Competition 竞争

When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one and dissect¹ it. 1981年8月，IBM推出了他们的个人电脑，乔布斯让自己的团队买了一台并进行了详细的分析。

Their consensus² was that it sucked. 大家一致认为这是个很糟糕的产品，

Chris Espinosa called it "a half-assed, hackneyed attempt," and there was some truth to that. 克里斯·埃斯皮诺萨称其“性能低下、毫无创新”，这话不无道理。

It used old-fashioned command-line prompts and didn't support bitmapped graphical displays. 它使用的是过时的命令行提示符，屏幕也只能显示字符，而不是图形界面的位图显示。

Apple became cocky, not realizing that 苹果的员工显得过于自信了，他们没有意识到，

corporate³ technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM 企业的技术经理也许更愿意从KM这样的老牌企业购买产品，

rather than one named after a piece of fruit. 而不是他们这家以水果命名的公司。

Bill Gates happened to be visiting Apple headquarters for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. IBM发布个人电脑的那天，比尔·盖茨恰巧在苹果公司的总部参加一场会议。

"They didn't seem to care," he said. “他们看上去根本不在意，”他说，

"It took them a year to realize what had happened." “他们用了一年时间才意识到发生了什么。”

Reflecting its cheeky confidence, 有一件事情表现出了苹果公司狂妄的自信：

Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Welcome, IBM. Seriously." 他们在《华尔街日报》上刊登了一幅整版广告，标题是：“欢迎你，IBM。真的欢迎。”

It cleverly positioned the upcoming computer battle as a two-way contest 它把即将来临的电脑产业大战定位成了两家公司之间的竞争：

between the spunky and rebellious⁴ Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM, 生气蓬勃而又叛逆的苹果和老牌巨头IBM。

conveniently relegating⁵ to irrelevance⁶ companies such as Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that were doing just as well as Apple. 而当时和苹果公司表现同样出色的康懋达公司、坦迪公司以及奥斯本，则被归入了 “不相干公司”的行列。

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, 乔布斯在整个职业生涯中，都喜欢把自己看做对抗邪恶帝国的反抗者，

a Jedi warrior⁷ or Buddhist⁸ samurai fighting the forces of darkness. 一名与黑暗力量作斗争的绝地战士或是佛教武士。

IBM was his perfect foil. IBM是他的完美陪衬。

He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere⁹ business competition, but as a spiritual struggle. 乔布斯把即将到来的产业战争看做商业竞争和精神较量的结合体。

"If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, “如果因为某个原因，我们犯下了巨大的错误，IBM赢了我们，

my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years," he told an interviewer. 那我个人的感觉就是，我们将进入计算机领域长达20年的黑暗时代。”他告诉一个采访者，

"Once IBM gains control of a market sector¹⁰, they almost always stop innovation." “一旦IBM控制了市场，他们几乎总是会停止创新。”

Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: 即使30年后的现在，在回顾那场竞争时，乔布斯还是把它当做神圣的改革运动：

"IBM was essentially¹¹ Microsoft at its worst. “IBM本质上就是最差状态下的微软公司。

They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. 他们不是创新的力量，而是邪恶的力量。

They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is." IBM就像AT&T、微软或者谷歌一样。”