Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
- Bob Dylan, 1964
Steve Jobs, Disney Director and famous iCrapper, is a baby boomer. Bram Cohen, who wrote BitTorrent, Shawn Fanning, who developed Napster, Sergei Brin and Larry Page who founded Google, and Linus Torvalds famous Linux dude are all much younger than Jobs. Steve Jobs represents entrenched interests. The aforementioned Millennials famously promote open systems and free exchange of ideas. Jobs is a “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) kind of guy, the sort who believes the Disney copyrights on that mouse should be extended to the corporation in perpetuity.
Jobs leads a cult of dedicated customers, people who will buy his products regardless of performance because they’re marketed so well. In upscale malls across the US you can get Apple products the day they are released simply by standing in queue at the Apple outlet and reinforcing the belief of those around you that the iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad or iWhatever is the NEXT BIG (retail) THING. Sadly, the Church of Apple’s profits are tied to a strict program of Digital Rights Management and it’s getting harder and harder to come up with the NEXT BIG (retail) THING, patent it, and control its release in the marketplace.
Okay, the iPods, those stored music thingies, were pretty cool. Initiates and communicants could identify each other by the little white carbuncles blossoming from their ears, growths that presumably excluded the echoing chant and drumbeat of the marketing weenies who tweet and IM and Facebook, and blog the news that the NEXT BIG (retail) THING that you bought last month will soon be passé, because the NEXT BIG (retail) THING is about to be introduced by Jobs at the next big iHoopla and Marketing Festival (BTOBS).
For the last month or two, under pressure by the need for big numbers on the iPad launch, Jobs has been on a tear spreading fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about competitive products. Now he’s added injury to insult with a patent infringement suit against HTC, his leading competitor. Well, it looks a little like an iPhone, but wait! It’s so much better!
Some of Jobs’ success is based on his creative adoption of Xerox’s mouse and graphical user interface. Will he prevail against HTC which seems to be taking a page from his own book?
8 Comments
Though I am typing my comments on a MacBook Pro here, I am writing from mid-air, on a flight, where the napkins they gave me with my drink serve as an advertising platform for HTC, withe following pitch:
“You just ordered a drink. Maybe you ordered ginger ale, maybe it was orange juice. Point is,you wanted a drink made just for you. At HTC we get that, which is why we design phones just for you. Because you are different than the guy sitting next to you.”
Yea, I get the play on that “different,” I think.
I wish they’d used “different from…”
rather than “different than…”
While I get hopelessly tangled up in “lie, lay, laid, layed” and have to think hard to find the correct usage, I’ve somehow imprinted on the “different from” thing and “different than” is simply an irritant.
That wireless connection six miles high is pretty cool. Happy landings!
Frank, Which is more fun, easier, more pleasurable to drive, a Ford Taurus … or a Lexus. And if you haven’t done both, your answer doesn’t count.
And number two, why is it PC users cannot envision that Mac users might actually be onto something?
xoxo
Lexus seats are too hard.
Had my hands on my first Mac at BofA in early ’84. It was okay, better than the Compaq luggable with the amber screen I’d been schlepping around. Came in the cutest little “MacPack” for easy transport. Worked fine with word processing software and spreadsheets. Mouse was a cool idea. Couldn’t tie into our networks though, so no email, no access to shared docs. Couldn’t read the floppies we wrote on non-Apple machines. Perfectly opaque OS.
Face it Zo. Apple provides status symbols for a select set of aficionados, a self identified in-crowd of upscale consumers. Why shop at Target when there’s a Nordstrom’s or a Niemann-Marcus in the neighborhood right?
Consider the lamers standing in line outside a retail store to buy a new phone or a tablet. What’s that about. Somebody said “Steve Jobs understands desire.” When does the realization hit that the seduction was great but basically you’ve just been screwed?
Taurus or Lexus? I’d rather drive a Maybach.
Frank, I’m saying a well-designed machine that actually does just work is a constant pleasure to use. As is an desktop and file system that employs literal symbols, in which everything is findable and … I could go on. Mac laptops are everywhere in tech, everywhere. Nobody goes back. Things changed, with OS X … and are about to change again.
Truly Mac laptops are visible everywhere due to the good marketing gimmick of an illuminated and recognizable logo. To suggest that they have a significant share of the desktops outside of educational institutions and marketing/media concerns, well… you’re wrong. They’re not cost effective.
Consider the lamers sitting at home ordering spare PC parts on e-bay. What’s that about? Steve Jobs does understand desire. He knows that half the people in line outside the Apple store are hoping to get laid before they hit the front door. This is why the Mac guy in the adds always looks so much happier.