
How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic - fogus
http://www.macworld.com/article/151903/2010/06/stevejobs_presentations.html?lsrc=rss_main
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ams6110
I saw Jobs give a presentation of NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (an
early, even pioneering ORM) at a trade show in Chicago... during the
presentation one of his NeXT machines crashed, and the audience got to see the
system reboot on the big projection screen. I don't recall any real
wisecracking... he just said "oops!" and maybe a little banter but did remain
very calm and continued the presentation without really missing a beat.

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jtbigwoo
A friend of mine has a great line for whenever something unexpected happens in
a demo: "I'm glad this happened and I'll tell you why..."

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djcapelis
I actually hate this line.

I've heard it a few times and it provides the impression that you weren't
going to explore something important in your planned presentation which is a
bit of a slap to the audience. I prefer "This gives us an opportunity to talk
about..."

Your presentation shouldn't be an accident, you shouldn't be _glad_ you would
have failed to tell us something important had things gone right, you should
be glad to react to changing circumstances and explain something off the cuff.

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kmfrk
I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he _loves_ the
products and features he is presenting; the videogame demonstrations in
particular seem to summon his inner child.

There are many dubious claims such as the "factual" remarks about the
superlative qualities of the products (thinnest, cheapest, greenest), but I am
sure he believes it when he starts the talk by saying that "we have some great
things to show you".

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ergo98
>I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he loves the
products and features he is presenting

He's a very good salesman. He clearly sold you on his pitch. I'm a little more
cynical, and hardly expect the head salesman of the company to be anything but
over the moon with the revolutionary new watchamacallit that changes the rules
and introduces a whole new aspect to living that no competitor could ever hope
to achieve, setting new benchmarks of stuff that wasn't important when we
didn't have it but have become a mandatory element that will change you world
now that we do.

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dkarl
Spot on. He's clearly too smart and too critical to love all his products as
much as he pretends. He can probably tell you thirty things he would fix about
the 4G iPhone. (Or you can just wait until he releases the next version.) The
mark of an innovator is perpetual dissatisfaction.

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kmfrk
I don't know about that. If he worked for AMD/ATI or nVidia, he might have
gone bonkers, as the innovations over the previous ones seem so intangible,
since the platform is basically an incrementalist arms race: benchmark scores,
umpteenillion transistors, superthreading. The mobile market could have been
the same, but Steve Jobs stepped up the PR game. It is unlikely, but not
impossible, that the people in the graphics industry could apply the same
communication strategy, but I won't go into that.

A lot of people on this site often tout the Android phones' hardware
specifications' superiority over the iPhone, since X has Y GHz or MB more.
What a lot of these people do not understand is that this is not at all what
the beauty of the iOS PR is about: it is about features and achievements.
These represent tangible milestone that do not come across as uninterest
incremental updates: "why would I want a 2GHz processor over a 1GHz" the
average consumer asks himself. "It is Xer", the other bloke says. Faster,
bigger, better, but to what end; to use the same logic of comparative
adjectives as arguments, it's also more expensive. This is why buying a
complete desktop Windows computer is incarnate nightmare of an average user.

I mentioned features and achievements and how the constitute tangible
milestone and selling points; nobody gives a damn about three-hundred-
something DPI (what is DPI?!). The current iPhone has a number of DPI, and
this new number is obviously higher, big deal. But there is an achievement;
the pixel density surpass the resolution of average human vision, so the
screen will be like a physical object---not a digital one. You could go on
about a "post-pixel era" or something like that, but the point is that we have
a feature and not a number anymore. This is a milestone to prospective users
as well as the employees at Apple who have now breached a frontier and
defeated a barrier in digital computing.

You are feel to chalk up his views on the larger products as
"dissatisfaction", but if his focus is in the features and achievements, there
is much to be ecstatic about.

... if you do not lapse into the world of nonsensical numbers and
incrementalism.

(Sorry if any of it is incoherent, but my allergy is killing me today.)

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dkarl
_But there is an achievement; the pixel density surpass the resolution of
average human vision_

And how many Apple users (let alone Steve Jobs) consider their perception to
be merely "average?" ;-)

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kmfrk
"Average" was misleading and a poor choice of word: most people if not
everyone. I do not have statistics about human vision, but I take this guy's
work for it:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-
the-iphone-resolution/).

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dkarl
He wasn't ad-libbing. A network or remote service being unavailable is a
common occurrence in presentations. I can't say I have a scripted response for
every common contingency, but I'm not Steve Jobs. If he's a rehearsal freak,
I'm sure he rehearsed the common problems and didn't just repeat the ideal
case over and over again.

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smwhreyebelong
Humor is a great strategy. Once you have people laughing, you can get away
with a few minor hiccups.

It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us
from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling
apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high
schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were
finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all
the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.

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eitally
This is all well and good -- and a similar post a few months ago relating how
Malcolm Gladwell practices his lectures had much of the same information --
but to be completely honest, with the amount of multitasking most people do
these days, almost none of the presentations we give are much more than
information sharing via PowerPoint/Impress/Pages. The extra time spent
rehearsing and preparing backup plans would be a complete waste.

It would be smarter for most people to practice their public speaking more
generally so that when they're giving these innocuous, boring presentations
they at least don't come off as buffoons (whether the demos work or not).

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smwhreyebelong
+1

I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet
points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points
instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an
engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared
speech/lecture.

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albemuth
This made me remember how awkward the Froyo/google tv hiccups at google I/O
felt in comparison, completely different story.

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tjmaxal
this reminds me of the old interview tip "turn weaknesses into strengths"
Being able to flip a hiccup into a fluid teaching point is good for any kind
of teaching not just power point presentations.

