評論
打印
On a beautiful spring day in 1986,
在1986年春天的一個美麗的日子，
they met in the publishing house's grand building in the heart of Oxford,
他們在牛津郡中心的出版社大樓見面，
where Jobs made an offer of $2,000 plus 74 cents for every computer sold
喬布斯提出，一次性支付2000美元且每賣出一臺電腦支付給出版社74美分，
in order to have the rights to Oxford's edition of Shakespeare.
以獲得牛津版莎士比亞作品集的版權。
"It will be all gravy to you," he argued.
“這對你們而言就是輕而易舉的收入，”喬布斯表示，
"You will be ahead of the parade. It's never been done before."
“你們將走在潮流的前列，這是別人從來沒有做過的事情。”
They agreed in principle and then went out to play skittles over beer at a nearby pub where Lord Byron used to drink.
出版社大體上同意了，然后他們一同前往拜倫曾經駐足的小酒館，喝啤酒玩撞柱游戲。
By the time it launched, the NeXT would also include a dictionary, a thesaurus, and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,
NeXT電腦還將囊括一部字典、一部百科匯編和一部《牛津引語詞典》，
making it one of the pioneers of the concept of searchable electronic books.
這使得NeXT電腦成為實現可搜索式電子書概念的先驅之一。
Instead of using off-the-shelf chips for the NeXT,
NeXT電腦沒有使用現成的芯片，
Jobs had his engineers design custom ones that integrated a variety of functions on one chip.
喬布斯讓工程師們設計定制芯片，能夠在一個芯片上集成多種功能。
That would have been hard enough,
這已經夠困難的了，
but Jobs made it almost impossible by continually revising the functions he wanted it to do.
而喬布斯還在不斷修改他想要的功能，這就使得這項工作幾乎不可能完成。
After a year it became clear that this would be a major source of delay.
一年后，這成了產品延遲發布的一個主要原因。
He also insisted on building his own fully automated and futuristic factory,
喬布斯還堅持建設自己的全自動化和未來派的工廠，
just as he had for the Macintosh; he had not been chastened by that experience.
就像他曾經對麥金塔項目的設想一樣。他并未從那次經歷中學乖。
This time too he made the same mistakes, only more excessively.
這次，他犯了同樣的錯誤，而且有過之而無不及。
