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  3. Twenty years ago there was panic in Cupertino, Calif. Only a week remained b

Twenty years ago there was panic in Cupertino, Calif. Only a week remained b

游客2025-04-14  28
问题     Twenty years ago there was panic in Cupertino, Calif. Only a week remained before the team of whiz kids designing Apple’s radical new computer had to turn in the final code. The giant factory was ready. The soon-to-be-famous Super Bowl commercial was ready. But the computer wasn’t.
    As recounted by software wizard Andy Hertzfeld on a new cyber-digital history site(folkore.org), the already overworked Mac team trudged back to the cubicles for seven days of debugging hell, fueled by espresso chocolate beans and a dream. And on Jan. 24, 1984, their leader, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, recited a verse from "The Times They Are A-Changing" then formally unveiled the Macintosh, a boxy little guy with a winning smile icon on it nine-inch monochrome screen. The Mac-oids fully expected to make computer history, and they did. What surprises them now is that their creation is still around two decades later.
    Only nine years after the first personal computer(a build-it-yourself box whose only input was a set of switches), Apple’s team had delivered an experience that would persist into the next century. This was the graphical user interface(GUI), a mind-blowing contrast to the pre-1984 standard of glowing green characters and arcane commands. Though Apple didn’t come up with the idea of windows on a screen and a mouse to let people naturally manipulate information, the Macintosh refined and popularized those concepts. Lots of people criticized—and some made fun of—those advances at the time. But even Apple’s rivals became convinced that the GUI was groovy. Now, no matter what computer you use, you’re using, essentially, a Mac.
    The original Mac was costly, underpowered and had no cursor keys. Early sales disappointed Apple, and the then CEO John Sculley fired Jobs in 1985. Eventually, Mac became equipped with more memory and storage, and people began to discover the machine’s ability to become a tool for the new pursuit of desktop publishing. The machine began to take off. But the business world never warmed to Macintosh, and by the mid-90’s tech pundits were crafting Apple obituaries. In 1997 prodigal cofounder Jobs returned and restored Apple’s luster with innovations like the eye-popping iMac.
    "I think Apple’s now doing the best work it’s ever done," says Jobs. "But all of us on the Mac team consider it the high point of our professional careers. I only wish we knew a fraction of what we know now." Even now for its 25 million users, the Macintosh is a source of passion.(Journalists know that a disparaging word about an iMac or a PowerBook will unleash a hundred flames from rabid Apple-heads.)Steve Jobs thinks he knows why. "In the modern world there aren’t a lot of products where the people who make them love them. How many products are made that way these days?"
    If that’s so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple’s recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent? Jobs has a theory about that, too. Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation that protecting its turf. "The Mac-user interface was a 10-year monopoly," says Jobs. "Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens."
    A wicked smile cracks the bearded, crinkly Steve Jobs’s visage, and for a moment he could be the playful upstart who shocked the world 20 years ago. "Hmm, look who’s running Microsoft now," he says, referring to former Procter & Gamble marketer Steve Ballmer. "A sales guy!" The smile gets broader. "I wonder..." he says. [br] According to Jobs, the main reason the Mac market share did not go up much was that______.
选项 A、market share and company profit were treated equally
B、the monopoly of Mac lasted too long
C、any monopoly would end sooner or later
D、sales people were only concerned about profits
答案 D
解析 本题为推断题。根据倒数第二段中的“Who ended up running the company?Salesguys．At the critical juncture in the late’80s，when they should have gone for market share，theywent for profits．”可知，乔布斯认为，在20世纪80年代末期的关键时刻，销售人员本应该追逐市场份额，却只关注于利润，导致Mac市场份额极低。因此，D选项正确。
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