Reporter, Let’s start with the birth of the iPhone. How did you get the idea to create it?
记者：我们先从iPhone的起源谈起吧， 您是怎么想到发明它的？
Jobs: We all had cellphones. We just hated them, they were so awful to use. The software was terrible. The hardware wasn’t very good. We talked to our friends, and they all hated their cellphones too. Everybody seemed to hate their phones. And we saw that these things really could become much more powerful and interesting to license. It’s a huge market. I mean a billion phones get shipped every year, and that’s almost an order of magnitude greater than the number of music players. It’s four times the number of PCs that ship every year. It was a great challenge. Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with. And we’ve got the technology. We’ve got the miniaturization from the iPod. We’ve got the sophisticated operating system from Mac. Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and just say，“We，re going to do it. Let’s try.” The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let’s give them a shot. And they did.
乔布斯：我们都用过手机。我们都不喜 欢用手机，因为它们并不好用。软件烂 得一塌糊涂，硬件也不怎么样。我们和 朋友聊天，他们也都非常痛恨自己的手 机。似乎每个人都痛恨自己的手机。于 是我们觉得，这些东西完全可以变得更 加强大，摆出来也会很有意思。这是一 个巨大的市场，我是说每年有10亿部 手机被卖掉，这单生意在数量上可比音 乐播放器庞大多了，是每年个人电脑销 量的4倍。这是个巨大的挑战。我们要 做出一款可以让我们自己都一见钟情的手机。我们手中有技术，有源于iPod的 微型制造工艺，还有来自Mac电脑的精 密操作系统。从未有人想过往手机里放 进一个如OS X般精密的操作系统，这 看来确实是个问题。关于我们能否做 到这点，我们公司内部进行过激烈的 讨论。我不得不当机立断地作出决定： “我们可以做到的。让我们试试看吧。” 那些最聪明的软件工程师说他们可以做 得到，那么我们给他们这个机会。他们 果然做到了。
Reporter: How do Apple connected with its costumers?
记者：苹果和消费者之间的联系是怎样 的？
Jobs: We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us. It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, [right?] He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 4 A faster horse，.”
乔布斯：我们之所以去做iTunes，是因 为我们都热爱音乐。我们在iTunes里 做出了自认为是最好的自动唱片点唱 机。然后我们又都希望随身携带全部的 音乐资料库。研发团队展开了非常艰辛 的工作。他们之所以这么卖命，就是 因为我们都需要一个这样的产品。你 知道吗？我是说我们自己就是最早的 那几百个用户。这事儿和流行文化无 关，和坑蒙拐骗无关，和说服人们接 受一件他们压根儿不需要的东西也无 关。我们只是在搞明白我们S己需要 什么而已。而且我认为，我们已经建 立了一套良好的思维体系，其他许多 人都会需要。我们收了钱就是来做这件 事的。所以你没法走上大街去问别人下 一件大事会是什么？亨利?福特曾经有 过一句名言：“如果我当年去问顾客他 们想要什么，他们肯定会告诉我‘一匹 更快的马’。”
Reporter What will affect your decision? How do you make your strategy?
记者：你根据什么作出决定，怎样制定 发展战略？
Jobs: We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made (when launching Apple’s retail stores). But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products. When we created the iTunes Music Store, we did that because we thought it would be great to be able to buy music electronically, not because we had plans to redefine the music industry. I mean, it just seemed like writing on the wall, that eventually all music would be distributed electronically. That seemed obvious. The music industry has huge returns. Why have all this overhead when you can just send electrons around easily?
乔布斯：我们从不作市场调研，我们不 招顾问。这10年来我只请过一家公司 帮忙分析Gateway的零售策略，以免犯 下与他们一样的错误（开设苹果零售店 时）。但是，我们本身是不招顾问的。 我们只是想制做出伟大的产品。我们之 所以开发iTunes音乐商店，是因为我们 觉得，能够以电子方式购买音乐会相当 了不起，而不是因为我们计划去重新定 义音乐产业。我的意思是，就像在墙上 写字，音乐最终还是要通过电子化来发 行，这很明显。音乐产业拥有巨大的回 报。如果你可以简单地通过电子进行传 播，为什么还要多花那些冤枉钱呢？
Reporter: What drives Apple employees? What kind of motivation do they have?
记者：是什么在驱使苹果的员工进步？ 他们的动力是什么？
Jobs: We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the executive team could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.
乔布斯：人这一生没法做太多事情，所 以每一件都要做到精彩绝伦。这就是生 活。人生苦短，你知道吗？所以这是我 们为人生作出的选择。我们本可以在日 本某地的某座寺庙里打坐，或扬帆远 航。管理层本可以去打高尔夫，或掌 管其他公司，而我们全都选择了来做这 件事。所以这件事情最好能够做得好一 点。它最好能够物有所值。我们觉得它 的确还不错。
Reporter: Why people want to work at Apple?
记者人们为什么希望在苹果工作？
Jobs: The reason is，is because you can’t do what you can do at Apple anywhere else. The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple‘s the only company that has everything under one roof. There's no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook.Our DNA is as a consumer company—for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it，s our fault，plain and simply.
乔布斯：因为你在其他任何地方都做不 了你在苹果可以做的事情。在那些电脑 公司里，工程师早就没影儿了。在消 费类电子产品公司里，他们根本不了 解软件层面的事情。所以，现在苹果 能做出的产品，在其他公司你根本做不 出来。苹果是唯一一家将方方面面全盘 掌控的公司。没有其他公司能够造一台MacBook Air出来，因为我们不仅控制 了硬件，我们还控制了操作系统。而得 益于操作系统和硬件之间的紧密互动。 Windows和戴尔笔记本之间就没有什么 紧密互动可言。我们骨子里就是一家消 费品公司，你的生死存亡掌握在消费者 的手中。他们才是我们关注的对象。我 们觉得自己的工作就是对整个用户体验 负责。如果表现不及格，那就是我们的 错，就这么简单。
Reporter: Do you think that Apple could live without you?
记者：你认为如果没有你，苹果还能继 续存活吗？
Jobs We’ve got really capable people at Apple. I made Tim [Cook] COO and gave him the Mac division and he’s done brilliantly. I mean, some people say，“Oh，God, if Jobs got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.” And，you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. And the board would have some good choices about who to pick as CEO. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.
乔布斯：苹果公司人才辈出。我把蒂姆 (库克）提拔成了首席运营官并将Mac 部门交到他手上确实成绩斐然。我的意 思是，有人说：“哦，老天，如果乔布 斯被公交车给碾死了，苹果就‘歇菜 了’。”不过，虽然这不是什么值得高兴 的事儿，而正因苹果公司人才济济，董 事会肯定会选出一位合适的CEO。我的 任务就是将整个管理团队都培养成优秀 的继任者，这也是我在努力的目标。
Reporter: What do you think of your demanding reputation?
记者有人说你很苛刻，你怎么看？
Jobs: My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.
乔布斯：我的工作不是对人表现得和蔼 可亲。我的工作是让他们做得更好。我 的工作是把公司里的各种资源聚拢到一 起，清除路障，然后把资源投放到最关 键的项目上。我要把我们手下这些天才 们召集起来并督促他们，让他们更上一 层楼。怎么做呢？只好采取更为极端的 思路。
Reporter: OK, I’m wondering that what Apple really focus on?
记者好的，我想知道苹果究竟专注于什么？
Jobs: Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probahlv wouldn’t have seen it coming.
乔布斯：苹果是一家价值300亿美元的公司，但主要产品却不到30种。我不 知道这种状况是否曾经存在过。毫无疑 问，过去那些有上千产品的消费电子公 司，我们专注得多。人们以为“专注” 的意思就是对你必须关注的事情点头称 是。但这并不是“专注”的全部内涵。 “专注”意味着必须对另外100个好点 子说不，谨慎小心地作出选择。事实 上，任何事情，做或不做，我都引以为 傲。有一个再贴切不过的例子：多年以 来，我们都迫切地需要一款PDA产品， 而终于有一天我意识到，90%的PDA 用户只是在路上把信息从里头调出来而 已，而不放进去。不久，手机就实现了 这样的功能，于是PDA市场就萎缩到 了今天的规模，而且也没有可持续性。 所以我们决定不进入这个领域。如果我 们选择了跟进，我们就没有资源去开发 iPod 了。我们基本上会连它的影子都见 不着。
Reporter: What’s your management style?
记者：你的管理风格是怎样的？
Jobs: We’ve got 25,000 people at Apple. About 10,000 of them are in the stores. And my job is to work with sort of the top 100 people, that’s what I do. That doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors. So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know-just explore things.
乔布斯在苹果公司，我们有2.5万 人。差不多1万人在专卖店里工作。而 我的工作是和最顶端的大约100个人协 作，这就是我的工作内容。这并不意味 着他们都是副总裁之类的领导，他们中 的一些人只是贡献卓越的关键性个体。 所以如果有好点子出现，我的一部分工 作就是把它传播开来，看看不同的人怎 么想，让人们围绕着它展开讨论，让想 法在这个由100人组成的群体里充分循 环，让不同的人从不同的层面对它展开 摸索，你知道的，就是深入摸索。
Reporter： What do you think of the operating system?Do you think it’s beneficial?
记者：你对操作系统怎么看？你认为它有好处吗？
Jobs： That allows us to innovate at a much faster rate than if we had to wait for Microsoft, like Dell and HP and everybody else does. Because Microsoft has their own timetable, for probably good reasons. I mean Vista took what—seven or eight years? It’s hard to get your new feature that you need for your new hardware if it has to wait eight years. So we can set our own priorities and look at things in a more holistic way from the point of view of the customer. It also means that we can take it and we can make a version of it to fit in the iPhone and the iPod. And, you know, we certainly couldn’t do that if we didn’t own it.
乔布斯：它使我们更快地创新，而不像 戴尔、惠普和其他所有公司那样看着微 软干着急。因为微软或许是出于好意有 自己的时间安排。我说的是，Vista好 像让人等了七八年？如果你需要等上8 年，那为新硬件添加新功能就更无从谈 起了。而我们则可以自行决定孰轻孰 重，从消费者的角度出发，更全面地看 问题。这也意味着我们不但可以把系统 玩弄于股掌之间，还可以为iPhone和 iPod制作特别的版本。而且，如果没有 操作系统，我们什么都实现不了。
Reporter Then tell us something about your marathon Monday meetings.
记者跟我们说说你们苹果周一马拉松 似的例会吧。
Jobs： When you hire really good people you have to give them a piece of the business and let them run with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to kibitz a lot. But the reason you’re hiring them is because you’re going to give them the reins. I want them making as good or better decisions than I would. So the way to do that is to have them know everything, not just in their part of the business, but in every part of the business. So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we，re having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda—80% is the same as it was the last week，and we just walk down it every single week. We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.
乔布斯：当你招到了真正的人才，你就 必须让他们分担一部分生意，并且充分 放权。当然这并不意味着我就不能发表 意见了。可是你招他们进来就是为了把 接力棒交到他们手里。我希望他们能够 做到青出于蓝而胜于蓝。所以要实现这 个目标，就必须让他们了解所有事情， 而不是停留于自身的业务范围之内。所 以我们每周一做的事情就是回顾整个公 司的运营情况。我们着眼于之前一周的 销售项目，每一件正在开发的产品，以 及那些麻烦的产品，那些供不应求的产 品。我们检查所有开发中的产品，每周 一次。我们做了一份日程——80%是 与上周相同的，我们每周都重新做。在 苹果公司，我们没有太多的繁文缛节， 但这是为数不多的雷打不动的惯例之一。