Posted by J.Goodwin at 1/15/07 6:48 a.m.

Interesting. Steve Jobs talks in simple, short sentences with well known words.

Given that his products are typically associated with an urban hipster / yuppie demographic, which I would expect to be college educated...

Everyone else is talking specifically to geeks basically, and choose their words appropriately.

Posted by Uncle Paul at 1/15/07 10:27 a.m.

I disagree. They were all speaking to essentially the same type of audience. Steve Jobs is simply a more effective communicator by spending more time and effort to get across his ideas. A laundry list of features and benefits can be put in a brochure.

People always talk about the principles of KISS but rarely put them into practice. You learn in short, concise blocks. You retain more when learning in smaller increments.

You can carry the comparison further. Look at the slide shows of the same presentations. Gates and Dell overload their slides with info. Jobs puts forth images, simple words, and phrases.

Which do you think is more impactful and remembered?

Posted by ppsassociates at 1/15/07 11:30 a.m.

Without oversimplifying too much, a person is significantly more likely to deliver in effective message by following the less-is-more philosophy.

Posted by John Bailo at 1/15/07 12:15 p.m.

This is by far one of your best blog entries ever!

Just eyeballing the "clouds" Jobs by far and away goes for floweriness in his elocution.

Gates is somewhere inbetween Dell and Jobs, will more prosaic yet marketing oriented words. Jobs and Gates have as some of their bigger words their current products (iPhone, Vista). That actually is really good for them, as they are now walking billboards for these products and David Ogilvy would would give them high marks for sticking to the product.

As far as Dell, which is having a hard time, that seems to be reflected in the cloud, which to me reads as more hard edged, technological.

Jobs seems to be leading the pack with having made the commitment from a total tech/geek speak style to something approaching what a 14 year old girl would say about a phone or computer. Gates in 2nd place and Dell last.

And their respective stocks reflect that...

Posted by J.Goodwin at 1/15/07 1:48 p.m.

There has to be some kind of audience difference, because MacWorld happens in San Francisco while CES happens in Vegas.

The Mac folks set themselves apart geographically as being different than all the geeks at CES, and people have to make a decision to attend CES OR Macworld each year.

Posted by unregistered user at 1/16/07 5:48 a.m.

Take a look at the keynotes, and you will see, that indipendent of what they are talking about, Steve Jobs found the best way to motivate and excite the audience.

Posted by unregistered user at 1/16/07 10:42 a.m.

It seems to me that this is nothing more than Jobs being aware of and catering to his target audience: Idiots.

HA! My match has been thrown!

Posted by unregistered user at 1/16/07 5:52 p.m.

I wouldn't put too much worth on the text analysis tools at usingenglish.com. I ran a pretty dense article from a psychology journal through and its scores were lower than Gate's speach. 40 year old's that haven't been trained in psychology would have a problem with this article and it reported a gunning fog index of 9.25. If you are curious, the article was here:
http://staff.washington.edu/donnaw/Devine%201989.pdf

And the scores were:
Lexical Density: 21.38%
Hard Words: 545 (7.82%)
Fog Index: 9.25

Posted by unregistered user at 1/16/07 8:12 p.m.

Just a note for the unregistered user about the psychological journal text he or she entered- the longer the text, the more scores go down as things get repeated. To standardise comparisons, people normally use blocks of, say, a thousand words chosen at random from a text to compare like with like.

Lexical density, for instance, will decline rapidly as words get repeated, so the dense text the person talks about will be using technical terms, but will be repeating them. I put 1,000 words of the psychology text through and got the following scores:
Hard Words: 133 (13.57%)
Lexical Density: 36.84%
Fog Index: 12.56

All are noticeably higher, and this would be the way to assess readability more accurately, though I don't say that these tests are an exact science.

While the comparisons of the keynote addresses are interesting to look at, again, the best way to assess their difficulty would be to choose an equal-sized block of text from each. However, I think the clouds are very interesting and would probably work regardless of text length.

Richard
UsingEnglish.com

Posted by unregistered user at 2/2/07 11:48 a.m.

Interesting to note, Bill gates cloud has no mention of computer or PC

Posted by unregistered user at 2/12/07 2:41 a.m.

IT IS NOT ABOUT RATING WORDS... YOU JUST ASK YOURSELF WHO SOLD MORE? AFTER THE CONFERENCE?? ??
and ofcourse, there's lots of factors to decide which is smarter? i say the smartest one who didn't forget to wear a tie !! ammarnajjar4u@yahoo.com

Posted by unregistered user at 4/25/07 4:56 p.m.

It would be interesting to throw all three Keynotes as one file through the cloud tool, and see what messages it comes up with: would phone prevail? or would it be incredible great devices?

Posted by philski at 5/26/07 1:56 p.m.

Hi all, very good article by the way and well put together, thank you.

i am studying Lexical density at the moment and think its not really as understood as it should be, and its so interesting from an optimization point of view. Actually more so than most people know.

I still put my money on Bill Gates. He isnt selling a product, he is selling a vision.

Posted by unregistered user at 6/10/07 6:01 p.m.

IMHO-From the data given for all 3, it all comes down to the great American advertising snake oil salesperson. Each are selling products that in reality are as unreliable as the next power surge or drop-off-the table or hard drive crash or faulty flaming batteries or unsecure software systems or buggy software systems or bloated software packages or you fill-in-the-blank from your own computer experiences. Over hyped marketing at its best.

Posted by unregistered user at 7/4/07 9:16 p.m.

i think they just say what they're think about the next generation of the technology or actually what their companys are goint to work in the next years

Posted by unregistered user at 12/22/07 2:30 a.m.

GOD!!! If They (MICROSOFT and MAC) worked TOgether We would have The BEST kick-ass devices (computers to Phones to i dunno fridges :S) microsoft and apple working together would be so cool... :D

Posted by unregistered user at 1/26/08 3:32 a.m.

I disagree. They were all speaking to essentially the same type of audience.
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