Took half a day’s leave to spend time with Faith on her birthday. I didn’t have anything special planned, so we had ourselves a nice sandwich lunch before dropping by the IT show to take a look-see.
Microsoft was there promoting Vista, and to put it quite bluntly, doing a terrible job at it. What Microsoft needs to understand is that operating systems aren’t very exciting. The general populace does not care if you now have 128-bit encryption over the old 64-bit. We just want our operating systems to work. The guy at the booth seemed was banging home the fact that Vista came with 24/7 online support.
“A group of mechanics are on call with every purchase of a Bentley”. Woohoo.
Steve Jobs on the other hand, has it nailed down. Rather than promising you the “wow”, his presentations traditionally end with Steve saying, “just one more thing”, and he produces something that blows everyone’s mind.
Rather than selling the customer an attribute of the product, Apple does a fine job of concentrating on what the customer can do with the new product. It’s about applications, not operating systems. What can I now do that I couldn’t do before? That’s the important question, because that’s what would make me cool. And that’s what people would pay for.
You got it absolutely right but I think MS still thinks it’s 1987 - and people still naively think handing a kid a Pc will produce a squiggly line world where he is an astronaut or like this campaign where people equate an OS with a giant pumpkin or a lingerie shop in 1955. If anything, Wow is too open ended and sets themselves up - that giant pumpkin could also mean, WOW, that’s only giant sucker OS - how are we going to move the damn thing or wow, this OS sucks.
While Apple’s I’m a Mac, I’m a Pc is not perfect, Apple at least realizes people know enough about Pc’s where they realize within a price range, they’re all the same - these are all people with a PC on their desk - they know exactly what it can or cannot do …
I was thinking about Web Standards after reading htis post. Maybe that’s one of the problem with Web Standards as well. To paraphrase your words, “[web standards] aren’t very exciting. The general populace does not care if you now have…”. If so, then to paraphrase your words again, the key to speed up adoption of web standards is to emphasise on the applications from the end-user’s point of view? OK, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. :)
Ivan, you hit the nail on the head. The roundtable discussion we were supposed to have the other time was supposed to illustrate this problem we have “preaching” web standards.