乔布斯生平中英文对照
《经济学人》网络版今天发表评论文章，对乔布斯的逝世做出了默哀，并对乔布斯的生平进行了总结。指出乔布斯非凡的成就源于其丰富的经历，而乔布斯将科学技术与人文科学和人性相结合是其产品成功的根本所在。
NOBODY el in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter， could put on a show like Steve Jobs. His product launches， at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up a “magical” or “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”。 He spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed， easy to u products.
He had been among the first, back in the 1970s， to e the potential that lay in the idea of lling computers to ordinary people。 In tho days of green-on—black displays, when floppy discs were still floppy, the notion that computers might soon become ubiquito
us emed fanciful. But Mr Jobs was one of a handful of pioneers who saw what was coming。 Crucially, he also had an unusual knack for looking at computers from the outside， as a ur, not just from the inside, as an engineer—something he attributed to the experiences of his wayward youth。
Mr Jobs caught the computing bug while growing up in Silicon Valley. As a teenager in the late 1960s he cold-called his idol, Bill Hewlett, and talked his way into a summer job at Hewlett—Packard. But it was only after dropping out of college, travelling to India, becoming a Buddhist and experimenting with psychedelic drugs that Mr Jobs returned to California to co-found Apple, in his parents’ garage, on April Fools’ Day 1976. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diver experiences,” he once said。 “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions。” Bill Gates， he suggested， would be “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger"。
Dropping out of his college cour and attending calligraphy class instead had， for e
xample， given Mr Jobs an apparently uless love of typography。 But support for a variety of fonts was to prove a key feature of the Macintosh, the pioneering mou-driven， graphical computer that Apple launched in 1984. With its windows, icons and menus, it was sold as “the computer for the rest of us"。 Having made a fortune from Apple's initial success， Mr Jobs expected to ll “zillions” of his new machines。 But the Mac was not the mass-market success Mr Jobs had hoped for, and he was ousted from Apple by its board。
Yet this apparently disastrous turn of events turned out to be a blessing: “the best thing that could have ever happened to me”, Mr Jobs later called it. He co-founded a new firm， Pixar, which specialid in computer graphics， and NeXT, another computer-maker. His remarkable cond act began in 1996 when Apple， having lost its way， acquired NeXT, and Mr Jobs returned to put its technology at the heart of a new range of Apple products。 And the rest is history： Apple launched the iMac, the iPod， the iPhone and the iPad, and （briefly） became the world’s most valuable listed company. “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple," Mr J
obs said in 2005. When his failing health forced him to step down as Apple’s boss in 2011, he was hailed as the greatest chief executive in history. Oh， and Pixar, his side project, produced a string of hugely successful animated movies。
In retrospect, Mr Jobs was a man ahead of his time during his first stint at Apple. Computing's early years were dominated by technical types。 But his emphasis on design and ea of u gave him the edge later on. Elegance, simplicity and an understanding of other fields came to matter in a world in which computers are fashion items, carried by everyone, that can do almost anything. “Technology alone is not enough，” said Mr Jobs at the end of his speech introducing the iPad， in January 2010. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing。" It was an unusual statement for the head of a technology firm, but it was vintage Steve Jobs.
His interdisciplinary approach was backed up by an obssive attention to detail. A carpenter making a fine chest of drawers will not u plywood on the back, even though n
obody will e it, he said， and he applied the same approach to his products。 “For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic， the quality， has to be carried all the way through.” He insisted that the first Macintosh should have no internal cooling fan, so that it would be silent—putting ur needs above engineering convenience. He called an Apple engineer one weekend with an urgent request: the colour of one letter of an on—screen logo on the iPhone was not quite the right shade of yellow. He often wrote or rewrote the text of Apple’s advertiments himlf.
His on-stage persona as a Zen—like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified。 He eschewed market rearchers and focus groups， preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products。 “A lot of times， people don’t know what they want until you show it to them，" he said. His judgment proved uncannily accurate： by the end of his career the hits far outweighed the miss. 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 changed reality， channelling the magic of computing into
products that reshaped music， telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the univer” did just that。
