I have to admit, Twitter’s been one of my guilty pleasures. Every time I fire my client up, I ask myself why I’m doing it. But I do it all the same.
It’s not that lots of good information comes in that way. Still less that I get to read deathless prose. Let’s face it, there’s only so much eloquence you can cram into 140 characters.
Then I hit Jason Kottke’s blog post and I celebrated. He nailed it.
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I’ve been hearing from more people after the new MS ad campaign (you know, the one where MS pays an actress to cleverly make the point that the reason you buy a Windows laptop is because you can’t afford a Mac?) claiming Apple should license OS X to cheap Dell/HP machines for the low end customers. It’s not going to happen without a radical change in the Apple approach to marketing, and as long as they deem OS X important to them, I don’t see Apple making that change. When you look at it from their perspective, there’s just no business case for it.
What is it Apple is selling? The one constant in all the variations is User Experience. Whether you’re talking iPhone, iPod, or iMac, Apple’s big competitive advantage is the consistently excellent user experience. So, what happens when they go for the low end buyer?
They lose money. Don’t believe me? Follow.
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I have a problem with books. The major symptom of this problem is I have too many. I love the feel of them, everything about them. I have a disease — it’s called bibliophilia.
But I’m learning to cope with it. Slowly I have learned to differentiate between the words on the page and the pages themselves. There are writers I love to read (Gene Wolfe, I’m looking at you) and books I love to hold (leather-bound Lord of the Rings) but at least I’ve now managed to convince myself that the sets are not identical. Gene Wolfe is still Gene Wolfe, even if the words are formed by excited particles on a screen instead of ink on paper. I still fear it must be illegal for anyone to write that addictively well.
But now I have another problem.
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Seth Godin states the obvious in a recent post. That’s not a knock on him; it needs stating and restating and restating yet again, until the penny finally drops, or they take delivery from the Clue Train. Slimy marketers and sharp operators have fatally poisoned the environment for the rest. That particular ecosystem can no longer sustain life; it’s long past time to realize that and move on.
As far as the public is concerned, the default belief is “all marketers are liars.” “How can you tell if the salesman is lying?” goes the old joke. “He moves his lips.” comes the punch line. And we laugh, because inside, we truly believe that to be the case.
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