Joel on Software

Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity

里克查普曼在搜寻愚蠢

by Joel Spolsky Friday, August 01, 2003

(This is the foreword to Rick Chapman's new book, In Search of Stupidity.)

（这是给李克超普曼的新书《搜寻愚蠢》写的前言）

In every high tech company I’ve known, there’s a war going on, between the geeks and the suits.

在我知道的每一家高科技公司都发生着一场战争，一场极客和西装之间的战争。

Before you start reading this great new book full of propaganda from software marketing wizard and über-suit Rick Chapman, let me take a moment to tell you what the geeks think.

在你开始阅读这本充满了从软件市场营销指南到查普曼谈西装的伟大著作之前。让我花一点时间来告诉你，极客们是怎么想的？

Play along with me for a minute, will you?

跟我玩一分钟。你愿意吗？

Please imagine the most stereotypically pale, Jolt-drinking, Chinese-food-eating, video-game-playing, slashdot-reading Linux-command-line-dwelling dork. Since this is just a stereotype, you should be free to imagine either a runt or a kind of chubby fellow, but in either case this is not the kind of person who plays football with his high school pals when he visits mom for Thanksgiving. Also, since he’s a stereotype, I shall not have to make complicated excuses for making him a him.

你想象一下那种最典型的：脸色苍白的，爱喝汽水，爱吃中餐的，爱玩电玩的，爱读slashdot，然后活在linux命令行码头的那一类人。由于这只是一个典型。你可以尽情的想象不管是矮也好胖也好，但是不管怎么样这都不是那种感恩节回去拜访母亲的时候会跟他的高中同学一起踢足球的那种人。因为这只是个典型，我也不会编造复杂的理由把它捏造成这个样子。

This is what our stereotypical programmer thinks: “Microsoft makes inferior products, but they have superior marketing, so everybody buys their stuff.”

这就是我们典型的程序员的思维：微软做的产品更差，但是他们的市场做的很好。所以每个人都买他们的产品。

Ask him what he thinks about the marketing people in his own company. “They’re really stupid. Yesterday I got into a big argument with this stupid sales chick in the break room and after ten minutes it was totally clear that she had no clue what the difference between 802.11a and 802.11b is. Duh!”

问他他是怎么看他们公司的市场部人员的。“他们真的很蠢，昨天在休息室，我跟这个愚蠢的销售猪来了一场大争论。十分钟之后很明显他根本不知道802.11a和802.11b的区别，真蠢”。

What do marketing people do, young geek? “I don’t know. They play golf with customers or something, when they’re not making me correct their idiot spec sheets. If it was up to me I’d fire ‘em all.”

年轻的极客，销售人员是做什么的呢？我不知道！他们没有让我去帮他们修正他们那个傻叉的规范表格的时候，就会跟客户玩高尔夫或者其他什么东西。如果换了我是老板我简直会把它们全部开掉。

A nice fellow named Jeffrey Tarter used to publish an annual list of the hundred largest personal computer software publishers called the Soft-letter 100. Here’s what the top ten looked like in 1984[1]:

有一个叫JefferyTarter的好人曾经发布了一百个大的个人电脑软件销售商的年销售列表。叫做软件100。下面是1984年的时候这个列表的样子。

OK, Microsoft is number 2, but it is one of a handful of companies with roughly similar annual revenues.

好吧，微软排名第二，但是这只是一把年收入差不多的公司的销售额而已。

Now let’s look at the same list for 2001.

让我们看看同一个列表2001年的样子。

Whoa. Notice, if you will, that every single company except Microsoft has disappeared from the top ten. Also notice, please, that Microsoft isso much larger than the next largest player, it’s not even funny. Adobe would double in revenues if they could just get Microsoft’s soda pop budget.

哇哦，稍加注意的话，你会发现：除了微软之外的每一个公司都已经从前十里面消失了。同时请你注意，微软的销售额要比下一个公司大多了。更有意思的是，如果Adobe能够拿到微软的苏打水可乐预算的话，他们的收入就可以翻番。

The personal computer software market is Microsoft. Microsoft’s revenues, it turns out, make up 69% of the total revenues of all the top 100 companies combined.

个人电脑软件市场就是微软的。结果显示微软的营收占据了软件行业前一百公司所有营收总和的69%。

This is what we’re talking about, here.

这就是我们要讨论的。

Is this just superior marketing, as our imaginary geek claims? Or the result of an illegal monopoly? (Which begs the question: how did Microsoft get that monopoly? You can’t have it both ways.)

这难道只是像我们想象出来的那个极客声称的卓越的市场营销。还是不合法的垄断的结果？（这就引出了一个问题，微软是如何取得那个独裁地位的。你不可能怎么样都能做到那个位置）

According to Rick Chapman, the answer is simpler: Microsoft was the only company on the list that never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really? We ridiculed them, shut it off, and went back to using Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer every minute of every day. But for every other software company that once had market leadership and saw it go down the drain, you can point to one or two giant blunders that steered the boat into an iceberg. Micropro fiddled around rewriting the printer architecture instead of upgrading their flagship product, WordStar. Lotus wasted a year and a half shoehorning 123 to run on 640KB machines; by the time they were done Excel was shipping and 640KB machines were a dim memory. Digital Research wildly overcharged for CP/M-86 and lost a chance to be the de-facto standard for PC operating systems. VisiCorp sued themselves out of existence. Ashton-Tate never missed an opportunity to piss off dBase developers, poisoning the fragile ecology that is so vital to a platform vendor’s success.

根据里克查普曼，答案更简单：微软公司是那个列表上所有的公司里面唯一一个没有犯过任何致命的愚蠢错误的公司。不管这是超级大脑思考出来的结果，还是纯粹是狗屎运。微软公司所犯下的最大错误就是那个会跳舞的文件夹。那到底有多糟呢？我们开过这玩意儿的玩笑，然后就把它关了。然后又回去每天每分钟都在用Word，Excel，Outlook IE。但是对于其他曾经占据着市场主导地位的软件公司。我们看见他们慢慢被排挤出去。你总可以指出那样的一两个巨大失误把小船慢慢引向冰山。MircoPro忙得团团转重写他们的打印机架构而不是升级他们的旗舰产品。WordStar Lotus浪费了一年半的时间为了让123能够运行在640kb的机器上。等他们做到的时候，Excel发布了，而640k的机器都已经算是小的内存了。DigitalResearch过高的定价了他们的CP/M-86操作系统，失去了成为市场操作系统规范的机会。VisiCorp直接因为官司失去踪影。Ashton-Tate从来没有放弃过一个机会来激怒dbase开发者，进而毒害了这个脆弱的生态圈。而这对平台提供商的成功来说又是至关重要的。

I’m a programmer, of course, so I tend to blame the marketing people for these stupid mistakes. Almost all of them revolve around a failure of non-technical business people to understand basic technology facts. When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn’t know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products. Put Jim Manzi (the suit who let the MBAs take over Lotus) in that meeting and he would be staring blankly. “What’s a rich text edit control?” It never would have occurred to him to take technological leadership because he didn’t grok the technology; in fact, the very use of the word grok in that sentence would probably throw him off.

当然我是个程序员。对于这些愚蠢的错误我更加倾向于责怪市场销售人员。所有的这些事实几乎都包含了这样的一个失误那就是：尝试让非技术的商业人员去理解最基本的技术知识。当百事可乐的推手JohnSculley在开发苹果的Newton的时候。他并不知道这个国家所有计算机专业的从业人员都知道的一个事实：手写识别是不可能的。这个时候比尔盖茨正在召集程序员们开会，请求他们创建一个富文本编辑器可以复用在其他所有的产品中。如果把JimManzi（就是那个放弃NBA课程去接手Lotus的西装家伙）放在那个会议里他会黯然失色。什么是富文本编辑控件。他看起来从来没有想过要担当技术方面的领袖。因为他对技术不感冒。实际上在刚才那个句子里面只要用上“感冒”这种单词恐怕就会让他恶心一阵子了。

Buy the book

If you ask me, and I’m biased, no software company can succeed unless there is a programmer at the helm. So far the evidence backs me up. But many of these boneheaded mistakes come from the programmers themselves. Netscape’s monumental decision to rewrite their browser instead of improving the old code base cost them several years of Internet time, during which their market share went from around 90% to about 4%, and this was the programmers’ idea. Of course, the nontechnical and inexperienced management of that company had no idea why this was a bad idea. There are still scads of programmers who defend Netscape’s ground-up rewrite. “The old code really sucked, Joel!” Yeah, uh-huh. Such programmers should be admired for their love of clean code, but they shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of any business decisions, since it’s obvious that clean code is more important to them than shipping, uh, software.

如果你问我，而我是带偏见的，如果在智囊团里面没有程序员的话，没有软件公司会成功的。到目前为止所有的证据都可以支持我的观点。但是很多那些致命的错误也都是程序员自己犯的。网景公司里程碑式的决定要重写他们的浏览器而不是一点儿一点儿慢慢改进，使他们失去因特网的几年光景，他们的市场份额从90%降到了4%。而这恰恰是程序员的主意。当然那些非技术的，没有丰富经验的公司的管理人员，完全不知道为什么这是一个很糟糕的主意。哪怕时至今日还是会有许多程序员会站起来，支持网景公司从头开始的决定。Joel，旧代码实在是太糟了。 是啊，呵呵，这样的程序员也许应该因为他们喜欢干净的代码受人尊敬。但是不应该被允许参与到任何一百公尺以内发生的任何商业决定里。因为很明显干净的代码，对于他们来说。比发布软件更重要。

So I’ll concede to Rick a bit and say that if you want to be successful in the software business, you have to have a management team that thoroughly understands and loves programming, but they have to understand and love business, too. Finding a leader with strong aptitude in both dimensions is difficult, but it’s the only way to avoid making one of those fatal mistakes that Rick catalogs lovingly in this book. So read it, chuckle a bit, and if there’s a stupidhead running your company, get your résumé in shape and start looking for a house in Redmond.

所以我会接着里克再说一点。如果你想在软件行业取得成功的话。你是必须要有一个管理团队，完全的理解并且喜欢编程。但是他们也要理解和爱好商业。要找一个在这两个维度都很强的人是很困难的。但是这也是里克在他的书里面生动的总结的唯一能够避免那些致命决策失误的方式。所以读一下吧！一点点的消化，并且如果很傻的观念在管理你的公司的话，就准备好你的简历，在Redmond重新找一个公司把。

[1] Source: Soft*letter, Jeffrey Tarter ed., April 30, 2001, 17:11.