Falling

一落千丈

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. Its beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.

麦金塔电脑刚发布时引发了一阵热潮，但到1984年下半年，其销量就开始急剧下滑。问题是根本性的。这是一台虽然精美却运行缓慢、动力不足的电脑，再多的宣传也无法掩盖它的缺点。它的美丽之处在于，其界面看上去像一间阳光明媚的游戏室，而不是一块闪烁着绿色字母和呆板命令行的幽暗屏幕。然而，这也造成了麦金塔最大的弱点。采用文本方式显示，一个字符只占用不到一个字节；而Mac采用像素方式显示用户想要的优雅字体，这样，每个字符所需要的内存就比前者多出二三十倍。丽萨电脑为了解决这一问题，将内存扩展至1000K以上，而麦金塔的内存只有128K。

Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a “Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname “the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”

另一个问题在于，没有内置硬盘驱动。乔安娜·霍夫曼曾坚持，要使用内置硬盘作为存储设备，乔布斯因此称她为“施乐偏执狂”①。麦金塔只有一个软盘驱动器，你如果想要复制数据，有可能会落下肘关节发炎的毛病，因为你得来回装卸软盘。此外，麦金塔没有风扇，这是乔布斯武断顽固的又一佐证。他觉得，风扇会增大电脑的嗓音。没有风扇散热造成了很多组件故障，并让麦金塔赢得了“米色烤面包机”的绰号，而这一绰号显然无益于提髙产品的流行度。麦金塔电脑外形诱人，因而在发布的头几个月，销量非常好；但当人们逐渐认识到这款电脑的局限后，销量便逐渐减少。霍夫曼后来感叹道：“现实扭曲力场可以作为一种鞭策，但最后总是要被现实打破的。”

At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation. He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the “Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in. “I was furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said Hoffman. “It was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned.”

1984年底，丽萨电脑销量几乎为零，麦金塔的销量跌至每月10000台以下，乔布斯在绝望之下作出了一个低劣、不合规矩的决定。他决定在库存的丽萨电脑上安装麦金塔仿真程序，并作为新产品出售，命名为“麦金塔XL”。由于丽萨电脑已停产，且不会再投入生产，因此乔布斯这次要做自己都不看好的东西，就有点反常。“我很愤怒，因为它根本就不是什么MacXL。”霍夫曼说道，“这么做的目的就是为了把剩下的丽萨电脑都卖出去。它卖得很好，但接下来我们不得不停止这个可怕的骗局，我也因此辞职了。”

The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984” ad. Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,” showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death. From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.

这种负面情绪在苹果公司1985年1月的广告中也有所体现，这次的广告试图再次激起人们反对IBM的情绪共鸣，就像“1984”广告那样。不幸的是，这两则广告之间有一个根本区别：“1984”广告以一种英勇乐观的基调结束；但是这次，李·克劳和杰伊·恰特（JayChiat）写的新故事脚本，名为“旅鼠”（Lemmings）,内容则是身着深色西装、被蒙住双眼的企业管理者迈向悬崖，走向死亡。从一开始，乔布斯和斯卡利就感到不安，这个故事似乎无法传达出苹果正面和光辉的形象，相反，只会侮辱购买过电脑的每一个企业管理者。

Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. “You guys didn’t want to run ‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, “I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,” and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. “I can’t believe you’re going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publishing.”

乔布斯和斯卡利要求广告公司想想其他创意，但广告公司拒绝了。其中一位员工说：“你们去年还不想要‘1984’广告呢。”根据斯卡利的说法，李·克劳补充道：“我会把自己的全部名声和一切都压在这个广告上。”然而当雷德利·斯科特的弟弟托尼把广告拍出来后，这个创意显得更糟了。行尸走肉般的经理们朝着悬崖前进，口中唱着葬礼版的《白雪公主》插曲，“嘿——嚯，嘿——嚯”，而枯燥的电影制作使得这部广告片比故事脚本还要沉闷。“我简直不敢相信，你竟然要放这么个广告来羞辱全美国的商务人士！”黛比·科尔曼看过广告后冲乔布斯吼道。营销会议上，她站起来表达了自己对这个广告的无比厌恶。“我郑重其事地在乔布斯桌上放了一封辞职信。信是在我的Mac电脑上打出来的。我觉得这个广吿对企业管理者是一种侮辱。我们可是刚刚才在个人电脑领域立足。”

Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency’s entreaties and ran the commercial during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley’s wife, Leezy (who couldn’t stand Jobs), and Jobs’s new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. “It insulted the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the president of a market research firm told Fortune. Apple’s marketing manager suggested afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and apologize for the apology.

不过，乔布斯和斯卡利屈从于广吿公司的意愿，在美国橄榄球“超级碗”大赛中播放该段广告。两人一同前往斯坦福体育场观看比赛，同行的还有斯卡利的妻子利兹——她受不了乔布斯，以及乔布斯情绪亢奋的新女友蒂娜·莱德斯（TinaRaise）。在这场沉闷比赛的第四节的尾声时，苹果公司的广告播出了。球迷们抬头看着大屏幕，几乎没有反应。而在整个美国范围内，大多数反馈都是负面的。“它侮辱了苹果的目标用户群。”一家市场调研公司的总裁告诉《财富》杂志。苹果公司的营销经理随后建议，公司可能需要在《华尔街日报》上买个版面进行道歉。杰伊·恰特则威胁道，如果苹果敢这么做，他的广告公司就会买下旁边的版面，为苹果的道歉广告道歉。

Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna’s firm, was in charge of hand-holding and logistics at the Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn’t like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. “We got into a big fight on what a calla lily is,” Cunningham recalled. “I know what they are, because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said I was ‘stupid’ because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.” So Cunningham went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. “That suit’s disgusting,” he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look, I know you’re angry, and I know how you feel,” she said.

同年1月，乔布斯前往纽约接受一对一的记者采访，其间表露出自己对该广告和苹果公司整体现状的不安。像以前一样，里吉斯·麦肯纳公司的安迪·坎宁安负责乔布斯在卡莱尔酒店的安排和后勤。乔布斯到达酒店后，命令坎宁安重新布置一遍套房，而当时已是晚上10点，第二天就要接受采访。另外，他觉得钢琴摆放的位置也不对，草莓也不是他想要的品种。但是，最大的问题在于他不喜欢房间里摆放的花。他想要马蹄莲。“我们为了马蹄莲到底什么样大吵了一场，”坎宁安说道，“我知道马蹄莲是什么，因为我结婚的时候就用过，但是他坚持要另一种类型的百合花，并且说我很蠢，因为我不知道真正的马蹄莲什么样。”于是坎宁安只好出去买。幸好这里是纽约，她这么晚还能买到乔布斯要的那种百合花。房间重新布置好后，乔布斯又开始挑剔她的穿着。“这身套装好恶心。”他对她说。坎宁安知道乔布斯有时会爆发出无名怒火，因此她试图让他平静下来。“你看，我知道你在生气，我也知道你的感受。”她说。

“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.”

“你他妈根本不知道我的感受，”乔布斯吼道，“你他妈完全不知道我这样会是什么感受。”——

注释：

①施乐推出的电脑采用内置硬盘存储。