《經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)人》網(wǎng)絡(luò)版今天發(fā)表評論文章，對喬布斯的逝世做出了默哀，并對喬布斯的生平進(jìn)行了總結(jié)。指出喬布斯非凡的成就源于其豐富的經(jīng)歷，而喬布斯將科學(xué)技術(shù)與人文科學(xué)和人性相結(jié)合是其產(chǎn)品成功的根本所在。

　　NOBODY else 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 use products.

　　He had been among the first, back in the 1970s, to see the potential that lay in the idea of selling computers to ordinary people. In those days of green-on-black displays, when floppy discs were still floppy, the notion that computers might soon become ubiquitous seemed 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 user, 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 diverse 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 course and attending calligraphy classes instead had, for example, given Mr Jobs an apparently useless love of typography. But support for a variety of fonts was to prove a key feature of the Macintosh, the pioneering mouse-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 sell “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 specialised in computer graphics, and NeXT, another computer-maker. His remarkable second 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 Jobs 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 ease of use 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 obsessive attention to detail. A carpenter making a fine chest of drawers will not use plywood on the back, even though nobody will see 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 user 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 advertisements himself.

　　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 researchers 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 misses. 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 universe” did just that.

　　以下為中文評論全文：

　　到目前為止，世界上還沒有哪個計算機(jī)行業(yè)或者其他任何行業(yè)的領(lǐng)袖能夠像喬布斯那樣舉辦出一場萬眾矚目的盛會。在每次蘋果推出新產(chǎn)品之時，喬布斯總是會獨(dú)自站在黑色的舞臺上，向充滿敬仰之情的觀眾展示出又一款“充滿魔力”而又“不可思議”的創(chuàng)新電子產(chǎn)品來，他的發(fā)布方式充滿了表演的天賦。計算機(jī)所做的無非是計算，但是經(jīng)過他的解釋和展示，高速的計算就“仿佛擁有了無限的魔力”。喬布斯終其一生都在將他的魔力包裝到了設(shè)計精美、使用簡便的產(chǎn)品當(dāng)中去。

　　喬布斯早在20世紀(jì)70年代便已經(jīng)看到了向普通大眾出售計算機(jī)這塊業(yè)務(wù)的潛力。在當(dāng)年世界還在使用綠黑相間的屏幕、5寸軟盤的時代，讓電腦成為家家戶戶必備的設(shè)備似乎還是一個遙不可及的夢想。但是喬布斯是少數(shù)幾位具有遠(yuǎn)見卓識的先驅(qū)之一。而更為重要的是，喬布斯擁有一個不尋常的本領(lǐng)，即他不僅會從工程開發(fā)人員的角度從內(nèi)審視電腦，同時他還會從用戶的角度來從外界觀察人們對電腦的需求——他將這一本領(lǐng)歸功于他自己任性的青年時代。

　　豐富的經(jīng)歷塑造了非凡的成就

　　喬布斯從小在硅谷長大，使得他從小便有機(jī)會耳濡目染到計算機(jī)的世界。在20世紀(jì)60年代末，他有幸認(rèn)識了自己心目中的偶像比爾·休利特(Bill Hewlett)，并成功地為自己獲得了到休利特創(chuàng)辦的惠普做暑期兼職的機(jī)會。此后他在讀了1年大學(xué)后輟學(xué)、前往印度、開始篤信佛教并嘗試了迷幻藥劑，比較終他選擇回到了加利福尼亞州并與好友聯(lián)合創(chuàng)辦了蘋果。他的公司于1976年的愚人節(jié)當(dāng)天在他的父母的車庫里正式開張。他曾經(jīng)表示：“很多在我們這個行業(yè)的人都沒有過如此復(fù)雜的經(jīng)歷，因此他們沒有足夠的經(jīng)驗(yàn)來推出非線性的解決方案。”他表示比爾·蓋斯“如果在年輕的時候吸吸迷幻藥或者經(jīng)常去花天酒地一下的話，他的眼界肯定將會更加開闊。”

　　例如喬布斯從大學(xué)輟學(xué)并去參加了書法班，使得喬布斯對排版產(chǎn)生了濃厚的興趣。但是他學(xué)習(xí)各種字體的目的卻是使之成為麥金塔(Macintosh)系統(tǒng)的核心賣點(diǎn)，這款由蘋果于1984年推出的電腦產(chǎn)品還具有開拓了鼠標(biāo)驅(qū)動、圖形優(yōu)化的特性。其中的窗口、圖標(biāo)以及菜單等用戶友好的界面和功能被外界視為一款“給大眾使用的電腦”。喬布斯在通過蘋果挖得了第一桶金子之后，便期望著通過未來新的機(jī)型獲得“數(shù)以億計”的收益。但是Mac并沒有像喬布斯的想象那樣大獲成功，而他自己也被蘋果踢出了董事會。

　　然而塞翁失馬焉知非福，喬布斯在多年以后談到被踢出蘋果董事會這件事情的時候表示，“這是我人生經(jīng)歷當(dāng)中比較令人高興的一件事。”他在離開蘋果后又聯(lián)合創(chuàng)辦了皮克斯動畫公司(Pixar)，專攻電腦動畫業(yè)務(wù);并又創(chuàng)辦了另外一家從事電腦產(chǎn)品生產(chǎn)的企業(yè)NeXT。他于蘋果在1996年陷入困境的時候再度出山，在蘋果收購了NeXT之后再度將自己的創(chuàng)意注入到了蘋果的系列產(chǎn)品當(dāng)中。之后的歷史便成為了經(jīng)典：蘋果先后推出了iMac、iPod、iPhone以及iPad，并且很快便成為了全世界市值比較高的企業(yè)之一。喬布斯在2005年表示：“我敢肯定，如果蘋果當(dāng)年沒有開除我的話，這一切都不會發(fā)生。”直到他于2011年8月由于健康原因辭去CEO職務(wù)之前，他一直被外界視為比較杰出的CEO。而皮克斯作為喬布斯的一個副業(yè)產(chǎn)品，也為大眾帶來了大量精彩的動畫電影。

　　將技術(shù)與人性結(jié)合，追尋內(nèi)心的直覺

　　回顧喬布斯的一生，喬布斯早在開發(fā)出第一款蘋果電腦時便已經(jīng)遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)地走在了時代的前沿。早年的計算機(jī)技術(shù)主要是強(qiáng)調(diào)技術(shù)，而喬布斯則率先關(guān)注了設(shè)計以及使用的便捷性，這也為他在后來推出產(chǎn)品的特性奠定了基礎(chǔ)。在他心目當(dāng)中，電腦應(yīng)該是一款優(yōu)雅、簡潔并且可以輕松方便地用來了解世界的時尚產(chǎn)品，而大眾應(yīng)該人手一份，同時可以用它來做任何事情。喬布斯在2010年1月發(fā)布iPad時，在演說收尾時指出：“單靠科技是遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)不夠的，必需要讓科技與人文科學(xué)以及人性相結(jié)合，其成果必需能夠讓用戶產(chǎn)生共鳴。”這段臺詞對于科技業(yè)的領(lǐng)袖來說十分不可思議，但是如果了解了喬布斯的背景的話，這也不難理解他為何會如此表述了。

　　他將自己把不同行業(yè)和學(xué)科集成的思維歸功于自己關(guān)注細(xì)節(jié)。他表示，“為了讓自己能夠睡個好覺，我必須確保所有產(chǎn)品的外觀美學(xué)、設(shè)備質(zhì)量都必須一絲不茍地完成。”他在開發(fā)第一臺麥金塔電腦的時候曾經(jīng)強(qiáng)烈要求電腦不能內(nèi)置冷卻扇，以確保電腦運(yùn)行的時候能夠足夠安靜——他將用戶的需求凌駕于了工程設(shè)計之上。他還曾經(jīng)命令一位蘋果的工程師花一個周末的時間加班解決iPhone的屏幕上一個字母的顏色不顯示精確的問題。同時他還會經(jīng)常自己撰寫或者修改蘋果的廣告文字。

　　喬布斯在公眾場合上是一個如禪宗一般神秘的人物。他是一個專制而脾氣暴躁的經(jīng)理人。但是他是有狂妄的本錢的。他在評估和開發(fā)潛在新產(chǎn)品的時候總是拒絕使用市場調(diào)研以及觀察機(jī)構(gòu)，而更樂意相信他自己的直覺。他表示：“很多情況下，人們在見到一件新事物之前是很難說出自己到底想要什么的。”而他的觀點(diǎn)在大多數(shù)情況下毫無疑問是正確的：在他的職業(yè)生涯中，他的成功遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)超過了失敗。一位蘋果的早期員工稱喬布斯擁有“屏蔽現(xiàn)實(shí)”的本領(lǐng)，以便追尋自己的內(nèi)心直覺，但是比較終他卻能夠改變現(xiàn)實(shí)，通過魔法般的手段重塑了電腦與音樂、通訊以及媒體的關(guān)系。喬布斯在年輕的時候曾經(jīng)表示“希望能夠做出一番讓宇宙為之一震的事業(yè)。”而他也的確做到了。

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