1995年乔布斯：遗失的访谈（节选）After serious disagreements with Apple’s 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 wasn’t the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would’ve 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:That’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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. S o that’s 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 don’t think John had a vision for the company.Bob: Well, I guess I’m asking was what was your vision that lost out in this instance?Steve: It wasn’t 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 expensesdramatically in the Apple II area…, that we needed to be spending very heavily in the Macintosh area, err… things like that. John’s 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 paral ysis in the early part of 1985, andI wasn’t at that time capable…I don’t think…of running the company as a whole. You know I was30 years old. A nd I don’t think I had enough experiences to run a 2 billion dollar company. Un fortunately John didn’t either.And so anyway… I … I was told in no uncertain terms that there’s no job for me, it’s really tragic.Bob: Siberia.Steve:Yeah. It would have been far smarter for Apple to sort of let me work on the nex t (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 emotion al if I keep talking about this. S o anyway … but that’s irrelevant, I am just one person and the company is a lot more people than me. That’s not the most important part. T he 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. I t’s on a glide slope too, to die! And the reason is because …Y ou 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 don’t know! But it was… what happened was the …understanding of how to move these things forward, and how to create these ne w products, somehow evaporated, and I think a lot of go od people stuck around for a while, but there wasn’t an opportunity to get together and do this, because there w asn’t any leadership to do that.So what’s happened with Apple now is that they’ve 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, b ut would provide a good revenue stream for several years, but it’s a glide slope. I t’s just gonna go like this. So it’s unfortunate and I don’t really think it’s reversible at this point of time.Bob:Neither do I. What about Microsoft? I mean that’s the juggernaut now, and it’s kind ofFord-LTD going into the future. I t’s definitely not Cadillac, it’s not BMW it’s just … you know … what’s going on there, how did these guys do that?Steve:Microsoft’s 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 Microsoft’s credit they used that fantastic opportunity to create mor e opportunity for themselves. Most people don’t remember but until 1984 with the Mac, Microsoft was n ot 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 don’t 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 don’t mean that in a small way. I meant that in a big way in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring mu ch culture into their product. And you say why is that important. Well, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That’s where one gets the idea.If it weren’t for the Mac, they would have never had that in their products.And, so I guess, I’m saddened not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned th eir success, for the most part. I have the problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. Their products have no… sort of spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don’t ha ve a lot of that spirit either. But the way that we are going to ratchet it up… our species, is to take the best, and to spread it around to everybody so that everyone grows up with better things, and start to understand the subtleties of these better things. And Microsoft is just… McDonalds. So that’s what saddens me. Not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft products don’t display more insight and more creativity.。