Gates and NeXT

蓋茨和NeXT

Bill Gates was not a soul mate. Jobs had convinced him to produce software applications for the Macintosh, which had turned out to be hugely profitable for Microsoft. But Gates was one person who was resistant to Jobs’s reality distortion field, and as a result he decided not to create software tailored for the NeXT platform. Gates went to California to get periodic demonstrations, but each time he came away unimpressed. “The Macintosh was truly unique, but I personally don’t understand what is so unique about Steve’s new computer,” he told Fortune.

比爾·蓋茨跟喬布斯性情并不相投。喬布斯曾說服蓋茨為麥金塔做軟件應(yīng)用，最后給微軟帶來了豐厚利潤。但是，比爾·蓋茨抗拒喬布斯的現(xiàn)實扭曲力場，因此，他決定不為NeXT平臺開發(fā)專門軟件。蓋茨會定期到加利福尼亞州看NeXT的演示，但是每次他都不以為然。“麥金塔真的是獨一無二，但是我個人不太理解史蒂夫的新電腦有什么特別之處。”蓋茨對《財富》雜志表示。

Part of the problem was that the rival titans were congenitally unable to be deferential to each other. When Gates made his first visit to NeXT’s Palo Alto headquarters, in the summer of 1987, Jobs kept him waiting for a half hour in the lobby, even though Gates could see through the glass walls that Jobs was walking around having casual conversations. “I’d gone down to NeXT and I had the Odwalla, the most expensive carrot juice, and I’d never seen tech offices so lavish,” Gates recalled, shaking his head with just a hint of a smile. “And Steve comes a half hour late to the meeting.”

造成這種情況的部分原因在于，這兩位彼此競爭的巨頭無法做到互相恭敬。1987年夏天，蓋茨第一次造訪NeXT公司位于帕洛奧圖的總部，喬布斯讓他在大堂里等了半個小時，蓋茨甚至透過玻璃墻看到了喬布斯只是在里面走來走去地閑談。“我到NeXT，喝了最貴的奧德瓦拉牌胡蘿卜汁，見識了如此豪華的科技企業(yè)辦公室，”蓋茨回憶道，帶著一抹笑容搖了搖頭，“我們的會面史蒂夫遲到了半個小時。”

Jobs’s sales pitch, according to Gates, was simple. “We did the Mac together,” Jobs said. “How did that work for you? Very well. Now, we’re going to do this together and this is going to be great.”

根椐蓋茨的說法，喬布斯的推銷說辭很簡單。“我們曾一起做過Mac項目。”喬布斯說，“結(jié)果對你怎么樣？非常好。現(xiàn)在，我們一起做這個，也會非常棒。”

But Gates was brutal to Jobs, just as Jobs could be to others. “This machine is crap,” he said. “The optical disk has too low latency, the fucking case is too expensive. This thing is ridiculous.” He decided then, and reaffirmed on each subsequent visit, that it made no sense for Microsoft to divert resources from other projects to develop applications for NeXT. Worse yet, he repeatedly said so publicly, which made others less likely to spend time developing for NeXT. “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it,” he told InfoWorld.

然而，蓋茨對喬布斯很殘忍，就像喬布斯對其他人一樣。“這款機器就是垃圾他說，“光驅(qū)的反應(yīng)時間太長，機箱太他媽貴，整個東西太荒謬。”當時蓋茨就決定，微軟不會分散其他項目的資源來為NeXT開發(fā)應(yīng)用程序，并且在隨后的每次到訪都重申了這一點。更糟的是，他一再公開表態(tài)，致使其他軟件公司也不愿意花時間為NeXT開發(fā)軟件。“為它開發(fā)？我會在它上面撒尿。”他在《信息世界》（InfoWorld）上說。

When they happened to meet in the hallway at a conference, Jobs started berating Gates for his refusal to do software for NeXT. “When you get a market, I will consider it,” Gates replied. Jobs got angry. “It was a screaming battle, right in front of everybody,” recalled Adele Goldberg, the Xerox PARC engineer. Jobs insisted that NeXT was the next wave of computing. Gates, as he often did, got more expressionless as Jobs got more heated. He finally just shook his head and walked away.

兩人碰巧在一次會議的走廊上遇見時，喬布斯開始因為蓋茨拒絕為NeXT開發(fā)軟件而訓(xùn)斥對方。“等你有市場的時候我會考慮。”蓋茨回答說。喬布斯生氣了。“當著周圍所有人的面，他們倆開始大聲爭吵。”阿黛爾·戈德堡回憶說，她是施樂帕洛奧圖研究中心的工程師，當時也在場。喬布斯堅持認為NeXT會是計算機產(chǎn)業(yè)的下一波浪潮。這次爭執(zhí)跟以往一樣，喬布斯越是激動，蓋茨就越是一言不發(fā)。最后蓋茨搖搖頭走開了。

Beneath their personal rivalry—and occasional grudging respect—was their basic philosophical difference. Jobs believed in an end-to-end integration of hardware and software, which led him to build a machine that was not compatible with others. Gates believed in, and profited from, a world in which different companies made machines that were compatible with one another; their hardware ran a standard operating system (Microsoft’s Windows) and could all use the same software apps (such as Microsoft’s Word and Excel). “His product comes with an interesting feature called incompatibility,” Gates told the Washington Post. “It doesn’t run any of the existing software. It’s a super-nice computer. I don’t think if I went out to design an incompatible computer I would have done as well as he did.”

在兩人的爭執(zhí)以及偶爾不情愿地表示出的尊重背后，是基本理念上的差異。喬布斯看好硬件和軟件集成的端到端一體化系統(tǒng)，這就致使他要創(chuàng)造出與其他軟件和機器都不兼容的計算機。蓋茨推崇不同的公司做出互相兼容的機器，自己從中獲利：這些硬件設(shè)備都運行同一個標準的操作系統(tǒng)——微軟的Windows操作系統(tǒng)，并都能運行同樣的軟件應(yīng)用程序，如微軟的Word和Excel。“他的產(chǎn)品有一個有趣的特點，就是不兼容性，”蓋茨告訴《華盛頓郵報》說，“它不運行任何已有的軟件。它是一臺超級棒的電腦。如果要我來設(shè)計一款不兼容的計算機，我覺得自己做不到他那么好。”

At a forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989, Jobs and Gates appeared sequentially, laying out their competing worldviews. Jobs spoke about how new waves come along in the computer industry every few years. Macintosh had launched a revolutionary new approach with the graphical interface; now NeXT was doing it with object-oriented programming tied to a powerful new machine based on an optical disk. Every major software vendor realized they had to be part of this new wave, he said, “except Microsoft.” When Gates came up, he reiterated his belief that Jobs’s end-to-end control of the software and the hardware was destined for failure, just as Apple had failed in competing against the Microsoft Windows standard. “The hardware market and the software market are separate,” he said. When asked about the great design that could come from Jobs’s approach, Gates gestured to the NeXT prototype that was still sitting onstage and sneered, “If you want black, I’ll get you a can of paint.”

1989年，在馬薩諸塞州劍橋市的一個論壇上，喬布斯和蓋茨先后現(xiàn)身，陳述彼此截然相反的世界觀。喬布斯談到，每隔幾年，計算機產(chǎn)業(yè)就會出現(xiàn)新的浪潮。麥金塔電腦借圖形界面推出了革命性的新方法。現(xiàn)在，NeXT通過將面向?qū)ο蟮木幊谭椒ㄅc采用光盤為存儲介質(zhì)的功能強大的計算機捆綁起來，正在引領(lǐng)新一輇的革命。喬布斯表示，每個大型軟件廠商都意識到了自己必須成為新浪潮的一部分，“除了微軟”。輪到蓋茨講話時，他重申，喬布斯控制軟件和硬件端到端一體化的系統(tǒng)終究會失敗，就像蘋果與微軟Windows操作系統(tǒng)的競爭一樣。“硬件市場和軟件市場是分開的。”他說。當被問及喬布斯的方法可能會產(chǎn)生的偉大設(shè)計時，蓋茨示意大家看看還在臺上的NeXT樣機，嘲笑道：“如果你想要黑色，我可以給你一罐黑色油漆。”