'1984': As Good as It Gets

In 2006, Macs sales are competing head on with PC sales. Apple has an identity. There is no longer any question about what Apple stands for. Short humorous clips by somewhat recognizable and well liked TV personalities that compare features of computers? It's not better or worse, it's simply more appropriate.

That commercial was from '96, and the ranks of Apple fans have grown quite a bit since then (Apple wasn't even running a unix back then!) so I'd venture that quite a few current Apple fans never saw (or maybe saw but don't even remember) that commercial. How does that commercial prove that these fans are tasteless?

It would be anachronistic [1] and no dictatorship was actually brought down but maybe he is referring to this: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,957964,00.h...

I would pick TV. Revolutions always have a myriad of causes and a myriad of factors that help or hinder them, a technology alone is never enough to bring down a dictatorship. I do think, though, that technologies can help revolutions and maybe even be the one deciding factor that makes them successful.

Take the peaceful German revolution in 1989: East Germans weren’t hungry, they weren’t even poor, they weren’t unemployed and their tyrants were, as tyrants go, relatively mild. But East Germans could watch West German TV and compare, see that West Germans were richer, had more choice, more chances, more freedoms and more attractive holiday destinations. Would there have been the same mass demonstrations without West German TV, without information from the West?

The trigger of the fall of the Berlin Wall itself was of course famously also East and West German TV and radio [2].

[1] Is this a correct usage of “anachronistic”? I got quite confused as to whether it is, searched around and eventually gave up.

[2] In 1989, the East German regime wanted to slowly and in a controlled fashion open the border for their own citizens because of continued mass demonstrations and pressure from abroad. The plan to do so was announced on November 9 at a press conference. Asked when the new rules would come into force, a member of the Politbüro said erroneously that they would come into force immediately. West German TV and radio quickly spread the news that the Wall was open and because of the masses of people coming to the Wall it was actually really open that same evening. Wikipedia has a longer writeup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#The_Fall

Think of Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who eventually won the Nobel prize. Once he lost favor of the ruling party, the KGB started confiscating his manuscripts.

His master work, the Gulag Archipelago, consisted of seven parts that he never saw together because the pages were hidden at his friends' places. The book was smuggled in pieces to France to be assembled and printed there.

That was little more than 40 years ago. In that environment, the ability to transmit book pages and images over a telephone wire must have seemed like a remarkable improvement compared to spending years hiding manuscripts in the hope of eventually being able to get them out through someone.

I know that there are strong proponents of brand building, and that that commercial did help establish their iconoclastic image. I just don't know whether it translated into actual sales to the degree that it gets lauded. I'm not trying to be a contrarian for argument's sake. I just think that the success of Apple had way more to do with the return of Steve Jobs and the creation of innovative products that people love than it did with a brand building campaign.