有声英语故事连载：《名人传记》之乔布斯 第42期

故事连载

 

Sure. You mentioned IBM, when IBM entered the market, was that a daunting thing for you at apple?

的确如此。你提到IBM，IBM进入PC市场是不是对苹果构成了威胁?

Oh sure. I mean… here was apple, you know a 1 billion dollar company, and here was IBM, at that time, probably about 30 some billion company entering the market,

那当然，苹果当时的市值只有10亿，而IBM大约是300亿

sure. it was very scary. Err... we made a very big mistake though, that IBM’s first product was terrible. It was really bad.

确实让人胆寒，尽管IBM的第一款产品十分糟糕

We made a mistake of… not realizing that a lot of other people have strong vested interests to help IBM to make it better. So ...If it has just been IBM, it would have crashed and burned.

但我们太轻敌了，我们忽略了很多人的利益与IBM捆绑在一起，如果没有这些帮助，IBM早就输了

But IBM did have I think a genius in their approach, which was to have a lot of people have vested interests in their success. And that’s what saved them in the end.

IBM的确很高明，它建立了强大的同盟阵营，终于救了它一命。

 

So you came back from visiting Xerox PARC with a vision, and how do you implement the vision?

你从施乐研究中心找到了灵感，如何付诸行动呢?

Well, I got our best people together and started to get them working on this.

马上召集身边的骨干来实现这个创意

The problem was we hired a bunch of people from HP, and they didn’t get this idea, they didn’t get it.

问题是从惠普跳槽来的几个人不理解图形界面的本质

I remember having dramatic arguments with some of these people, who thought the coolest thing in user interface was the soft keys at the bottoms of the screen,

我跟他们大吵过几次，他们觉得图形界面就是在屏幕下方加上几个按钮

 

you know. They have no concept of proportionally spaced fonts, no concept of the mouse.

完全不明白比例字体和鼠标的重要性

As a matter of fact, I remember arguing with these folks, people screaming at me,

我记得他们和我争执不下，冲我大嚷大叫

it could take us 5 years to engineer a mouse and it would cost 300 dollars to build.

说什么研发鼠标至少要5年，成本不会低于300美元