。我记得在里德6岁那年，有一次他回到家，那天我刚解雇了一个人，我可以想象到那人在告诉妻子和孩子他已经失业的时候该是怎样的情形。这是很残酷。但必须有人做这事。我想我的职责就是要确保团队的优秀。如果我不做，就没有人会去做。
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him. Then he brought out what became The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing “Like a Rolling Stone” and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says, “Play it fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
你要不断地推动创新。迪伦本来可以一直唱抗议的歌曲，也会赚很多钱，但他没有这样做。他需要继续前进。1956年，由于去做电子音乐，他疏远了很多人。1966年的欧洲巡演是他的巅峰。他上台演奏了一组原声吉他，观众非常喜欢他。接着他推出了后来的 The Band乐队，他们演奏全都是电声乐器，观众不时向他们喝倒彩。正当他准备演唱“Like a Rolling Stone”的时候，观众中有人大喊“叛徒！”迪伦就说“来他妈个震天响”他们就这样做了 。披头士乐队也是一样。他们不断发展、改进、完善他们的技艺。这也是我一直努力去做的-永不止步。否则，就如迪伦所说，如不忙于求生，就等于在找死。
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.
是什么激励着我？我认为大多有创造力的人都会对能够得益于前人的所作所为表示感激。我没有发明我用的语言或数学，我不太会做饭，更不会做衣服。我做的一切都依赖于我们社会的其他成员，站在他们的肩膀之上。许多人想要回报社会，增添有意义的贡献。这只有用我们自己最擅长的方式努力去展现价值-因为我不会写鲍勃迪伦的歌或汤姆·史塔伯德的戏剧。我们努力用自己的天赋去传递我们深切的情感，去表达我对前人全部馈赠的感激，去贡献自己的才华。这就是激励着我的力量。
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