The keynote presentation of Steve Jobs on WWDC 2007 had a pretty big reaction in various media. As usual, a lot of people were pissed of by Apple’s advertising. Just a few hours after the keynote was public Joel wrote:
Apple is and always has been severely dishonest in all their advertising when it comes to performance. This is the company that spent years telling us that the PowerPC was faster than Intel, only, suddenly, to change their claims midsentence without an explanation when reality caught up with them, in a scene almost exactly like the scene in 1984: “Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.”
This is the company that’s about to release the iPhone on a slow, last-generation data network but is running TV ads that have edited out all downloads and waiting time that network entails.
These products may be cool, but I don’t understand why Apple should be allowed to lie so blatantly in their advertising about performance and get away with it. I’m sorry, but a web browser that takes a minute to launch is not going to win any converts on Windows.
I personally don’t care that much about the lies in Apple’s ads, since a lot of companies do that. I was a little confused by the fact that (as usual) the keynote had more negative talk about Microsoft products, than positive stuff about Apple products. This in not something new, but sound stupid combined with the fact that you want to announce your “new” features that Vista has for a year like sidebar in Finder, specialized folders like “My Pictures” and “My Downloads”, previews of content in icons and games.
Apple’s whole ad campaign and speeches are based on negativism, and I am really curious how will they advertise if they ever get out of their puny 6% market share. It feels strange to spend the first part of your speech explaining how bad Windows is, and then to announce that your third key feature is the ability to run Windows on your hardware. Apple is on the rise, the market share is growing, and bringing in games to the Mac is a really, really smart move. I can imagine that Macs will be a much more developer-friendly platform than PCs thanks to the fixed hardware. But in order to not piss everyone around, Apple should stop with the negative advertisements, or always be the underdog in the OS market.
