Chapter 24 The first session of distinguished guests

Kai-fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, often recalls meeting Jobs for the first time.It was a weekend in the early winter of 1989, and the weather in Pittsburgh was freezing.Carnegie Mellon University, built on the hillside, is like a park attached to the edge of the city. In the bright sunshine, it looks more fresh and quiet. Kai-fu Lee, who was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon at the time, received a call from his mentor, Raj Reddy, at home. "Hi, Kai-fu," Reddy's voice sounded excited, "today we have a distinguished guest in our laboratory. Can you come to the school? I think you must be interested in demonstrating your voice recognition system."

"Oh? Who is he?" Kai-fu Lee asked curiously. "An important, important man. You must be dying to meet him. His name is Steve Zeops." "Steve Jobs?" Kai-fu Lee didn't realize it all of a sudden. He was stunned for a moment before suddenly realizing, "Oh, oh, you mean Steve Jobs? The founder of Apple?" "Yes, that's him!" Professor Reddy spoke with an Indian accent, no wonder Kai-fu Lee didn't hear clearly at first. "Really? I can see Jobs soon?" Li Kaifu was as happy as a child. When he arrived at the campus, Kai-fu Lee saw a tall and handsome young man standing beside Professor Ruidi, wearing a light gray trench coat over his suit, with handsome shoulders and deep eyes. resemblance.He is Steve Jobs, who has been away from Apple for 4 years and is running around promoting the newly released NeXT computer.

Kai-fu Lee demonstrated to Jobs the world's first non-specific continuous speech recognition system invented by himself.The demonstration was so successful that Jobs praised it repeatedly: "Wow, it's amazing! This is a technology that can change the future and shake the earth!" Kai-fu Lee was very happy when he heard Apple's founder praise himself. He thought that Jobs might invest in or buy the patented technology he invented.But he soon discovered that Jobs's praise of himself was actually a ulterior motive.The purpose of Jobs' trip was mainly to discuss cooperation with the computer department and promote NeXT computers, not to investigate a new technology.Sure enough, when the topic changed, Jobs said to Kai-fu Lee:

"Your speech recognition system is implemented on Sun workstations, right? You know what? Our NeXT workstations are faster and more powerful than Sun's. The operating system we use, NeXTSTEP, is based on your Carnegie Mellon University Developed by the Mach kernel, it represents the future technology, has the best graphical user interface, and the most flexible object-oriented development model. If you port your speech recognition system to a NeXT computer, the effect will be much better.” In this way, Jobs won an order from Carnegie Mellon University with his excellent marketing talent.A batch of NeXT workstations came to the laboratory of the Department of Computer Science soon.Kai-fu Lee also tried to port his speech recognition system to NeXT computers.However, the results of the trial disappointed Lee Kai-fu.Although the NeXT workstation provides a more user-friendly development and user interface, the speed of NeXT is much slower than the Sun workstation used by Kai-fu Lee at the time, and it is not as powerful as Jobs introduced.This is a tragedy for a speech recognition system that cares most about CPU speed.

But in any case, Jobs' trip to Carnegie Mellon left an unforgettable impression on Kai-Fu Lee.Later, when Kai-Fu Lee joined Apple, Jobs was still in charge of NeXT.Shortly after Lee Kai-fu left Apple, Jobs returned to Apple.The two have never been able to work together in the same company. Speaking of it, it is really a big regret. Carnegie Mellon University, where Kai-fu Lee is located, is simply a holy place for researchers, students, and engineers in the field of computer science.The world's top researchers are gathered here, with innumerable first-class scientific research achievements and patented technologies, and its influence is no less than that of Shaolin and Wudang in the world of martial arts.Kai-fu Lee's mentor, Raj Reddy, is a Turing Award winner, and his status is almost equivalent to a master in the martial arts.In addition to Kai-fu Lee, Reddy has also trained the inventor of the Java language——James Gosling (James Gosling)—such a high-ranking student is indeed well-deserved.

At Carnegie Mellon, there are many similar masters.A guy named Rick Rashid had caught Jobs' attention a few years earlier. In 1985, Professor Rashid began to lead a team at Carnegie Mellon to conduct research on the next-generation operating system kernel.Based on the most cutting-edge "microkernel" theory, Rashid's team successfully developed Mach, a new UNIX-like operating system kernel. As soon as Jobs saw Mach, he immediately realized that this kind of operating system kernel representing the future and the NeXT computer, which was also facing the future, were a perfect match.Without doing anything, Jobs simply went to Carnegie Mellon University and launched a massive "poaching" work against Professor Rashid and his team.

Unfortunately, Jobs failed to persuade Professor Rashid.Rashid joined Microsoft in 1991 and soon became a senior vice president leading Microsoft Global Research.But Jobs still succeeded in poaching a programming genius from Professor Rashid's team.Coincidentally, this programming genius was also a classmate of Kai-Fu Lee at Carnegie Mellon. His name was Avadis Tevanian. Tevanian is an Armenian-American who showed a knack for programming when he was a student at Carnegie Mellon.According to Li Kaifu's recollection, although Tevanian was not outstanding in theoretical study in the class and his test scores were average, his hands-on programming ability was absolutely outstanding.No matter how difficult the problem is, no matter how complicated the logic is, once it is in his hands, it will quickly become a line of exquisite code.Tevanian has long been a unique figure in Professor Rashid's Mach team. Jobs has firmly locked him in from the beginning, and dug him into NeXT.

Later, Tevanian returned to Apple with Jobs, and applied his accumulation on Mach and NeXTSTEP to Apple's new-generation operating system Mac OS X, becoming the number one person in Apple's software field, also known as " The Father of OS X".More importantly, Tevanian was also one of the troikas who helped Jobs turn the tide and create another glories after Jobs returned to Apple.The other two wagons are Jonathan Ive, who leads product design, and Jon Rubinstein, who heads hardware and engineering.Of course, these are things for later, we will not show them for the time being.