| Saturday, January 5, 2002 |
16:35 - The Joy of Tech Weighs In
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It's about time we heard from JoT on this matter. But the most bizarre part of this is just how correct this cartoon is going to have to be to do justice to the hype.
You know, when most companies produce slogans like this before a show, people-- even their devoted customers-- mostly just yawn and say "Yeah, c'mon, make with the actual announcement and stop playing marketing games."
But the Mac fans are gobbling this up. (Yes, I know, I'm doing exactly that myself. Shut up.) Again, this is the Way of the Mac. To Apple fans, the strategy of the company is a shared community experience. The fact that Apple is small enough (compared to Microsoft) and nimble enough to direct its movements according to direct feedback from the users makes it all feel like something we can directly affect. When you get thousands and thousands of people together, even if it's across the net, they have an emotional feedback effect that makes them all feel invincible and potent, like if we all just believe hard enough, everything will turn out fine. It's like Apple, the entity, is much larger than Apple, the company-- and every one of us is part of the entity.
The reality is that Apple is just a company, like any other company. They have their evil lawyers, their stupid execs, their mindless market-droids, their haughty engineers-- all the same stuff that Microsoft has. But what they've somehow managed to cultivate, that nobody else has, is a user base that considers itself to be part of the company. When Apple succeeds, we all jubilate. When Apple fails, we all share the pain.
And when Apple tickles us, we all go into hysterics.
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