高官新宠免费阅读全文:经济学人：“魔术师”乔布斯

斯蒂夫·乔布斯

The magician

魔术师

The revolution that Steve Jobs led is only just beginning

WHEN it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up an “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”. Mr Jobs, who died this week aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy-to-use products.

说到产品展示，在计算机产业和其他相关产业领域，没有人能像史蒂夫•乔布斯做得这样好。他的产品发布会就是一场大师级的个人秀——独自站在黑色的舞台上，像变魔法一样，在充满敬畏的人群面前召唤出某种“令人惊叹的”新型电子产品。他曾经说，电脑所作的就是调用、混洗数据，只要做得足够快，“结果看起来就像变魔术一样”。乔布斯于本周逝世，享年56岁。他一生致力于将这种魔法融入到设计优雅、使用便捷的产品中。

The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and the internet humming with tributes from politicians, is proof that Mr Jobs had become something much more significant than just a clever money-maker. He stood out in three ways—as a technologist, as a corporate leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had previously been impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the deepest effect on the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just beginning.

人们把蜡烛和鲜花放在苹果商店外面，网上到处都是政治家的悼词——人们对乔布斯逝世的反应表明，他的重要性已经远远超过一个聪明的生意人。他在三个方面表现出色——技术专家、公司领袖，他让人们喜欢上了之前没有人情味儿和小玩意。奇怪的是，正是这最后一点特性对人们的生活方式产生了最深远的影响。个人科技时代全面到来。

Apple of his eye

他眼中的苹果

As a technologist, Mr Jobs was different because he was not an engineer—and that was his great strength. Instead he was obsessed with product design and aesthetics, and with making advanced technology simple to use. He repeatedly took an existing but half-formed idea—the mouse-driven computer, the digital music player, the smartphone, the tablet computer—and showed the rest of the industry how to do it properly. Rival firms scrambled to follow where he led. In the process he triggered upheavals in computing, music, telecoms and the news business that were painful for incumbent firms but welcomed by millions of consumers.

作为一名技术专家，他与众不同之处在于他不是工程师——这正是他最大的长处。他痴迷于产品设计和美学，沉迷于使高科技更加使用便捷。他一次次地拾起现存的半成型创意——如鼠标驱动的电脑、数字音乐播放器、智能手机和平板电脑——然后告诉其他业内人士如何恰当地实现这些创意。竞争对手狼狈地跟随他。他引发的计算机、音乐、通信和新闻产业变革广受百万消费者欢迎，也让其他业内公司苦不堪言。

Within the wider business world, a man who liked to see himself as a hippy, permanently in revolt against big companies, ended up being hailed by many of those corporate giants as one of the greatest chief executives of his time. That was partly due to his talents: showmanship, strategic vision, an astonishing attention to detail and a dictatorial management style which many bosses must have envied. But most of all it was the extraordinary trajectory of his life (seearticle). His fall from grace in the 1980s, followed by his return to Apple in 1996 after a period in the wilderness, is an inspiration to any businessperson whose career has taken a turn for the worse. The way in which Mr Jobs revived the ailing company he had co-founded and turned it into the world’s biggest tech firm (bigger even than Bill Gates’s Microsoft, the company that had outsmarted Apple so dramatically in the 1980s), sounds like something from a Hollywood movie—which, no doubt, it soon will be.

在更广阔的商界中，他喜欢自诩为嬉皮，他总是和大公司对抗，最终被这些公司誉为他所在的时代的最伟大的CEO。这部分归功于他的才能：表演技巧、战略眼光、对细节惊人的关注和另其他老板羡慕的独裁管理方式。不过最重要的是他不同寻常的人生轨迹。他在八十年代曾误入歧途，在漂泊了一段时间后，于1996年回到苹果公司，这对任何经历事业挫折的商人来说都是一种鼓励。乔布斯将联合创建、日薄西山的苹果公司变成世界上最大的科技公司——甚至比在1980年代击败苹果公司的微软还要大——听起来像是好莱坞电影的情节，但是毫无疑问，很快就会有这样一部电影。

But what was perhaps most astonishing about Mr Jobs was the fanatical loyalty he managed to inspire in customers. Which other technology brand do you ever see on bumper stickers? Many Apple users feel themselves to be part of a community, with Mr Jobs as its leader. And there was indeed a personal link. Apple’s products were designed to accord with the boss’s tastes and to meet his obsessively high standards. Every iPhone or MacBook has his fingerprints all over it. His great achievement was to combine an emotional spark with computer technology, and make the resulting product feel personal. And that is what put Mr Jobs on the right side of history, as the epicentre of technological innovation has moved into consumer electronics over the past decade.

但是，最令人惊奇的是乔布斯激起了消费者对苹果的狂热忠实。你曾经在汽车保险杠贴纸上看到个哪个其他的品牌？许多苹果用户认为自己是乔布斯领导的共同体的一员。这里面确实有一点个人关系。苹果的产品是根据老板的口味设计的，并且迎合了他对高标准的痴迷。每一台iPhone或MacBook都布满了他的指纹。他的伟大成就是将激情的火花和电脑技术结合在一起，使最终产品人性化。正是这一点让乔布斯站在了历史正确的一边，技术革命的中心在过去十年中移到了消费性电子产品。

A world without Jobs

世上已无乔布斯

As our special report in this week’s issue (printed before Mr Jobs’s death) explains, innovation used to spill over from military and corporate laboratories to the consumer market, but lately this process has gone into reverse. Many people’s homes now have more powerful, and more flexible, devices than their offices do; consumer gizmos and online services are smarter and easier to use than most companies’ systems. Familiar consumer products are being adopted by businesses, government and the armed forces. Companies are employing in-house versions of Facebook and creating their own “app stores” to deliver software to smartphone-toting employees. Doctors use tablet computers for their work in hospitals. Meanwhile, the number of consumers hungry for such gadgets continues to swell. Apple’s products are now being snapped up in Delhi and Dalian just as in Dublin and Dallas.

正如本期“特别报道”（乔布斯逝世之前付印）所言，创新曾经遍布军队、企业实验室和消费者市场，但是现在却反过来了。许多人家里的设备比办公室里的更加强大、灵活；消费性产品和在线服务比大部分公司系统更智能更方便。公司、政府和军队也采用类似的消费性产品。公司建立了内部的“脸书”（Facebook）和自己的“应用商店”，给配备智能手机的员工提供软件。医生使用平板电脑完成医院里的工作。同时，渴望得到这种设备的消费者越来越多。苹果的商品在德里、大连和在都柏林、达拉斯一样畅销。

Mr Jobs had a reputation as a control freak, and his critics complained that the products and systems he designed were closed and inflexible, in the name of greater ease of use. Yet he also empowered millions of people by giving them access to cutting-edge technology. His insistence on putting users first, and focusing on elegance and simplicity, has become deeply ingrained in his own company, and is spreading to rival firms too. It is no longer just at Apple that designers ask: “What would Steve Jobs do?”

乔布斯有着“控制狂”的名声，批评家以易用性为理由，抱怨他设计的产品和系统封闭且不灵活。但是，他使数百万人能够接触到前沿科技。他坚持用户第一，以优雅和简洁为中心，这些观念在不仅在苹果公司根深蒂固，并且还传播到了竞争对手那里。“史蒂夫•乔布斯会怎么办？”——现在不仅是苹果公司的设计师才这么问了。

The gap between Apple and other tech firms is now likely to narrow. This week’s announcement of a new iPhone by a management team led by Tim Cook, who replaced Mr Jobs as chief executive in August, was generally regarded as competent but uninspiring. Without Mr Jobs to sprinkle his star dust on the event, it felt like just another product launch from just another technology firm. At the recent unveiling of a tablet computer by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, whose company is doing the best job of following Apple’s lead in combining hardware, software, content and services in an easy-to-use bundle, there were several swipes at Apple. But by doing his best to imitate Mr Jobs, Mr Bezos also flattered him. With Mr Jobs gone, Apple is just one of many technology firms trying to invoke his unruly spirit in new products.

苹果和其他科技公司的差距似乎正在缩小。蒂姆•库克（Tim Cook）八月份取代了乔布斯的位置。本月，他带领的团队召开的新版iPhone发布会被认为有一定竞争力但是不能鼓舞人心。没有了乔布斯的星光四射，活动就像是另一家科技公司在发布另一种产品。杰夫•贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）的亚马逊公司在最近的一次平板电脑发布会上对苹果公司挥出几记老拳。这家公司紧随苹果公司，将硬件、软件、内容和服务整合成一个易用平台。但是贝索斯尽力模仿乔布斯的行为也给乔布斯脸上贴了金。乔布斯走了，苹果现在成了众多将他的不羁精神放进新产品里的科技公司中的一个。

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 conjured up a reality of his own, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped entire industries. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that.

苹果发展早期的一位工程师曾经说过，乔布斯的说服能力在于它能散发出一种“现实扭曲力场”。但是，他最终创造了他自己的现实，将计算机的魔力引入产品中，改造了整个产业。那个年轻时说要“在宇宙中制造点儿动静”的人兑现了他的承诺。