What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . .

何等野兽 终于等到它的时辰

Steve Jobs, 1996 Things Fall Apart

万物解体

When Jobs unveiled the NeXT computer in 1988, there was a burst of excitement. That fizzled when the computer finally went on sale the following year. Jobs’s ability to dazzle, intimidate, and spin the press began to fail him, and there was a series of stories on the company’s woes. “NeXT is incompatible with other computers at a time when the industry is moving toward interchangeable systems,” Bart Ziegler of Associated Press reported. “Because relatively little software exists to run on NeXT, it has a hard time attracting customers.”

当乔布斯1988年首度推出NeXT计算机时，引起了热烈反响。可是到第二年计算机最终上市时，市场热情却退去了。乔布斯那种让媒体眼花缭乱、心生敬畏、趋之若鹜的才能开始失效，负面新闻也层出不穷。“NeXT跟其他计算机不兼容，而当时，这个行业正向操作系统可互换的方向发展，”美联社记者巴特·齐格勒（BartZiegler）报道说，“因为相对来说，可以在NeXT上使用的现有软件很少，所以它很难吸引消费者。”

　　NeXT tried to reposition itself as the leader in a new category, personal workstations, for people who wanted the power of a workstation and the friendliness of a personal computer. But those customers were by now buying them from fast-growing Sun Microsystems. Revenues for NeXT in 1990 were $28 million; Sun made $2.5 billion that year. IBM abandoned its deal to license the NeXT software, so Jobs was forced to do something against his nature: Despite his ingrained belief that hardware and software should be integrally linked, he agreed in January 1992 to license the NeXTSTEP operating system to run on other computers.

　　 NeXT试图将自己重新定位为一个新产品类型——个人工作站的领跑者，目

标用户是那些希望兼顾工作站的强大功能与个人计算机的友好性的人。但是这类消费者当时已经从快速发展的Sun公司买到了这样的产品。NeXT在1990年的收入是2800万美元，而同年Sun公司的收入是25亿美元。IBM放弃了向NeXT授权软件的协议，所以乔布斯被迫做了一件违背他本性的事情：虽然他根深蒂固地认为硬件和软件应该是一个不可分割的整体，但是在1992年1月，他同意授权NeXTSTEP操作系统在其他品牌的计算机上运行。