Tag: steve jobs

By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Here’s an odd one: Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day,”  describes why President Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day—and then supports Obama’s reasoning, saying that too many decisions weaken our brains. It’s gotten more than 1000 comments.

Leaving aside the flaw in the Obama example—he’s often photographed wearing something other than a suit—let’s look at Petrone’s claim, based on an L.A. Times article, “Too many decisions can tax the brain, research shows,” that too many decisions can lower math skills:

Two college professors…both found that a person has a limited amount of brain power in a day, so the more decisions they have to make, the weaker their decision-making process becomes…

Vohs…asked a group of random people how many decisions they made that day, and then asked them a series of simple math questions. The more decisions they made in the day, the worse they did on the math questions.

I was instantly skeptical.  1) I’d guess the more we train our brain to make interesting, challenging, important decisions, the more of those we empower it to make. But yes, if we fill our brains up with trivial decisions, we limit them.

And 2) there are many different kinds of decisions. Exercising critical thinking skills–or for that matter, intuitive snap judgments a la Gladwell’s “blink” theory–might actually boost our math performance. Other types of decisions could sharpen or weaken our math performance.

So I went back to the original article. The logic is far more nuanced than Petrone implies. What’s fatiguing is not how many decisions we make, but overwhelming choice in a single decision:

…When people have too many decisions to make — consumers end up making poor decisions, are more dissatisfied with their choices or become paralyzed and don’t choose at all.

And as the complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to look for ways—often erroneous—to simplify the choosing process. If there are 100 kinds of cereal, instead of looking at all of the characteristics, people will evaluate a product based on something familiar, such as brand name, or easy, such as price.

Now this actually does make sense. Marketers know fewer choices = more purchases.

Come back tomorrow for a look at the branding (Steve Jobs) part of Petrone’s argument. (Subscribe to this blog so you’ll be notified.)

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Networking, People Helping People, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

  • Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
  • For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
  • The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Shel's Personal Life, Technology Tagged with ,

Part 1 of two related posts.

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs introducing the very first Mac, taken by Scott Knaster, who wrote software documentation for Apple.

If you’re under 35 or so, it may be hard to see what all the cheering was about—especially when you realize the audience was drawn from the smartest and most tech-savvy people in the country. After all, it’s a black-and-white computer with a terrible speech synthesizer and a 9-inch screen, running off a floppy disk, for goodness sake.

But compared to what else was out there, it was like going from a hand-crank-to-start Model T Ford to, let’s say, a Prius. There were no PCs in the under $8000 range that could do half of what the Mac did effortlessly, at a price under $3000. None that could:

  • Be controlled with a mouse instead of typing arcane instructions
  • Display type on the screen in multiple fonts, sizes, and styles, including handwriting-like script fonts
  • Create pictures using painting tools instead of massive amounts of computer code
  • Play chess on a realistic-looking 3D board, using the mouse to move pieces
  • Synthesize speech this clearly and easily
  • Have all the pieces in one relatively lightweight box, be carried around in a bag, and still have a screen big enough to work (there were portable computers back then, like the Kaypro and Osborne—but the Kaypro was big and awkward and had sharp metal edges, and the Osborne’s 5″ screen  was kind of like using something the size of an iPhone but weighed 24.5 pounds and had screen quality like an old non-cable black-and-white TV screen

Along with the “insanely great” slogan, Apple also called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” And it was! I had actually begun shopping for my first computer in late 1983. Frankly, although I recognized that I needed a computer and it would make writing my second book a lot easier, I was intimidated. I didn’t want to have to learn code, didn’t want to struggle with awkward and unintuitive commands. I had used computerized typesetting equipment on one of my newspaper jobs, and it wasn’t fun.

So I took my time researching. I looked at the Kaypro, Osborne, Morrow, Commodore 64 (which had the worst word processing software I’ve ever seen) and various others, and by March, 1984, I was pretty much set to buy an Apple II, but not excited about the learning curve, or about not knowing how the page would look until I hit print. But my dealer, who was a friend, told me, “wait a month, we’ve got something really cool coming.” When the Mac was released to the general public in my area in April 1984, I bought one of the very first ones.

In Part 2 of this series, “How the First Mac Gave Me a Monopoly Marketing Advantage for 10 Years,” I draw marketing lessons from what that first Mac allowed me to do that none of my competitors were doing.

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By Posted on Posted in Other, Publishing Tagged with , , , ,

I’ve been an Apple user since I got my first Mac in 1984. One of his greatest contributions was to make computers much more accessible to non-geeks. It would have been a lot longer learning curve on a pre-windows IBM PC or even an Apple II. MacWrite 1.0 and WYSIWYG [what-you-see-is-what-you-get—a major innovation in computers at that time] completely revolutionized the way I wrote resumes, which were my major service line at the time (and which I still do, occasionally)–plus made it much easier to develop template documents, etc. Four of my eight books started as earlier books. In 1979, I turned in the MS for my first book, which was a co-authored rewrite of a much older book–with pieces of the original book spliced into my typed out pages with scissors and tape. The other three were all upgraded from books I’d written earlier after getting a computer (one of them on that original 1984 machine)l it was SO much easier!

And just this summer, I found a new use for one of Jobs’ newest technologies: Using an iPad with the seaprate Apple wireless keyboard, I can type to my deaf stepfather while he holds the screen and reads what I’m saying in real time. Much better than passing a laptop back and forth or shouting in his ear.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for the many innovations that have made the world brighter and made my personal life easier.

For more on Jobs’ life and legacy, among the thousands of articles out there, this one on the Macworld site is quite good.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

If you’re under 35 and you watch the video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh, in January 1984, you might wonder: what’s with all the cheering, it doesn’t do much. But it was revolutionary for its time.

Before that, you talked to computers by typing arcane commands. Text was displayed all in one font, and if you were lucky, the font had descenders (the stalks on the g, p, and q actually went below the bottom of the other letters)–so you could even read it. If you weren’t lucky, it was a squiggly mess. My first laptop was like that (a Radio Shack Model 100, which I bought in 1986). Graphics? You want graphics? They were sooo primitive, and not easy for the casual user to generate. To do that detailed MacPaint picture of a Japanese woman that Jobs shows on an early IBM PC or an Apple II would have been pretty much impossible.

The Mac, from day 1, allowed multiple fonts, bold and italic (and other less useful effects) with a simple click, included a graphics program that anyone could use, and even had sound.

I had one of those early Macs: my first computer, which I bought in April, 1984. It had 124K (not meg, and certainly not gig) of RAM, 64K of ROM, and a single 400K floppy drive. The startup disk included the operating system, a word processor, paint program, and a bit of room for data files. There was no hard drive, and backing up those data files was a major PITA involving multiple disk swaps. Oh yes, and a 9-inch monochrome monitor; color Macs didn’t come along for quite a while. I bought a second floppy drive for $400, and about a year later, a 20 MB hard drive for $700. Now you can get several gigabytes on a thumb drive and pay $40.

And before personal computers, computing was reserved for the specially trained, who talked to their machines by laboriously keypunching a line of code at a time, starting over if they made an error. Processors were in a central location, and you used a terminal to talk to them–a terminal with almost no computing power of its own.

So first, PCs swung the culture away from those centralized computers, to having power on your own desk. But then the Internet reversed the trend. Once again, a lot of our processing is done someplace else. Which means everyone’s personal comptuers have access to enormous resources: the world’s knowledge available in seconds.

And the Internet as a commerce platform means we can shop, pay bills, raise and contribute funds for causes, manage databases far away from the comfort of our own home, or from any far-flung corner of the world

And among the many other things the Internet changed is our definition of community. We’ve completely separated community from geography.

For social change and environmental justice activists, the possibilities are enormous. Especially considering we’re probably at the Model T stage. The Internet as a commercial venture is only 13 years old; the Mac, 25 years old; personal computing, about 30 years old. The practical gas-powered automobile was created in 1886; Ford introduced the Model T (not his first car, by the way; he had at least three earlier models, starting in 1903) 22 years later. Just as no one could have predicted the enormous impact the automobile has had on society, so, no one can predict just how far the Internet will stretch.

Building on the Howard Dean campaign of 2004 (the first to make a serious attempt at harnessing the Internet), Obama’s presidential campaign was greatly helped by his use not only of e-mail and the Web, but of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And by groups like MoveOn and True Majority, that were able to organize their members to support and fund the campaign, while focusing attention on a progressive agenda.

And of course, the countless blogs, e-zines, websites, and radio programs on the Net, from around the world, are an easy alternative to mainstream corporate-owned media that can no longer tightly control the news–at least not for those willing to be a bit adventurous with their web searches. That, too, is revolutionary.

The future promises to be quite exciting.

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