| How to present Microsoft-style: Steve Jobs, you've got nothing to worry about. | | Date Created: 02 Nov, 2005, 10:31 AM |
 Photo: Niall Kennedy
Microsoft "Live" presentation
San Francisco
November 1 2005 |
I was back from the morning walk with Shrek and doing what I do before I get on with the day: check for updates of my favourite RSS feeds, including podcasts.
Themes often emerge, as the RSS feeds and even the podcasts overlap in content, pursuing parallel paths to the search for answers - sometimes it's confusing as to what the questions may be, but I can handle that.
Attention was on the agenda today (once more) it seems, as I located this post from A VC blog. (By the way, see how long it takes you to locate the name of the blog's owner before you give up, and your attention is lost).
The blog discusses some of the work in the '70s performed by psychologist Herbert Simon on attention, and his early description of the term satisficer, which I have used here earlier when describing a Less is More philosophy and how Windows and Mac epitomise the differences. Barry Schwartz has also used the term satisficer in his recent book, The Paradox of Choice.
I liked the blog entry and the comments and links, so decided to create a Notetaker file to which I simply dragged the entry complete with links and layout (then deleted extraneous bits) and called it Attention.
In the comments section were some ideas expressed about pictures and their superiority for getting messages across, and it resonated with me with respect to recent posts and articles about presentation skills, especially how I prefer Apple's Keynote over Microsoft's Powerpoint.
But it also got me thinking about some RSS feeds I read when I first woke up quite early. Microsoft had been delivering a Keynote on its Windows Live platform, and by the time I returned from my walk, pictures of the event had been posted.
Here's a picture located on Flickr, uploaded by Niall Kennedy.
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Quickly - what is this picture about?
Less quickly, does this picture sum up not just the difference between Bill Gates' presenting style and that of Steve Jobs, but of the two companies themselves?
Now, why is so much of the really significant Microsoft products and services up in the clouds? Apart from the obvious jokes about "vaporware" given the content of clouds, the slide is like Microsoft - so much, so confusing, yet how much is useful?
(Think I'm making this stuff up? Look over at Scoble's blog where he states:
"But, yes, they made this stuff too complicated. I see it clearly in my mind now. I’m going to get some videos now and make these teams simplify what they are trying to say.")
In fact, the premise of the Live platform is to make Microsoft's products more useful than previously, with tighter integration of products and services.
Of course, without hearing Bill G. discuss the slide's content within the context of the entire presentation (did the live internet demo really fall over?), one cannot read too much into the slide.
But why oh why in the bottom right hand corner is a 2G G3 iMac seen representing "other devices", along with a Blackberry and perhaps a ROKR phone? Would it have been so embarassing to locate a picture of a new G5 iMac? I'm sure Apple would have sent Bill a neat picture to help him illustrate his slide.
The Niall Kennedy Flickr upload contains a number of other pictures, and yep, they all look like standard Powerpoint fare... yawn-material. One can hope what was said better illustrated what Microsoft has up its sleeve.
UPDATE: Former Apple employee, Mike Evangelist, who is writing a terrific blog, also used Niall's Flickr slideshow of the Live presentation to come to the same conclusions about presentation style. Go read here.
And welcome to all those from PresentationZen who picked up on Garr's linking to me. He has done a stirling job describing and evolving some of the ideas posted in this blog a couple of days before.
If you scroll down, you'll locate other blog entries specifically about the creative potential behind the software Jobs uses, called Keynote, which at Version 2, is a truly viable alternative to Powerpoint. You'll also see how I expect it will move to version 3 sometimes soon, given recent "Stevenotes" - on the iPod Nano and iMac G5.
Keynote is Mac only due to the serious graphics requirements. It imports and easily scales .avi and Quicktime movies for smooth playing, and elicits greater slide creativity.
Go to this link written in his blog by a journalist using Keynote for the first time to get a flavour for its use. The author, Charles Wright, is well known in Australia, for his Windows' advice. Here's the actual newspaper article published a month ago.
Here's my bottom line: If this is what comes out of the head of the beast in Redmond, what chances are there realistically that all those 30 million Powerpoint presentations occurring each day (according to Microsoft) will be any better? Nada.
We're talking cookie cutter approaches to complex and often difficult topics where everything looks the same. How do you expect to stand away from the others, even if your data and concepts are different? This is why these articles since the Windows Live demo have garnered surprisingly large quotients of coverage. It's the silent shout of end users and viewers shouting "Enough Already!" (Yep, another link to an earlier critique of Powerpoint in my blog.) |
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