iPad专题.docx

1、iPad专题iPad专题Lex专栏：大放异彩的iPad Tech takes tablets 英国金融时报 Lex专栏 Filler of stockings, saviour of publishing, compulsory accessory for the self-respecting executive: tablets are hard to ignore, as is the company that in 2010 finally made them a success: Apple.它是装在袜子里的圣诞礼物，它是出版业的救星，它是自视甚高的高管必需的配饰。人们很难忽视平板电

2、脑，也无法忽视今年最终让平板电脑取得成功的那家公司苹果(Apple)。Between unveiling the iPad in April and New Years eve next week, the company will have sold about 14m of its new toy, the most successful product launch in Apples history (it took more than three years for iPods to sell at the same rate). But beyond the immediate i

3、mpact to Apples share price, the arrival of tablets marks the culmination of a long anticipated trend: convergence.从今年4月发布之日起，到新年前夜，苹果的iPad销量将达到1400万部，成为该公司历史上发布最为成功的产品（iPod达到同等销量花了3年多）。但除了对苹果股价的直接影响，iPad的问世还标志着一个人们期待已久的一个趋势趋同性达到了顶点。Assuming that the next version of the iPad contains a camera, there

4、 are now marked technological similarities among many types of devices: music players, phones, tablets and laptops. Indeed, this commonality has helped Apple expand its product lines with comparatively little research and development spending.假设iPad的下一个版本包含照相功能，那么如今的很多种设备在技术上都具有明显的相似性：音乐播放器、手机、平板电脑和

5、笔记本电脑。实际上，这种共性使得苹果只需投入相对较少的研发支出，就拓展了产品系列。The convergence is good for Apple, but is a threat to some established supply chains and manufacturers. Few anticipated the rapid move to flash-based storage or the sale of software via app stores. Estimates for PC sales five years hence require far more gues

6、swork than before, because the extent to which tablets replace laptops is unknown (although likely considerable).趋同性对于苹果有利，但对于一些老牌供应商和制造商却是威胁。很少有人预料到，市场会如此之快转向基于闪存的存储设备，或通过应用软件在线商店来销售软件。因此，要预计未来5年个人电脑的销量，要比以前更费脑子，因为平板电脑将在多大程度上取代笔记本电脑仍是一个未知数（尽管可能会很可观）。Yet Apple could also be threatened by convergence

7、. For now, tablets are constrained by what is effectively smartphone software, so they remain largely consumption devices. A tablet operating system that allows effective content creation would provide the final death knell to PCs, but give a sliver of hope to manufacturers and indeed staid old Micr

8、osoft that they can displace Apple.不过，苹果可能也会受到趋同性的威胁。目前，平板电脑收到软件限制这些软件实际上更像智能手机软件因此它们基本上仍属于消费设备。当平板电脑的操作系统允许高效创建内容时，将为个人电脑敲响最后的丧钟，但会给制造商（事实上还有沉寂的老微软(Microsoft)）带来一丝希望的曙光：它们能够取代苹果。What next? Well, with touchscreen computers integrated into the walls of homes and offices and every digital aspect of ea

9、ch persons life controlled from a personal tablet, the future is just a short hop, skip and a jump away.接下来又是什么？由于触摸屏电脑走进了家庭和办公室，每个人生活中可以数字化的方方面面，都可以从一台个人平板电脑加以控制，未来距我们只有一步之遥。Lex专栏是由FT评论家联合撰写的短评，对全球经济与商业进行精辟分析译者/梁艳裳在iPad上办报 iPad should compete with the web英国金融时报专栏作家 约翰加普 Richard Branson and Rupert M

10、urdoch are entrepreneurs with an admirable record of ignoring conventional wisdom, so it is worth watching when they do the same thing at once.理查德布兰森(Richard Branson)和鲁珀特默多克(Rupert Murdoch)这两位企业家历来就不肯墨守成规，这一点令人钦佩。因此，当他们两人在同一时间做同一件事时，值得加以关注。In this case, they are launching iPad-only publications. Sir

11、 Richard bowled into New York on Tuesday to unveil a 1.79 or $2.99 monthly magazine called Project, while Mr Murdoch is about to launch a “newspaper” called The Daily, for which he hopes 800,000 people will pay $1 a week. Both will charge readers in an era when most internet publications are free.我这

12、里说的是，他们两人都即将推出只面向iPad的出版物。理查德爵士上周二在纽约宣布，他计划推出定价1.79英镑或2.99美元的月刊Project，而默多克将推出“日报”The Daily，每周收费1美元，他希望能够吸引80万订户。在大多数互联网出版物都免费提供的时代，他们两人却都打算向读者收费。The fact that Mr Murdoch will separate his new daily publication from “the open web” by publishing on the iPad has provoked scepticism and hostility in di

13、gital media circles. “Murdoch keeps fighting the internet and the internet keeps on winning,” wrote Mathew Ingram of the GigaOm technology blog.默多克要在iPad上发行日报，此等脱离“开放互联网”的举动，在数字媒体圈子中引发了怀疑和敌意。“默多克一直在和互联网作战，而赢的总是互联网，”马修英格拉姆(Mathew Ingram)在科技博客GigaOm上写道。This fits into a bigger debate about whether comp

14、anies are balkanising the web to gain economic leverage. Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who invented the World Wide Web, complained in Scientific American about Facebooks private accumulation of data, and of print publishers “disturbing” wish to create closed worlds.这件事落入了一个更广泛的辩论范畴：为了获得经济效益

15、，企业是否正在互联网上“占山为王”？发明万维网的英国科学家蒂姆贝尔纳斯-李(Tim Berners-Lee)在科学美国人(Scientific American)上抱怨Facebook私下搜集数据的行为，以及印刷媒体欲构建封闭世界这一“令人不安”的事实。Yet, even leaving business models aside, it is hard to blame them. The truth is that, two decades after Sir Tim pioneered it, the internet has proven a poor medium for publi

16、shers who originate a lot of news and information. It has gone further than levelling the playing field between old-style publishers and start-ups it has given the advantage to low-cost information providers.然而，就算抛开商业模式不谈，人们也很难对他们横加指责。事实上，在蒂姆爵士发明万维网20年后，对原创大量新闻和信息的出版商来说，互联网已证明是个糟糕透顶的媒体。它不仅促成了新老出版商之间

17、的平等竞争，也令低成本信息提供商获得了优势。This was less clear before the iPad and other tablets came along, but it stares you in the face when you compare the experience of reading a publication with a lot of content on a desktop and a tablet. A regular browser on a computer is good for skimming (“surfing”) among many

18、different news sources, but poor at immersing you in one.有一点在iPad及其它平板电脑问世之前不甚明朗，但当你在台式电脑上和平板电脑上阅读同一份内容丰富的刊物、然后比较二者的体验时，这一点就变得一目了然了。电脑上常规的浏览器，用来在五花八门的新闻源之间泛泛浏览自是便利，但它很难让你沉浸在某个新闻源中。In his book The Shallows, the technology writer Nicholas Carr talked of the internets “uniquely rapid-fire mode of colle

19、cting and dispersing information” and argued that he was becoming accustomed “to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”在The Shallows一书中，科技作家尼古拉斯卡尔(Nicholas Carr)阐述了互联网“在收集和传播信息方面独一无二的迅捷模式”，称自己已渐渐习惯“按照网络分发信息的方式获取信息：它有如一束快速移动的粒子流”。It goes without

20、saying that the internet has great benefits in terms of the amount of information that can now be accessed directly, rather than being mediated by a newspaper or television news show. The idea that anyone could (if he or she chose) read the 250,000 US diplomatic cables soon to be made available by W

21、ikileaks would have been inconceivable two decades ago.不言而喻，互联网在信息量方面具有极大优势，人们如今可从互联网上直接获取信息，而无需经由报纸或电视新闻节目“转播”。任何人（只要愿意）都可以阅读维基解密(Wikileaks)不久将公布的25万份美国外交电报，这种事在20年前是不可思议的。But there is no such thing as a neutral medium. Just as newspapers, radio and television offered different methods of presentin

22、g news and information, with varying degrees of depth, the internet favours some forms of content over others. People tend to skim the home pages of sites rather than delving deeply because browsers work that way.然而，根本不存在什么“中性媒体”。正如报纸、广播和电视以不同呈现方式提供深度各不相同的新闻和信息一样，互联网也会偏重某些形式的内容。人们往往浏览网站的主页，很少深入网站展开阅

23、读。这是浏览器工作模式所致。If you try to dig far into a web publication, the pages often load slowly and it is hard to find your way out again, or even to know where you are within it. The web is an infinite experience. You never have a feeling for what the whole is,” says John Rose, a partner of Boston Consulti

24、ng Group.若你想深挖某网站的内容，页面打开往往较为缓慢，而且你将很难找到“回头路”，甚至不知自己现在“身在何处”。“互联网给人漫无边际的体验，你永远也说不清整体的感觉。”波士顿咨询集团(Boston Consulting Group)合伙人约翰罗斯(John Rose)表示。This tends to favour shallow (I mean that technically, rather than as a value judgment) sites with a lot of aggregated material and links, such as Gawker and

25、the Huffington Post, over those weighted towards deep stacks of original content. The line is blurring as upstarts shift toward producing more original material, but the point stands.这往往对提供大量综合性信息和链接的“浅显”（这里是就技术而言，无关价值判断）网站有利，比如Gawker和赫芬顿邮报(The Huffington Post)，而对那些偏重于提供大量深度原创内容的网站不利。随着新兴网站逐渐增加原创内容，

26、两类网站之间的界线渐趋模糊，但上述论点依然成立。The iPad, with its full-screen apps containing a single game or information source changes that, as does the fact that an entire edition can be downloaded at once. This makes it easier to navigate in depth and to know where you are an experience akin to print.iPad推出仅包含单个游戏或单个

27、信源的全屏应用程序，而且一期刊物可以一次性整体下载。这些做法改变了上述情况，让深入浏览变得更加容易，也便于读者知道自己“身在何处”，类似于印刷出版物带给人的体验。On a tablet, an edited, in-depth publication has a better chance of competing with the atomised, open-source information flow of the open web. That is what Sir Richard and Mr Murdoch have bet on that a tablet restores t

28、he advantage of depth over breadth.在平板电脑上，一份经过编辑、有深度的出版物，有更好的机会与开放互联网上极度分散的开源信息流展开竞争。理查德和默多克赌的就是这一点：平板电脑将恢复深度相对广度的优势。That may not be enough many people are happy to live in the world of free, distributed information and will prefer it. “If you think that the day of the editor deciding what you read

29、today is dead then these apps will fall apart,” says Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis.这或许还不够许多人乐于生活在信息免费分发的世界里，并将继续选择这种方式获取信息。“假如你认为由编辑决定人们一天阅读内容的日子已经结束，那么这些应用软件就将无立足之地。”Enders Analysis分析师班尼迪克埃文斯(Benedict Evans)表示。My bet is that the two will co-exist, just as new forms of media have always done wit

30、h existing ones in the past. There is evidence that people are willing to spend far longer up to 45 minutes in the case of some magazines with an iPad publication than its website.我认为这两种方式将会共存，就如新式媒体往往与老式媒体共存一样。有证据表明，比起在出版物网站上阅读，人们愿意花更长时间阅读它的iPad版就某些杂志来说，这两者最长相差45分钟。Sir Tim would prefer publishers t

31、o stick to the rules, and the embedded biases, of the medium he pioneered. But, despite all of the public good the web has brought, that argument has no more moral force than if a print baron insisted on everyone producing newspapers.蒂姆爵士大概希望出版商严守规则，不要打破互联网固有的成规。但是，尽管互联网为公众带来了种种好处，上述观点的道德力量却和出版业大亨坚决

32、主张所有出版商都应只出版报纸无异。If Sir Richard and Mr Murdoch want to offer products in a new medium rather than the old one, let them. It is not as if they have some iron grip over digital distribution. The iPad has a browser and they will be up against many against thousands of other apps.如果理查德爵士和默多克希望在一种新媒体上、而不是老媒体上提供产品，那就随他们去吧。这并不等于他们牢牢控制了数字出版。在拥有浏览器的iPad上，他们将面对成千上万其它应用软件的竞争。Who knows if either of them will succeed, but someone w