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.