Making the Pitch

Clever lads have run the CES address of Bill Gates and the Macworld Keynote by Steve Jobs through a variety of text analysis tools to get an idea of why one has greater impact than the other. The article demonstrates that there is a huge difference in the complexity of the message. Jobs delivers short, easily comprehended sentences, where Gates tends to be using longer sentences, with more complex language. The word clouds generated from the speech are not that different in terms of focus. Both featured most frequent references to the products being featured. Interestingly this contrasted with Michael Dell’s CES presentation which was seemingly used much more ambiguous language with less direct reference to particular products. There’s also a slider-based version linked to the article that offers an alternative way to view the clouds. Unfortunately unless you use the arrow keys (i.e. read the small print) it seems next to impossible to click on the magic spot to get Gates cloud displayed.
This exercise begs the question of magic however, and whether it is merely the message and not thew actual technology being presented that enthralls the audience. One would expect that the concept of the iPhone itself may actually be more appreciable than Windows Vista and Michael Dell simply didn’t talk as much about products because he didn’t have any exciting new product to introduce. Nonetheless, a fun little intellectual exercise.
Gates in fact doesn’t seem to have always had the product focus that he does now. There is a word cloud timeline of his communications and it is only recently that products have bgun to experience high frequency of reference.