Hacker News Reader

Sometimes CEOs give boring presentations on revolutionary products. More often they give boring presentations on boring products. Steve Jobs has a huge advantage when it comes time to show his work because he produces such earth-shattering stuff. His salesmanship is the the icing on the already-delicious cake.

View on HN

Jobs does often end up being in the position where he can sell some pretty awesome products, but he's also adept at finding reasons to find things awesome in the first place. If he'd sold OSX by dryly listing its features, you might think "ah, UNIX, yeah, probably good idea, failed before with AUX, though". But when Jobs described OSX to people, they came away thinking "wow, this is a major leap in operating systems design." Part of this is pure charisma and great delivery. Another part of it is just a knack for picking up on genuinely great aspects of a product that others might not think to highlight.

Agreed. Though I should point out that Jobs is partially responsible for that advantage.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/01/the_myth_of_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com