Microsoft
微软

The meaning of Bill Gates
比尔盖茨的意义

Jun 26th 2008
From The Economist print edition

As his reign at Microsoft comes to an end, so does the era he dominated
比尔盖茨金盆洗手，叱诧微软时代结束

WHEN Bill Gates helped to found Microsoft 33 years ago there was a company rule that no employees should work for a boss who wrote worse computer code than they did. Just five years later, with Microsoft choking on its own growth, Mr Gates hired a business manager, Steve Ballmer, who had cut his teeth at Procter & Gamble, which sells soap. The founder had chucked his coding rule out of the window.
当33年前比尔盖茨协助创立微软时，公司有条规定”员工不应该为编程能力比自己差的老板工作。”仅仅5年之后，为了应对微软飞速发展产生的瓶颈，盖茨先生雇佣了商务经理史蒂夫•鲍尔默。后者只曾在日用化学品公司宝洁初试身手。这位创始人便这样把他的编程规则抛到了九霄云外。

In becoming the world’s richest man, Mr Gates’s unswerving self-belief has repeatedly been punctuated by that sort of pragmatism. But those qualities have never been on such public display as they were this week, when the outstanding businessman of his age stepped back from a life’s work.
成为世界上最富有的人的路上，盖茨先生一贯的自信多次让位于那种实用主义哲学。但那些品质从未如本周一样在公众面前展示得如此淋漓尽致-一个年纪并不大的成功商人甘愿主动离开费尽一生心血的事业。

As Microsoft’s non-executive chairman, Mr Gates will devote most of his efforts to his charitable foundation, where he will pit himself against malaria and poverty, rather than Google and the Department of Justice. To choose such formidable new foes in the middle of your life takes bags of self-belief, but it is also pragmatic-and a little poignant. Mr Gates has revelled in the day-to-day details of running his firm. To let it all go is to acknowledge that his best work at Microsoft is behind him. It is to accept that the innovator’s curse is to be transitory.
盖茨先生退位成为微软非执行主席后，将更多致力于其名下的慈善基金上。他的对手不再是谷歌和司法部，而是疟疾和贫穷。但这也是一种实用主义-尽管有些伤感。日复一日，盖茨先生已经沉醉于管理公司的点点滴滴。唯有承认自己在微软的黄金时代已经过去，唯有接受革新终难持久的诅咒，方能抛却这一切。

MS DOS and don’ts
有所为有所不为

As with many great innovations, Mr Gates’s vision has come to seem so obvious that it is hard to imagine the world any other way. Yet, early on, he grasped two things that were far from obvious at the time, and he grasped them more clearly and pursued them more fiercely than his rivals did at Commodore, MITS or even Apple.
盖茨先生有很多伟大的革新，其梦想已经成为现实，很难想象没有他的创举世界会如何。很早以前，他就牢牢把握了现在看来天经地义的两个理念，并且坚定不移的推行，比他的对手Commodore MITS甚至苹果公司更加努力执著。

The first was that computing could be a high-volume, low-margin business. Until Microsoft came along, the big money was in maintaining a select family of very grand mainframes. Mr Gates realised that falling hardware costs, combined with the negligible expense of making extra copies of standard software, would turn the computer business on its head. Personal computers could be “on every desk and in every home”. Profit would come from selling a lot of them cheaply, not servicing a few at a great price. And the company that won a large market share at the start would prevail later on.
第一个理念是计算机行业可以做到薄利多销。在微软入行前，资金都投入在维护一系列大型主机上。盖茨先生意识到降低硬件花销加上几乎可忽略的标准软件复件费用，可以让计算机行业发生翻天覆地的变化。个人电脑可以出现在”每个家庭的每张桌子上。”利润来自低价高销量，而不是高价低销量。最先在开始阶段赢得大量市场份额者将在以后的竞争中获得极大优势。

Mr Gates also realised that making hardware and writing software could be stronger as separate businesses. Even as firms like Apple clung on to both the computer operating system and the hardware-just as mainframe companies had-Microsoft and Intel, which designed the PC’s microprocessors, blew computing’s business model apart. Hardware and software companies innovated in an ecosystem that the Wintel duopoly tightly controlled and-in spite of the bugs and crashes-used to reap vast economies of scale and profits. When mighty IBM unwittingly granted Microsoft the right to sell its PC operating system to other hardware firms, it did not see that it was creating legions of rivals for itself. Mr Gates did.
盖茨先生还意识到把硬件生产和*分做两个行业效果更好。当时大型机公司哪怕是苹果都同时进行操作系统和硬件的开发。微软和个人电脑微处理器制造公司英特尔打破了这一模式。两者软硬分修，和谐共进，共同创立了革命性的战略同盟。尽管缺乏稳定性并且小错不断，但掠取了大笔市场份额和利润。当蓝色巨人IBM公司不经意中允许微软把自己开发的操作系统卖给其他硬件公司，并没有意识到正为自己大量树敌。比尔先生成功了。

The technology industry likes to sneer at Microsoft as a follower. And it is true that the company has time and again bought in or imitated the technology of others. That very first PC operating system was based on someone else’s code. But Mr Gates’s invention was as a businessman. His genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.
行内人士总嘲笑微软就像跟屁虫，它也确实一再别人那里模仿或买入技术。其首个个人电脑操作系统就是基于他人的代码。但盖茨先生在商业方面有了更多的创举。他的天才之处在于理解自己所需并找出获取的方法，不管要等多久也要弄到手。在一个到处是眼高手低对别人观点嗤之以鼻人士的行业中，随时做好转变的准备是一种引人注目的优势。

And look at what happened when Mr Gates’s pragmatism failed him. Within Microsoft, they feared Bill for his relentless intellect, his grasp of detail and his brutal intolerance of anyone whom he thought “dumb”. But the legal system doesn’t do fear, and in a filmed deposition, when Microsoft was had up for being anti-competitive, the hectoring, irascible Mr Gates, rocking slightly in his chair, came across as spoilt and arrogant. It was a rare public airing of the sense of brainy entitlement that emboldened Mr Gates to get the world to yield to his will. On those rare occasions when Microsoft’s fortunes depended upon Mr Gates yielding to the world instead, the pragmatic circuit-breaker would kick in. In the antitrust case it did not, and, as this newspaper argued at the time (see article), he was lucky that it did not lead to the break-up of his company.
然后再看看实用主义如何妨碍盖茨先生进一步成功。他很难听取别人意见，对细节斤斤计较，完全不能容忍他称之为”笨蛋”的人，这让微软的人无不忧心。但司法系统可不吃这一套。当微软陷入反垄断调查时流出的一段影像中，盖茨先生危言恐吓脾气暴躁，他坐在椅子中微微发抖，显得骄慢自大。这段影片难得的向公众展示了盖茨先生自我感觉天赋异禀想要世界屈从他意志的一面。当微软的财富都取决与盖茨先生是否会向世界低头时，他就会切换到实用主义的一面。但在反垄断一案中并未如此。本报当时就认为，此事没让其公司分崩离析是他的幸运。

Inevitability and temperament are two hallmarks of Gates the innovator. The third is the transience of all pioneers. The argument was brilliantly laid out by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School. The perfecting of a technology by a well managed company catering to its best customers leaves it vulnerable to “disruption” by a cheaper, scrappier alternative that is good enough for everyone else. That could be a description of Microsoft’s Office, which now does more than almost anybody could wish for-even as Google and others are offering free basic word-processors and spreadsheets online.
势不可当与魅力四射是盖茨作为革新者的两大标志，第三个就是同所有开拓者一样-好景不长了。哈佛商业学院的Clayton Christensen对此有极其高明的论断。不断完善管理和技术以满足高端用户需求的公司其一贯方针很容易被打断，最终选择生产价格便宜，质量刚够满足大众需求的产品。微软的Office系列收费软件正是如此，它现在的功能强大到几乎超出所有人的预想，可Google和其他公司却提供了仅有基本功能却完全免费的在线文字处理和电子表格软件。

Mr Gates was haunted by Mr Christensen’s insight-he even asked for his help to keep back the tide. Microsoft successfully extended Windows as an operating system for servers; it has moved into new areas, such as mobile devices and video games; and it has lavished billions of dollars on all sorts of research-without much to show for it. Despite all those efforts, the PC, Mr Gates’s obsession, has ended up as an internet terminal. The company still has everything to prove online (see article). Watching Microsoft in the company of Google and Facebook is a bit like watching your dad trying to be cool.
盖茨先生正陷入了Christensen所描述的情形中。他甚至向后者请教过如何阻止这一潮流。微软成功的把Windows操作系统拓展到服务器上。并且不断涉足新的领域，比如移动设备和视频游戏。在各个领域的研究上一掷千金-哪怕成果并不明朗。尽管所有这些努力，盖茨先生一直所执着的个人电脑已经成为网络终端。在互联网各个方面，他的公司依然需要努力证明自己。看着微软同谷歌和Facebook这些互联网时代新贵较劲就有点像看你老爸努力装酷的样子。

Business is good for you
商场是你的天地

Mr Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time-but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet computing. This does not diminish his achievement. Nor, as some would have it, does his philanthropy necessarily magnify it. Whatever the corporate-social-responsibility gurus say, business is a force for good in itself: its most useful contribution to society is making profits and products.
在他的时代，盖茨先生好运不断。然而他还难以胜任合作分散的网络计算时代，尽管这并不会使他的成就缩水。同时他的慈善事业也不会如一些人认为的那样必定为他锦上添花。不管这位身负公司和社会责任的巨头如何说，商业的力量永远在于其本身，它对社会最有用的贡献就是生成利润和产品。

philanthropy no more canonises the good businessman than it exculpates the bad. In spite of his flaws, Mr Gates is one of the good kind. Some great industrialists, like Henry Ford, stick around even as the world moves on and their powers fail. Mr Gates, pragmatic to the end, is leaving at the top.
慈善更多是为坏商人开脱，而非为好商人歌功颂德。瑕不掩瑜，盖茨先生还算好的那类。一些行业泰斗，比如亨利.福特，在时代变迁，风光不再时依然抱残守缺。盖茨先生最终选择实用主义，激流勇退。