特里·格罗斯访谈

原文标题: Interview with Terry Gross

背景: 1996年，史蒂夫和《新鲜空气》电台主持人特里·格罗斯回顾他在苹果的时光，并展望计算机行业的未来。他们在《玩具总动员》上映和成功IPO后不久谈话。与此同时，NeXT继续挣扎。

主题: "我总是试图提醒自己不要害怕失败"

核心概念

  1. 人文艺术视角 (Liberal arts point of view) - 苹果的核心贡献

内容

中文翻译

特里·格罗斯: 你认为在你们的软件帮助下，网络在近期未来会如何变化？

史蒂夫·乔布斯: 我认为大多数大公司、中型公司（甚至小公司）都开始将网络视为终极的直销渠道，绕过所有中间商，直接从供应商到消费者。当你想到这一点时，这是一个相当强大的概念。我喜欢的一点是，一家非常小的公司，如果它在网站上投入很多，可以看起来和一家非常大的公司一样强大。事实上，一些小公司在网络上更时髦，更早地跟上网络，所以它们实际上看起来比一些大公司更好。这将是一个非常平等的现象，但我认为大量的商品和服务将通过网络销售，或至少为这些事物创造需求。

TG: 除了更完整的网上购物能力，你还看到网络近期未来有什么？

SJ: 不只是购买商品和服务。是购买信息。我是说，你会发现……现在，当我想找出硅谷正在上映的电影时，我只是上本地网页查看。这比看报纸快得多，也比打电话给电影院等快得多。越来越多，我们在网络上寻找信息。我最近买了一台索尼的新摄像机。我上索尼的网页，了解他们提供的所有产品，并在打电话给商店实际找到之前就从那个网页选了我想要的。让我购买那个东西的需求是从索尼的网页创造的。我认为我们会看到越来越多这样的情况。你将购买信息或寻找信息，并从网络上对你将要做什么或购买什么做出很多决定。

TG: 去商店买软件的想法也会变得过时吗？你认为我们会从网络下载软件吗？

SJ: 当然。是的，毫无疑问。毫无疑问那会发生，而且我认为会在接下来的24个月内发生。有些软件现在仍然很大。到公司的网络上下匝道现在很快，但到消费者家庭的下匝道仍然不那么快。对于购买大型软件，比如CD-ROM游戏等，它们仍会物理分发一段时间，但当到消费者的下匝道变快时，可能不久的将来通过电缆调制解调器，那也可能完全电子化。

TG: 除了零售世界，你还看到网络有什么？

SJ: 网络上现在发生了很多事情，允许人们获取他们以前永远不会有的信息。这的作用当然是让特殊兴趣群体聚在一起。我知道有人中风了，上网发现现在有专门面向中风患者信息的几个网页，他们可以了解一些最新治疗方法。他们可以了解避免，最新的避免建议等。这些以前也不存在。

TG: 你认为当你被苹果赶出来时，人们是不是把你写死了？我是说，现在你有了这些巨大的成功。

SJ: 哦天哪，我不知道。我确信很多人这样做了，那没关系。那是非常痛苦的时期，你可以想象。

TG: 什么，被迫离开你的公司？

SJ: 哦，当然。那是非常痛苦的时期，但你只能向前迈进，并试着从中学习。我总是试图提醒自己不要害怕失败。当你有某事不成时，很多时候，人们的反应是变得非常保护，再也不想摔倒了。我认为那是大错误，因为你永远无法实现你想要的，而不在实现过程中摔倒几次。我试着不害怕失败，事实上，我离开苹果后失败了好几次。

TG: 你对苹果现在的问题感到惊讶吗，还是你预料到了？

SJ: 我尽量不太多谈论苹果。我要说的是，我离开苹果的那天，我们有十年领先微软。在技术行业，十年领先真的很难得。它发生，也许一家公司每几十年有一次，无论是施乐还是IBM的大型机。苹果有图形用户界面的十年领先。苹果的问题是他们停止创新。如果你看今天出货的Mac，它和我离开那天只有25%的不同，对于十年和数十亿美元的研发投入来说，这不够。

不是微软在复制Mac时那么聪明或 clever。是Mac十年来都是坐以待毙。这就是苹果的问题，他们的差异化蒸发了。不像康柏或其他在英特尔-微软标准空间竞争的公司，它们只需要……康柏只需要比竞争对手好5%就所有人想买他们的电脑。

苹果必须好50%或100%，因为当你买有点非主流的东西时，你承担风险，你想要更大的回报来承担那个风险。[……]这种差异化并没有完全蒸发，但大部分已经。这就是苹果现在的困境。这就是削减成本和其他事情不会是治愈方法的原因。苹果的治愈方法是通过创新走出当前困境。苹果还剩下很多好人，有适当领导就能做到这一点，而这正是缺少的。

TG: 一些Mac用户担心Mac操作系统会像Beta视频那样变得过时，因为它被VHS超越了。你怎么想？

SJ: 我认为在苹果有适当领导的情况下，那不会发生，但我认为我们得拭目以待。

TG: 你在乎吗？对你共同创造的公司苹果的未来，你感觉还有多大程度的参与、投入？

SJ: 每次Mac出货我都很高兴。还有人给我发邮件，告诉我他们有多爱他们的Mac。这有点像……你怎么解释？就像你第一个爱的人。你知道？就像你的初恋，再也不会有另一个像这样的。就我而言，我们在一起十年，那是很长时间。但如果你在生命中前进，你不能总是和你的第一个女朋友恋爱。对吧？

TG: 你认为如果没有苹果，计算机的现状会是什么？这是个机会，我猜，给一个真正自利的答案。但我是说，我真的好奇你怎么想。

SJ: 我通常相信，如果一群人不做了某事，在若干年内，时代会产生另一群人完成类似的事情。我们恰好出现在正确的地点，在正确的时间，和正确的人一起。我们做了一些精彩的工作。我为我在那里时苹果团队的工作感到非常自豪。我认为，我们主要的贡献与一些人可能认为的不同。我认为我们主要的贡献是带来了人文艺术的视角。

TG: 是啊，解释你是什么意思。

SJ: 我的意思是，如果你真正看Mac的易用性，背后的驱动力是带来——不仅是给人们易用性，以便更多更多的人可以在那时将电脑用于非传统事物——而且是给人们带来美丽的字体和排版。是给人们带来图形，不是为了绘制层流计算，而是为了让他们能看到美丽的照片、图片或艺术品等，可能帮助他们传达他们正在做的事。我们的目标是给人文艺术视角和人文艺术受众带来，这传统上一直是非常极客的技术和非常极客的受众。

TG: 什么让你觉得那个更人文艺术的方向是正确的方向？

SJ: 因为在我的视角，以及我成长的方式，科学和计算机科学是人文艺术。它是每个人都应该知道如何使用的东西，至少，并在他们的生活中利用。它不应该被限制在5%的人口在角落里。它是每个人都应该接触到的东西，每个人都应该掌握到某种程度，这就是我们看待计算或这些计算设备的方式。

TG: 你认为这个概念真的在整个行业最终流行起来了吗？

SJ: 那是苹果的种子：给其他人的电脑。我认为人文艺术的视角仍然在苹果存在。我不确定它在其他那么多地方存在。我是说，我认为微软花了十年复制Mac的原因之一是因为他们没有真正理解其核心。

TG: 你认为我们所知的PC正在改变的道路上吗？

SJ: 那是个大问题。我认为我们所知的PC会在相当长的时间内存在，但问题的核心是，我们是否正在进入一个时间窗口，在那里我们可能会看到第一个成功的后PC设备？个人数字助理，或PDA，试图成为那个但失败了。

下一次尝试，我认为，将是这些非常便宜的消费互联网设备。有人能做一个300美元的盒子，一边连接到你的电视，另一边可能连接到ISDN或电缆调制解调器，允许你花300美元就在电视上有一个网络浏览器并访问整个互联网吗？我认为这是完全可能的，我认为我们很快会看到这些设备，希望有一些创新的营销和分销技术围绕这些设备，让很多人突然能在客厅有一个网络浏览器。我认为那将非常令人兴奋，我认为那可能是第一个真正的后PC市场的开始。

TG: 我知道苹果有一种非常非正式、非企业类型的氛围，至少早期是这样。我想知道你有没有学到什么关于什么有效什么无效的经验教训，应用于你现在的公司，NeXT和皮克斯。

SJ: 嗯，我不知道企业生活方式是什么。我是说，苹果是一家公司；我们非常清楚这一点。我们非常 driven 去赚钱，以便我们可以继续投资于我们热爱的东西。我会说苹果是一种企业生活方式，但它与其他我看到的企业生活方式有一些非常大的不同。第一个是真正的信念，即没有映射到组织等级的创意等级。换句话说，伟大的创意可以来自任何地方，我们最好以更加平等主义的方式对待人们，就创意来自哪里而言。

苹果在涉及到许多伟大的创意时是一家非常自下而上的公司。我们雇佣了真正伟大的人，给他们空间做伟大的工作。很多公司——我知道这听起来疯狂——但很多公司不这样做。他们雇人告诉他们做什么。我们雇人告诉我们做什么。我们付他们所有这些钱，他们的工作是弄清楚要做什么并告诉我们。这导致了非常不同的企业文化，一种是真正更加同事式的而不是等级式的。

TG: 尽管这种对企业等级的不同方法，它可能仍然是一个压力很大的地方。

SJ: 嗯，我们很年轻，大多数人都没有结婚，所以他们可以工作15小时。你没有典型的情况，你工作是为了支撑你的生活。你的工作就是你的生活，在很多情况下。

TG: 对。你觉得自己从那个改变了吗？那还是你的生活吗？

SJ: 我觉得它仍然是我的生活，但它不是我全部的生活。它的比例更少了，但我仍然不真正……我一直无法将我的工作和我的生活视为不同的事物。它们是同一回事。它过去占我生活的99%，现在可能是50%。

英文原文

Interview with Terry Gross, Make Something Wonderful

Interview with Terry Gross

"One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail."

In 1996, Steve and the Fresh Air radio host Terry Gross looked back on his time at Apple and ahead to the future of the computer industry. They spoke shortly after Pixar's release of Toy Story and its successful initial public offering. NeXT, meanwhile, continued to struggle.

Terry Gross: How do you think that the web might change in the near future with the help of the type of software that you are producing now?

Steve Jobs: I think most large companies and medium-size companies (and even small companies) are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution chain, bypassing all middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the consumer. That's a pretty powerful concept when you think about it. One of the things that I love is that a very small company, if they invest a lot in their website, can look just as formidable and just as solid on the web as a very large company can. As a matter of fact, some of the smaller companies are more hip on the web, getting more hip to the web sooner, and so they actually look better than some of the large companies do right now. It's going to be this very leveling phenomenon, but I think a tremendous amount of goods and services is going to be sold, or at least the demand created for such things, over the web.

TG: What else do you see in the near future for the web, besides the ability to shop in a more kind of complete way through the web?

SJ: It's not just shopping for goods and services. It's shopping for information. I mean, you're going to find out… Already, when I want to find out the movies that are playing around Silicon Valley, I just go up on the local web page and check it out. It's a lot faster than going through the newspaper, and a lot faster than calling the theaters, et cetera. More and more, we're shopping for information on the web. I just recently bought a Sony, one of the new Sony camcorders. I went on Sony's web page, and I found out all about the ones they offer and picked the one I wanted right from that web page before I even called the store to try to find it physically. The demand to get me to buy that thing was created from Sony's web page. I think we're going to see more and more of that. You're going to be buying information or finding information, and really making a lot of decisions about what you're going to do with your life, or what you're going to purchase, from the web.

TG: Is the whole idea of going to the store to buy software going to become obsolete, too? Do you think we'll be downloading our software from the web?

SJ: Of course. Yeah, there's no question about it. There's no question that that will happen, and I think it will happen in the next twenty-four months. There's some software right now that's still very large. The web on-ramps and off-ramps to corporations are now very fast, but the off-ramps to the consumers' homes are still not so fast. For buying large software, such as CD-ROM games and stuff, they'll still be distributed on physical media for a while, but when the off-ramps to the consumer get faster, possibly with cable modems in the near future, then that could possibly go fully electronic as well.

TG: Tell me what else you see for the web beyond the world of retail.

SJ: There's a lot of things happening with the web right now, in terms of allowing people access to information that they would just never have before. What this does is, of course, it lets special-interest groups get together. I know people who have had, as an example, a stroke, and have gotten on the web and found that there are several web pages now devoted to information for stroke victims where they can learn about some of the latest treatments. They can learn about avoidance, the latest in avoidance advice, and things like that. Those things didn't exist before, as well.

TG: Do you think that when you were ousted from Apple that people kind of wrote you off? I mean, here you are with these big successes now.

SJ: Oh golly, I don't know. I'm sure that a lot of people did, and that was fine. It was a very painful time, as you might imagine.

TG: What, to be forced out of the company you创建?

SJ: Oh, of course. That was a very painful time, but you just march forward, and you try to learn from it. One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn't work out, a lot of times, people's reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. I think that's a big mistake, because you never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there. I've tried to not be afraid to fail, and, matter of fact, I've failed quite a bit since leaving Apple.

TG: Are you surprised at the problems Apple is having now, or did you see that coming?

SJ: I try not to talk about Apple too much. What I will say is that the day I left Apple, we had a ten-year lead over Microsoft. In the technology business, a ten-year lead is really hard to come by. It happens, maybe a company has that once every few decades, whether it be Xerox or IBM with mainframes. Apple had that with the graphical user interface. The problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating. If you look at the Mac that ships today, it's 25 percent different than the day I left, and that's not enough for ten years and billions of dollars in R&D.

It wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It's that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years. That's Apple's problem, is that their differentiation evaporated. Unlike Compaq, or others who play in the Intel-Microsoft standard space, where they only… Compaq only has to be 5 percent better than its competitors for everyone to want to buy their computers.

Apple has to be 50 percent or 100 percent better, because when you buy something that is out of the mainstream a little bit, you take a risk, and you want a much bigger reward for taking that risk. […] That differentiation has not completely evaporated, but for the most part it has. That's the predicament Apple's in now. That's why cost-cutting and other things at Apple are not going to be the cure. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. There's a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with the proper leadership, which is what's been missing.

TG: Some Mac users are afraid that the Mac operating system is in danger of becoming obsolete in the way that Beta video became obsolete because it was outdone by VHS. What do you think?

SJ: I think with the appropriate leadership at Apple, that's not going to happen, but I think we have to wait and see.

TG: Do you care? How still involved, invested, do you feel in the future of Apple, the company you co-created?

SJ: I'm happy every time a Mac gets shipped. I still have people sending me emails, telling me how much they love their Macs. It's sort of… how do you explain it? It's like the first person you were ever in love with. You know? It's like your first love, and there will never be another one like it. In my case, we were together for ten years, and that's a long time. But if you move on in your life, you can't always stay in love with your first girlfriend. Right?

TG: What do you think the state of the computer would be if it weren't for Apple? This is a chance, I guess, for a really self-serving answer. But, I mean, I'm really curious what you think.

SJ: I usually believe that if one group of people didn't do something, within a certain number of years, the times would produce another群人会 accomplish similar things. We happened to be at the right place, at exactly the right time, with the right group of people. We did some wonderful work. I'm extraordinarily proud of the work that the team at Apple did when I was there. I think that, personally, our major contribution was a little different than some people might think. I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers.

TG: Yeah, explain what you mean by that.

SJ: What I mean by that is that if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring—not only ease of use to people so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time—but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people. It was to bring graphics to people, not for plotting laminar flow calculations, but so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera, to help them communicate what they were doing, potentially. Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.

TG: What made you think that that more liberal arts direction was the direction to head in?

SJ: Because in my perspective, and the way I was raised, was that science and computer科学 is a liberal art. It's something that everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to, everyone should have a mastery of, to some extent, and that's how we viewed computation, or these computation devices.

TG: And you think that concept really caught on in the whole industry, eventually?

SJ: That's the seed of Apple: computers for the rest of us. I think the liberal arts point of view still lives at Apple. I'm not so sure that it lives that many other places. I mean, one of the reasons I think Microsoft took ten years to copy the Mac was because they didn't really get it at its core.

TG: Do you think the PC, as we know it, is on the road of changing?

SJ: That's a really big question. I think the PC as we know it is going to be around for quite some time, but the heart of the question is, are we entering a time window where we might see the first successful post-PC devices? Personal digital assistants, or PDAs, attempted to be that and failed.

The next attempt, I think, is going to be these very low-cost consumer internet appliances. Can somebody make a three-hundred-dollar box that hooks up to your television on one side and maybe hooks up to ISDN or a cable modem on the other side and allows you for, three hundred dollars, to have a web browser on your TV and to access the entire internet? I think that's entirely possible, and I think that we're going to see those devices soon, hopefully some innovative marketing and distribution techniques surrounding those devices so that a lot of people can all of a sudden have an internet浏览器 in their living room. I think that's going to be very exciting, and I think that could be the beginning of the first real post-PC market.

TG: I know at Apple there was, at least early on, a very informal, non-corporate type of atmosphere. I wonder if there are any lessons you learned about what worked and didn't work in the corporate lifestyle at Apple that you've applied to your current companies, NeXT and Pixar.

SJ: Well, I don't know what a corporate lifestyle is. I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we could continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had a few very big differences to other corporate lifestyles that I'd seen. The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words, great ideas can come from任何地方 and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.

And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don't do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we're paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that's really much more collegial than hierarchical.

TG: In spite of this kind of different approach to the corporate hierarchy, it was probably still a very high-stress place.

SJ: Well, we were very young, and most of the folks were not married, and so they could work fifteen-hour days. You didn't have a typical situation where you worked so that you can support your life. Your work was your life, in many cases.

TG: Right. Do you feel you've changed from that? Is that still your life?

SJ: I feel it is still my life, but it's not all my life. It's less of a percentage, but I still don't really… I've never been able to think of my work and my life as different things. They're the same thing. Where it used to be 99 percent of my life, it's maybe 50 percent of my life now.

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