| Saturday, August 26, 2006 |
12:10 - "It's pretty awesome when it works"
http://www.kojinshugi.com/?p=424
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Sam Muldia has a post in response to naysayers who would claim that this video of Stevenote demo failures is proof not only that Apple's claim to making stuff that "just works" is a fallacy, but that Doing It Yourself—with components bought off the shelf and good old predictable, reliable Windows—is the way to go.
It's a good post, though I know a few who will say that anecdotal reasoning is about worth the paper it's not printed on. I've had a similar path through DIY PCs and the eventual move to Macs as Sam has, however, so it certainly rings true for me. There are inconveniences to setting up a new PC that I've simply never thought about in the last six or seven years: downloading drivers, for example. Seriously: it's been years since I downloaded a driver. The few devices I've bought that require drivers come with them on CDs, and they always somehow—magically—manage to be compatible with the version of OS X I'm using.
My other reaction has to do with the blooper reel. I'm sure everyone's seen it; it's very amusing. But what exactly does any series of bloopers in product demos prove, whether it's from Microsoft or Apple? We might grin and exchange knowing glances when Windows XP goes to a BSOD when Bill Gates plugs in a scanner, or we might cringe and block our ears from the hecklers when a new online-service website doesn't work or iPhoto crashes. But the point of the "It just works" mantra is not about giant-screen demos. Really—it's not.
As Sam points out, the difference between the Mac and Windows experience is demonstrated when you take the thing out of the box, not when you see a demo of upcoming technology on stage. The chances that you'll run afoul of the same BSOD-inducing scanner driver or bad CGI on the .Mac site are pretty damned slim, because those particular bugs will likely have been stamped out by the evening after the demo—a furious post-keynote e-mail from the CEO will usually have that effect. But the real litmus test is in the overall experience the user actually has, during the out-of-the-box setup and over the course of the subsequent years of ownership.
Jobs not being able to explain what Adaptive Latent Semantic Analysis is doesn't say a damn thing about whether it "just works".
Besides, the most embarrassing and high-profile bloopers in this video are of things breaking that have nothing to do with Apple: a digital camera that won't turn on, a Sony executive who can't speak in front of crowds, an extensively tweaked Quake demo that fails to load. Probably what makes Jobs so furious about things like this is his feeling that he upheld his end of the bargain and made OS X demo-ready—but these third parties are letting him down.
When Mac users say their computers "just work", they're not going to point to Stevenote demos as evidence. They're going to point to their own experience in the real world. Blooper reels like this one might be cathartic for a few people who want to convince themselves that their Mac-using friends are crazy, but at the end of the day we know that even if a demo in some distant city didn't "just work", the computers on our desks sure do.
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Brian Tiemann
