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发表于 2011-10-9 14:23
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[Obituary] [2011.10.06] Steve Jobs 斯蒂文-乔布斯
http://www.ecocn.org/thread-58837-1-1.html
Obituary
Steve Jobs
斯蒂文-乔布斯
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NOBODY else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could put on a show like Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up a “magical” or “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. He spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy to use products.
不论在信息产业，抑或其他行业，还曾有谁为这个世界带来过如此缤纷的演出？只有他，斯蒂文-乔布斯。独自站在惊诧的人群之前，黑色的舞台之上，仿佛远古的法师，一件件只能用“魔法”，甚至无法形容的电子精灵，被召唤而出。这就是他，一个演员，一位大师。他曾说过：电脑所能做的只不过是攒弄一堆数字，而如果它足够快，它就是魔法。穷其一生，将这样的魔法包装进优雅的设计，幻化为简易的操作，这个人就是他：斯蒂文-乔布斯。
He had been among the first, back in the 1970s, to see the potential that lay in the idea of selling computers to ordinary people. In those days of green-on-black displays, when floppy discs were still floppy, the notion that computers might soon become ubiquitous seemed fanciful. But Mr Jobs was one of a handful of pioneers who saw what was coming. Crucially, he also had an unusual knack for looking at computers from the outside, as a user, not just from the inside, as an engineer—something he attributed to the experiences of his wayward youth.
70年代，作为第一批这样的人，乔布斯看到电脑拥有进入普通家庭的巨大潜力。在那个软盘还很软的黑屏绿字时代能预见到这一点的人并不多。但乔布斯就是这些少数派中的一员。而更重要的是，他拥有一个用户的视角，却不单单只看外表的功能；他身为一名工程师，却不被内在的结构所束缚——也许这一切就来自与他执拗的青春。
Mr Jobs caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley. As a teenager in the late 1960s he cold-called his idol, Bill Hewlett, and talked his way into a summer job at Hewlett-Packard. But it was only after dropping out of college, travelling to India, becoming a Buddhist and experimenting with psychedelic drugs that Mr Jobs returned to California to co-found Apple, in his parents’ garage, on April Fools’ Day 1976. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he once said. “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions.” Bill Gates, he suggested, would be “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.
乔布斯在硅谷长大，一直以来就热衷于给各种电脑挑各种毛病。60年代末的一天，乔布斯冒冒失失的抓起听筒，就拨通了他的心中偶像Bill Hewlett的电话，结果还真撞出了一份儿惠普的暑假实习。之后，他从大学辍学，旅行去了印度，皈依了佛教，尝试过神经类药物，但终于在1976年的愚人节，他回到加州，回到父母家的车库，和沃兹尼克一起组装出了第一台苹果机——创建了苹果公司。“干我们这行的，大多没有太丰富的个人经历。所以他们的生命中，没有那么多点，让他们来连接。这辈子的轨迹和条直线太像了。”乔布斯曾经这样评价过比尔-盖茨，“如果他磕过药，拜过佛，他就完全会是个更有想法的人。”
Dropping out of his college course and attending calligraphy classes instead had, for example, given Mr Jobs an apparently useless love of typography. But support for a variety of fonts was to prove a key feature of the Macintosh, the pioneering mouse-driven, graphical computer that Apple launched in 1984. With its windows, icons and menus, it was sold as “the computer for the rest of us”. Having made a fortune from Apple’s initial success, Mr Jobs expected to sell “zillions” of his new machines. But the Mac was not the mass-market success Mr Jobs had hoped for, and he was ousted from Apple by its board.
翘掉专业课，去上书法课，看上去是这一举动，让乔布斯对毫无用途的版面形制有了不可救药的热情。但支持不同字体和先锋的鼠标驱动，图形界面一同成为让Macintosh改变了1984。图标，窗口，菜单使苹果成为了“我们的电脑”。为苹果赢赚得第一桶金后，乔布斯期待着近乎无穷的销售额。但Mac最终没能赢得乔布斯希望中的胜利，不久他被自己的董事会扫地出门。
Yet this apparently disastrous turn of events turned out to be a blessing: “the best thing that could have ever happened to me”, Mr Jobs later called it. He co-founded a new firm, Pixar, which specialised in computer graphics, and NeXT, another computer-maker. His remarkable second act began in 1996 when Apple, having lost its way, acquired NeXT, and Mr Jobs returned to put its technology at the heart of a new range of Apple products. And the rest is history: Apple launched the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and (briefly) became the world’s most valuable listed company. “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” Mr Jobs said in 2005. When his failing health forced him to step down as Apple’s boss in 2011, he was hailed as the greatest chief executive in history. Oh, and Pixar, his side project, produced a string of hugely successful animated movies.
塞翁失马焉知非福，后来乔布斯称这是“从来发生过的最幸运的事情”。离开苹果后，他与人共同创立了两家新企业，专注于计算机图形动画的Pixar，和电脑制造企业NeXT。1996年，他开始了自己的惊天逆转。那时苹果效益日渐低迷。借着苹果公司收购NeXT，乔布斯重返董事会，并将大量技术注入苹果的一系列新产品中。接下来发生的事情，便众所周知了：苹果推出了iMac，iPod，iPhone和iPad，一举登顶全球公司市值榜第一。2005年乔布斯表示，“如果我不曾被董事会解雇，这一切都不会发生。”随着健康状况的恶化，2011年，乔布斯从苹果卸任。而他作为苹果CEO的辉煌，早已标榜史册。不，不仅如此，就连他的副产品Pixar，也生产了一系列空前成功的动画电影，将长久的留在影迷的心中。
In retrospect, Mr Jobs was a man ahead of his time during his first stint at Apple. Computing’s early years were dominated by technical types. But his emphasis on design and ease of use gave him the edge later on. Elegance, simplicity and an understanding of other fields came to matter in a world in which computers are fashion items, carried by everyone, that can do almost anything. “Technology alone is not enough,” said Mr Jobs at the end of his speech introducing the iPad, in January 2010. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” It was an unusual statement for the head of a technology firm, but it was vintage Steve Jobs.
回首往昔，乔布斯在创立苹果之处，是屹立时代潮头的弄潮儿。计算机的早期是纯粹技术型的专家玩具。但他对设计和适用性的强调赋予了苹果无比优势。典雅、简洁、通用，让电脑成为这颗星球上，人人都能拥有，事事都能解决的时尚器物。“单有技术是不够的，”2010年1月，在一次介绍iPad演讲的结尾，乔布斯娓娓道来“这是技术和艺术的联姻，和人文关怀的结合，是我们的心灵在歌唱。”这是对一家技术公司最非凡的评价，这也是斯蒂文-乔布斯的创造。
His interdisciplinary approach was backed up by an obsessive attention to detail. A carpenter making a fine chest of drawers will not use plywood on the back, even though nobody will see it, he said, and he applied the same approach to his products. “For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” He insisted that the first Macintosh should have no internal cooling fan, so that it would be silent—putting user needs above engineering convenience. He called an Apple engineer one weekend with an urgent request: the colour of one letter of an on-screen logo on the iPhone was not quite the right shade of yellow. He often wrote or rewrote the text of Apple’s advertisements himself.
他跨领域的创见，源于他对细节近乎偏执的关注。他曾说过，即便没人会看得见，一个好木匠也不会用胶合板做抽屉背。他也同样将这样的精神投入了自己的产品。“哪怕为了你晚上能睡的着觉，也永远不能丢下美学和质量不管。”他坚持不在第一款Macintosh上安装内置风扇：仅仅为整机静音——置用户体验于技术便捷之上。有一次，他在周末召来一名工程师，提出一个极端的要求：iPhone屏显logo上的一个字母的黄色不正！同样，他也经常自己撰写或重写苹果的广告词。
His on-stage persona as a Zen-like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said. His judgment proved uncannily accurate: by the end of his career the hits far outweighed the misses. Mr Jobs was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion field”, such were his powers of persuasion. But in the end he changed reality, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped music, telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that.
和他在舞台上充满了东方神秘主义的个人形象不同，乔布斯在公司里是一个脾气刚烈的独裁经理。但是他的自大与狂妄却又如此的正确。他远避市场调研和专业小组，在新产品研发上顽固的相信自己的直觉。“很多时候，除非拿给他们看，人们根本不知道自己要什么。”他的决策总是无比正确：在他事业的末期，他带给市场的冲击，远远大于自己可能的失误。一位在苹果创立伊始就加盟的老工程师这样评价乔布斯——一个现实扭曲力场，而这就是他的信念。最终这个力场终于扭曲了现实，将计算机的魔法灌入自己的产品，重塑了音乐，电信和媒体。那个想要“于天地间存留一物”的年轻人，做到了这一切。
(Photo credit: AFP) |
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