乔布斯传 第545期:铃鼓先生(1)（在线收听）

Mr. Tambourine Man

“铃鼓先生”

Andy Lack's first annual meeting at Sony was in April 2003, the same week that Apple launched the iTunes Store.

安迪·拉克在索尼参加的第一次年度会议是在2003年4月，和苹果公司推出iTunes商店的时间在同一周。

He had been made head of the music division four months earlier, and had spent much of that time negotiating with Jobs.

他在4个月之前被指派掌管音乐部门，花了很多时间和乔布斯谈判。

In fact he arrived in Tokyo directly from Cupertino, carrying the latest version of the iPod and a description of the iTunes Store.

实际上，他带着最新版本的iPod和关于iTunes商店的介绍，从库比蒂诺直接飞到了东京。

In front of the two hundred managers gathered, he pulled the iPod out of his pocket.

在200位经理面前，他从口袋里拿出了iPod。

"Here it is," he said as CEO Nobuyuki Idei and Sony's North America head Howard Stringer looked on.

“就是这个。”CEO出井伸之和索尼北美区总裁霍华德·斯金格看了看。

"Here's the Walkman killer. There's no mystery meat.

“随身听的大敌来了。这并不是个徒有其表、滥竽充数的东西。

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."

我们收购一家音乐公司的原因就是为了能做出这样的产品。我们可以做得更好。”

But Sony couldn't. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman,

但是索尼并没有做到。它拥有前卫的便携式随身听系列，

it had a great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices.

有一家很棒的唱片公司，还有多年制造精致的消费电子产品的经验。

It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs's strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales.

它拥有所有能与乔布斯的“硬件、软件、设备、内容销售整合战略”相匹敌的资本。

Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner,

那为什么失败了？一部分原因在于索尼是一家像AOL时代华纳这样的大公司，

that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines;

旗下有多个分支（“分支”这个词本身就不吉利），每个分支都有自己的“底线”。

the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.

在这样的公司里，如果让多个分支为了共同目标而协同运作，通常是很难实现的。