The headquarters of the popular note-taking app Evernote are typical of many Silicon Valley firms. There's a cafeteria brimming with free food, vending machines offering up free tech supplies, and conference rooms bearing wacky names. (Evernote's theme is videogames: You might have a meeting in Ace Combat, Elder Scrolls, or Dig Dug.)

Evernote的总部─流行的同名笔记应用程序诞生的地方─是一家典型的硅谷公司。那里有摆满了免费食品的咖啡厅，提供免费科技用品的自动贩售机以及名称稀奇古怪的会议室。（Evernote的主题是电子游戏：你参加会议的房间可能会被称作皇牌空战(Ace Combat)、上古卷轴(Elder Scrolls)或者挖挖特攻队(Dig Dug)。）

And then there are the whiteboards -- or, more accurately, the whitewalls. When the company moved last year into the Redwood City, Calif., building, it painted almost every surface with IdeaPaint, a substance that makes walls amenable to dry-erase markers.

此外，那里还有白板─或者更精确的说：白 。去年，当这家公司搬到位于加利福尼亚州雷德伍德城(Redwood City)的这座大楼中时，他们用白板漆(IdeaPaint)粉刷了几乎每一面 壁。用白板笔写在这种涂料上的字可以被轻松擦掉。

Now most of the building is a canvas for brainstorming, product design, strategy war-gaming, and, of course, doodles. Whether you're in an Evernote conference room, a hallway, or one of its large atriums stuffed with coders, you'll see scribbles wherever you turn.

现在，这座大楼大部分已经成了一块大画布，写满了头脑风暴、产品设计和策略沙盘推演草稿，当然，随意的涂鸦也混迹其中。无论你身处Evernote的会议室、走廊还是哪个放满了编码器的开阔天井中，你随时都能看到乱涂乱画的杰作。

At first blush this might strike you as incongruent. Evernote Corp.'s products are designed to render everything you think of and see, from grocery lists to websites to business cards, into digital notes that can be stored online forever.

乍看起来，你可能觉得这完全不匹配。Evernote的产品理念是把你想到的和看到的每一件事物─无论是采买清单、网站还是商务名片─都转化成能够被永久性存储的数字笔记。

The people who work at Evernote would thus seem to be the world's most ardent proselytizers of everything digital, and you might guess that the old-fashioned, hopelessly analog dry-erase marker would be out of place among such future folk.

因此，Evernote的员工似乎是世界上最热衷于投入全数字时代的人，你可能以为在这群未来战士眼中，老式的、无可救药的白板笔完全没有一席之地。

Yet Evernote, like pretty much every tech company I've ever visited, is in thrall to the whiteboard. Indeed, as technologically backward as they may seem, whiteboards are to Silicon Valley what legal pads are to lawyers, what Excel is to accountants, or what long sleeves are to magicians.

不过，就像我曾经拜访过的几乎所有科技公司一样，Evernote对白板简直无法自拔。事实上，白板可能看上去没有任何科技含量，但它对于硅谷的意义正如法律便签本对于律师、Excel软件对于会计以及长袖服装对于魔术师的意义一样。

They're an all-purpose tool of innovation, often the first place a product or company's vision is dreamed up and designed, and a constant huddling point for future refinement. And though many digital technologies have attempted to unseat the whiteboard, the humble pre-electronic surface can't be beat.

白板是一种万能的创新工具，它往往是一款产品或公司愿景最初被缔造和设计的地方，也是未来改良持续发生的地方。尽管很多项数字科技曾经试图取代白板的功能，但是这种低调的、非电子时代的书写平台却无法被打败。

The whiteboard has three chief virtues: It's fast. It's easy to use. And it's big. 'We're often doing something I call 'designing in the hallway,' ' said Jamie Hull, the product manager for Evernote's iOS apps. 'When a new problem or request comes up, the fastest thing you can do is pull two or three people aside, go to the nearest wall, and figure it out.'

白板拥有三个主要优点：书写迅速、容易使用且面积大。Evernote的iOS应用程序产品经理杰米・赫尔(Jamie Hull)表示：“我把我们经常做的一件事称之为‘在走廊里设计’。当一个新问题或新要求出现的时候，你能做到的最快的事情就是召集两三个人，来到最近的 壁，找出相应的解决方案。”

Unlike a computer or phone, the whiteboard is always on, always fully charged, and it doesn't require that people download, install, and launch software to begin using it.

与电脑或手机不同的是，白板永远随时待命、永远电量充足，它不需要使用者在使用前下载、安装或运行软件。

Whiteboards also allow for presenting a wide-range of information-writing, sketches, graphs -- while requiring no learning curve. If you can handle a pen, you can use a whiteboard. Though there are certainly great whiteboard artists, a whiteboard's casual, doodly nature lends itself even to people like myself, whose penmanship borders on the unreadable.

在白板上，你可以演示很多不同种类的信息─比如文字、草图和图表等─而这种技巧并不需要学习。只要你能拿笔，你就可以使用白板。尽管世界上当然有些出色的白板艺术家，但是白板随意的涂鸦特性让即使像我这样笔迹潦草的人也能上手。

This is in marked contrast to digital tools, which might require people to figure out certain buttons or other functions, or even get used to using a stylus or writing with fingers.

这一点与数字工具截然不同，数字工具或许要求使用者掌握某些按键或其他功能的用法，甚至要求使用者习惯于用手写笔或用手写字。

The whiteboard's hugeness is another key feature. The board is big enough to become the center of attention for a large crowd, making it an ideal space for a kind of visceral, physical collaboration, with lots of pointing, erasing and furious crossings out. That sort of thing can't easily be achieved on small, clinical screens.

面积大是白板的另一个主要特色。白板大到足以成为一群人的注意焦点，这使它成为了人们进行智力及身体协作的理想场合，使用者还可以在黑板上罗列重点、擦去甚至划去先前的内容。而这在小面积的简陋平台上是无法轻松实现的。

The whiteboard's size also enforces a certain kind of thought. Whiteboards reward bigness: Because you've got to draw objects large enough for everyone to see, and because dry-erase markers are too fat to allow you to write too much text, the whiteboard encourages thinking about the highest levels of an idea, and it discourages getting lost in details. In tech terms, whiteboards are low-resolution -- and in an era of increasingly high-definition communication systems, they're one of the few such low-def tools we have.

白板之大还可以激发思想，也带来了回报：因为你必须要画出每个人都能看到的足够大的内容，此外，白板笔太粗还导致你无法写出太多文字，因此，白板可以促使你把想法发展到最极致的水平，它还会防止你在细节中迷失自我。用技术术语来讲，白板是低分辨率的─在当今沟通系统的分辨率越来越高的背景下，白板是我们拥有的为数不多的低分辨率工具之一。

It's this bigness that makes the whiteboard the perfect tool for embarking on the sort of grand visions that animate Silicon Valley. It will come as no surprise, then, that some of the tech industry's most celebrated visionaries are often maestros of the whiteboard.

白板之大使它成为了激发硅谷想象力的完美工具。所以，毫不意外，科技领域一些最知名的有远见的人往往是白板大师。

According to Brad Stone's new book about Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. CEO is given to manning the whiteboard to explain to his employees why they're wrong about everything.

布拉德・斯通(Brad Stone)在他有关杰夫・贝索斯(Jeff Bezos)的新书中写道，这位亚马逊公司(Amazon.com Inc.)的CEO非常乐衷于利用白板向员工们解释为什么他们每一件事都做得不对。

Steve Jobs -- who certainly had a keen interest in the smallest of product details -- was an artist with the whiteboard. He used it to explain corporate strategy to his employees, he used it to outline his product ideas, and he used it to formulate his grandest ideas for Apple Inc. When Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he famously killed most of the foundering firm's products and replaced them with a lineup that he outlined on a two-by-two grid on a whiteboard: A notebook and desktop for consumers, and another pair for professionals.

史蒂夫・乔布斯─无疑对再小不过的产品细节都无比重视的人─就是一位白板艺术家。他用白板向员工们解释公司战略，用白板描述他的产品创意，还用白板勾勒了他对于苹果公司发展的最伟大构想。当乔布斯在1997年重返苹果公司时，他的著名举措就是否决了这家正在走下坡路的公司的大多数产品，并且用描绘在一块分割为四个板块的白板上的新产品线替换了那些老旧产品：他描绘的新产品是面向普通用户和专业人士的笔记本电脑和台式电脑。

Sure, there are disadvantages to the whiteboard. It's synchronous and physical, meaning that it can't be easily shared with people across the country, and can't be easily worked on by different people at different times. It's also not easy to back up or search -- if you erase something or forget a great idea, you can't go back and find it.

当然，白板也有一些缺陷。比如，白板的同步性和实物性，这意味著书写在白板上的内容并不方便与身在其他地点的人分享，也不方便得到不同的人在不同时间的反馈。另外，白板上的内容不容易备份或搜索─如果你擦掉了一些内容或者忘记了一个很棒的主意，你便无法找回它们了。

Well, not until recently. At Evernote, the team usually snaps photos of every whiteboard session, shuffling them all off to the company's app for long-term backup. Evernote also recognizes whiteboard text, allowing the documents to be searched. So there you go: With a digital tweak, the analog whiteboard is unbeatable.

不过，到最近这种情况已经有所改观。在Evernote，工作人员就经常给白板上的内容拍照，并把所有照片都上传至公司内部的一个应用程序中以供长期备份。Evernote还能识别白板上的文字，并支持关键字搜索。所以事情就是这样：通过数字化改造，模拟的白板无法被打败。