スティーブジョブスが亡くなって間もなく書店に並んだ日本語版の伝記を何度も手に取って見たが結局買わなかった。
最初に買ったマックには日本語版のイラストやフォトショップのソフトが無くて英語版を使って動かした。
辞書を引きながら操作して、何とかマックを使えるようになっていった。
Macとの出会いと同じようにジョブスの伝記も英語版で読もうと思い立ってアマゾンでSteve Jobs by Walter Isaacsonを購入した。
570ページの量に少し驚いたが読み始めると自分とMacの関わりが本当に初期の頃からだったとわかって益々興味が湧いてきて、まるで自分も一緒に開発に参加しているような錯覚を覚える程だった。
読み終えて一番心に残った事はあくまでも貫き通した彼の哲学”integration"へのパッションと新しい世界を予知する先見性と実現する情熱の凄さだ。
あれほど革新的なウォークマンを作ったソニーがどうしてiPodを作り出せなかったのか、というくだりは印象的だった。
"Here's the Walkman killer. There's no mystery meat. The reason you bought a music company is so that you could be the one to make a device like this. You can do better."
But Sony couldn't . It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman ,it had a great record company, and it had along history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs's strategy of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into divisions (the word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.
Job did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions;
それともう一カ所忘れられない所がある。
Some people say,"Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach . Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the stage.（from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson）
80才になる2020年のアップルという木にどのような果実が実を結んでいるのか見てみたい。