More Back Pages stories
From This Week's TechWatch
Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs—cool and in control
By Jon Peddie©®™
Steve Jobs, whom I have
only met once and then very briefly, is in a sense one of my heroes. He gets
that dubious accolade for two reasons—he takes no prisoners, and he is
uncompromising on quality and ease of use.
When I’m asked by a
client what I think of his or her new design, if it seems obvious to me that
it’s not addressing the user very well, I ask, “What would Steve do?” It has a
remarkable effect—people know immediately what they should do, or what they
shouldn’t have done. Then for various and mysterious reasons they don’t do it,
Apple gets more mindshare, Jobs gets richer even without pre-dated options, and
the rest look on in confusion and envy.
Apple, as personified by
Jobs, in addition to controlling product design and user’s delight, also controls
the press—mercilessly and with zero tolerance. No one dares leak a product
announcement or product specifications and the sad few who have tried have paid
for it by having their relationship with Apple terminated immediately and with
prejudice—it’s a take-no-prisoners policy and awareness of it is as powerful as
the policy itself.
We recently had a warning
email, from a client no less, telling us we had to pass through them anything
we wrote that mentioned their name—how’s that for attempted mind control (not
to mention a violation of the first, fifth, and seventh amendments)? We of
course laughed it off, but not without some consideration.
As some of you may know,
I find the incessant little letters and symbols at the ends of words annoying.
I once wrote a hilarious (or at least I thought so) article about the company
called Intelr, making the point that their name really was spelled that way.
Kathleen wouldn’t let me publish it. Not that she’s afraid of offending Intel,
but because she just didn’t think it was that funny. Nonetheless the little
circled c and the tiny ™ and other lawyer’ed-up artifacts that the PR monkeys
are made to put in their press releases, white papers, data sheets, and adverts
is at the least distracting and at the most ridiculous.
I once worked with an old
Polish machinist, and one day he came into the shop while I was painting the
handles of my tools. He snorted and said in that wonderful accent of his, “You
tink de wolf don eat da marked sheep?”
Lesson learned, and you
only have to look at the (still) thriving CD and DVD copying business in China
and East East Asia. Do the R , ®, TM , and © stop those
counterfeiters from using those exact names and words? Of course not—and they
laugh at them.
But since all the
computer and semiconductor companies are so lawyer’ed up these days (who’s
running the store?) we thought—well, I thought—we better take countermeasures
since we don’t have a lawyer and our combined payroll probably doesn’t match
the senior partner in one of their law firms.
Therefore we have come up
with new names for these companies and their products to avoid accidentally
violating one of their little symbols.
From now on the company
that brought you Moore’s Law will be known as Intelrctm, the company named as a
popular fruit will be Applrctm, we’ll have Amdcrtm, and Nvidiacrtm, and their
products will be the Radeoncrtm, Geforcrtm, and Opterctm. Oh, and we will
continue with our policy of not being an extension of the marketing departments
of these companies and not play the capitalization game, all proper nouns will
have just one capital letter, the first one, and all acronyms will have all
capital letters. Sorry iSuppli, nVidia
or NVIDIA whatever your name is, and you’ll be words in the English language,
with the appropriate ctmr at the end of course.
© This entire essay is copywritten and registered with
the U.S. Patent Office and the Department of Hhomeland Security. Reproducing
any letter in it will result in an FTC action that will stop the import and
export of all your products, the impounding of your employees’ 401K plans, and
the confiscation of any automobile costing more than $50,000. 
