How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic
macworld.com
macworld.com
I've heard it a few times and it provides the impression that you weren't going to explore something important in your planned presentation which is a bit of a slap to the audience. I prefer "This gives us an opportunity to talk about..."
Your presentation shouldn't be an accident, you shouldn't be glad you would have failed to tell us something important had things gone right, you should be glad to react to changing circumstances and explain something off the cuff.
There are many dubious claims such as the "factual" remarks about the superlative qualities of the products (thinnest, cheapest, greenest), but I am sure he believes it when he starts the talk by saying that "we have some great things to show you".
He's a very good salesman. He clearly sold you on his pitch. I'm a little more cynical, and hardly expect the head salesman of the company to be anything but over the moon with the revolutionary new watchamacallit that changes the rules and introduces a whole new aspect to living that no competitor could ever hope to achieve, setting new benchmarks of stuff that wasn't important when we didn't have it but have become a mandatory element that will change you world now that we do.
He answers his own email in a hurt tone of voice when you criticize them. If you don't think he begins each day with a tall, chilled glass of his own Kool-Aid... well, I'd have to disagree.
A lot of people on this site often tout the Android phones' hardware specifications' superiority over the iPhone, since X has Y GHz or MB more. What a lot of these people do not understand is that this is not at all what the beauty of the iOS PR is about: it is about features and achievements. These represent tangible milestone that do not come across as uninterest incremental updates: "why would I want a 2GHz processor over a 1GHz" the average consumer asks himself. "It is Xer", the other bloke says. Faster, bigger, better, but to what end; to use the same logic of comparative adjectives as arguments, it's also more expensive. This is why buying a complete desktop Windows computer is incarnate nightmare of an average user.
I mentioned features and achievements and how the constitute tangible milestone and selling points; nobody gives a damn about three-hundred-something DPI (what is DPI?!). The current iPhone has a number of DPI, and this new number is obviously higher, big deal. But there is an achievement; the pixel density surpass the resolution of average human vision, so the screen will be like a physical object---not a digital one. You could go on about a "post-pixel era" or something like that, but the point is that we have a feature and not a number anymore. This is a milestone to prospective users as well as the employees at Apple who have now breached a frontier and defeated a barrier in digital computing.
You are feel to chalk up his views on the larger products as "dissatisfaction", but if his focus is in the features and achievements, there is much to be ecstatic about.
... if you do not lapse into the world of nonsensical numbers and incrementalism.
(Sorry if any of it is incoherent, but my allergy is killing me today.)
You are a sucker for a sales pitch.
And how many Apple users (let alone Steve Jobs) consider their perception to be merely "average?" ;-)
When you study his lecture techniques and take five seconds to consider his numbers and superlatives, a lot of the sales pitch falls apart. I would not feel out of line to say that some of the claims are blatant lies. Even so, there still remains some indescribable magic in it reminiscent of a child-like fascination that Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto also (used to) focus on.
However, it is not impossible that I have been soundly duped by his superb acting skills as "happy Steve".
This is probably me back-pedalling and rephrasing my comment to say that he often exudes pure glee, particularly when using the videogames. It's more of a particular than a holistic observation, but I find these instances infectious.
It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.
It would be smarter for most people to practice their public speaking more generally so that when they're giving these innocuous, boring presentations they at least don't come off as buffoons (whether the demos work or not).
I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared speech/lecture.