1995 乔布斯：遗失的访谈(英文节选).doc

2014-2015学年 第二学期 专题口译 第十二周 IT科技单元E-C课下材料1995年 乔布斯：遗失的访谈（节选）After serious disagreements with Apples CEO, John Sculley, Steve left the company in 1985.Bob: Tell us about your departure from Apple.Steve: Oh it was very painful and I am not even sure if I want to talk about it. What can I say? I hired the wrong guy.Bob: That was Sculley?Steve: Yeah, and he destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for. Starting with me, but that wasnt the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple wouldve turned out like I wanted it to. He basically got on a rocket ship that is about to leave the pad, and the rocket ship left the pad, and he kind of went into his head, and he got confused and thought that he built the rocket ship, and he kind of changed the trajectory, so that it was inevitably gonna crash into the ground.Bob: But there was always in Pre-Macintosh days and early Macintosh days, there was always Steven and John show. You two were kinda joined at the hip for a while there.Steve: Thats right.Bob: And then something happened to split you, what was that, what was that catalyst?Steve: Well, what happened was that the industry went into a recession in late 1984. Sales started seriously contracted, and John didnt know what to do, and he had not a clue.And there was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple. There were fairly strong general managers running the divisions, and I was running the Macintosh division, somebody else was running the Apple II division etc. There were some problems with some of the divisions, and there was a person running the storage division that was completely out of lunch. A bunch of things needed to be changed.But all those problems got put into a pressure cooker, because of this contraction in the market place, and there was no leadership, and John was in a situation where the board was not happy, and where he was probably not long for the company. And one thing I did not ever see about John, until that time was, he had incredible survival instinct. Someone once told me: “this guy didnt get to be the this you know president of Pepsi Cola without these kinds of instincts”, and it was true.And John decided that a really good person to be the root of all the problems would be me. And so we came to loggerheads, and John had cultivated a very close relationship with the board, and they believed him. So thats what happened.Bob: So there were competing visions for the company?Steve: Oh clearly well not so much competing visions for the company. Because I dont think John had a vision for the company.Bob: Well, I guess Im asking was what was your vision that lost out in this instance?Steve: It wasnt an issue of vision, it was an issue of execution. In a sense that my belief was that Apple needed much stronger leadership to sort of unite these various factions that we created with divisions, that Macintosh was the future of Apple, that we needed to rein back expenses dramatically in the Apple II area, that we needed to be spending very heavily in the Macintosh area, err things like that. Johns vision was that he should remain the CEO of the company, and anything that would help him do that would be acceptable.So you know I think that you know Apple is in a state of paralysis in the early part of 1985, and I wasnt at that time capableI dont thinkof running the company as a whole. You know I was 30 years old. And I dont think I had enough experiences to run a 2 billion dollar company. Unfortunately John didnt either. And so anyway I I was told in no uncertain terms that theres no job for me, its really tragic.Bob: Siberia.Steve: Yeah. It would have been far smarter for Apple to sort of let me work on the next I volunteered why not I start research division. You know give me a few millions bucks a year and I would go hire some really great people and we would do the next great thing. And I was told there was no opportunity to do that.Bob: Oh well.Steve: So my office was taken away, it was it was I mean I will get really emotional if I keep talking about this. So anyway but thats irrelevant, I am just one person and the company is a lot more people than me. Thats not the most important part. The important part was the values of Apple over the next several years were systematically destroyed.I then asked Steve for his thoughts on the state of Apple. Remember this was 1995, a year before he would go back to Apple. Remember too when Apple bought NeXT a year after this interview, Steve immediately sold the Apple stock he received as part of the sale.Steve: Apple is dying today, Apple is dying a very painful death. Its on a glide slope too, to die!And the reason is because You know when I walked out the door of Apple, we had 10-year lead on everybody else in the industry, Macintosh was 10 years ahead. We watched Microsoft take 10 years to catch up with it. Well, the reason that they could catch up with it was because Apple stood still. I mean the Macintosh shipping today is like 25% different than the day I left!They spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D, I mean you know total of probably 5 billion dollars on R&D. What did they get for? I dont know! But it was what happened was the understanding of how to move these things forward, and how to create these new products, somehow evaporated, and I think a lot of good people stuck around for a while, but there wasnt an opportunity to get together and do this, because there wasnt any leadership to do that.So whats happened with Apple now is that theyve fallen behind in many respects certainly in market share, and most importantly their differentiation has been eroded by Microsoft. And so what they have now is that they have their installed base, which is not growing, which is shrinking slowly, but would provide a good revenue stream for several years, but its a glide slope. Its just gonna go like this. So its unfortunate and I dont really think its reversible at this point of time.Bob: Neither do I. What about Microsoft? I mean thats the juggernaut now, and its kind of Ford-LTD going into the future. Its definitely not Cadillac, its not BMW its just you know whats going on there, how did these guys do that?Steve: Microsofts orbit was made possible by a Saturn 5 booster called IBM. And I know Bill would get upset with me for saying this, but of course it was true. And much to Bill and Microsofts credit they used that fantastic opportunity to create more opportunity for themselves. Most people dont remember but until 1984 with the Mac, Microsoft was not in the applications business, which dominated by Lotus. And Microsoft took a big gamble, to write for the Mac. And they came out with applications that were terrible. But they kept at it and make them better. And eventually, they dominated the Macintosh application market, and then used the spring board of Windows to get into the PC market with the same applications. And now they dominated the applications business in the PC space too. So they have 2 characteristics. I think they are very strong opportunists. And I dont mean that in a bad way. And two, they are like the Japanese. They just keep on coming. And now, they were able to do that because of the revenue stream from the IBM deal. But nonetheless they made the most of it and I gave them a lot of credit for that.The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is I dont mean that in a small way. I meant that in a big way in the sense that they dont think of original ideas, and they dont bring much culture into their product. And you say why is that important. Well, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. Thats where one gets the idea. If it werent for the Mac, they would h