Three CEOs, Three Videos
Many writers, when they age, may not want to talk but would definitely hope to look like Samuel Beckett. Many CEOs, when they age, may not want to look but would definitely hope to hawk like Steve Jobs.
The return (he was once thrown out of Apple) and rise of Steve Jobs is a tale that rivals the best of our mythological legends. While Apple's products are primarily known for their design and elegance by virtue of being fashionable, Steve Jobs, once famously made an akand pratignya and renounced these very attributes from his personal life to better serve Apple. (He vowed to wear "black turtlenecks" everyday, because he didn't want to waste time picking a look in the morning!)
Bill Gates in contrast, who was once declared by the spouse of a popular Indian businessman as being too cute - bilkul Harry Potter jaise - is but an old shadow of himself and looks every bit a grumpy old armchair know-it-all.
Carly Fiorano, like most women of any substance, looks completely amiss and seems to have stepped into the tech world purely by accident. HP, in spite of the latest re-branding exercise has a lot to learn from Apple. Its new home media box is so ugly that Fiorano herself hesitantly tried to salvage the show by saying that she liked the other 'pink box too'.
posted by Prashanth Pappu @ 2:35 PM
11 comments
11 Comments:
Yeh "akand" kya hai bhai? Mind your 'ka's and 'kha's.
Also I find that 'nya' in 'pratignya' pretty gratuitous - I thought we banished that sound long ago to a remote southwest corner of India.
Oh, you don't want hindi lessons from a Bihari ? Maybe a Khadi boli speaker/ess will help me out.
Sorry dude. As Shashi Kapoor said in many of his movies, bachchpan se vilaayat mein rehne ke kaaran meri hindi thodi k(h)araab hain.
Ha! I was expecting this sooner or later. P - there's hell to pay for your "woman of substance" comment. I did my best to divert attention but now you're on your own.
Also, that twister was a great.
Baah! "twister was a great". I should read through my replies before posting.
Some k(h)alidasa there! Though, I remember the same someone in the common room commenting that VVS Laxman apna kaata kola (1).
(1) kaata kola : refreshing soft drink from south India
Children - everybody back to their benches (trenches?). I thought that we had argreed that we thrive on political incorrectness.
Watch the two videos (Steve vs Carly). Right from the fonts used in the slides, the introduction of the features, the body language, the humour, the pulse of the crowd - everything shows what a passionate salesman Steve Jobs is. Carly Fiorano might as well have been introducing a new car model or hawking jewelry on a tele-shopping channel. And I don't blame her, did you see that box? She was brining a very generic feminine sensibility to what was decidedly an ugly and utilitarian black box and it was plain jarring. Its definitely symptomatic of a much larger malaise in the tech world. How often do you find any miss-es going gaga over some new javascript features? I know Sumant and his labmates have all night galas to celebrate the same!
And members of the jury, permit me to bring to your notice that VVS made his debut for India in 2000-2001 when the witness was no longer in any common or uncommon room and recommend that you dismiss this fabricated case with prejudice and strongly censure his libelous ways.
Okay P, maybe not VVS but the 'kaata kola' does ring a definite bell - I had almost forgotten about it. Good that we recorded it here for posterity.
Maybe it's a guy thing but that media box didn't look bad at all. The pink one however had me rolling on the floor laughing my head off. Let me complete the image for you - the whole package tied with a shiny golden strip of paper with a large bow on top...
To be fair I didn't like the Steve Jobs package either. I wouldn't be caught dead with that silly purse of his - looked more like a kitty bag.
Perhaps the point has been lost in these comments, but it seems to me (from the videos) that only Steve Jobs currently knows how to lead a tech firm both strategy and other-reasons wise. He also seems to be the only one (among the three) who knows how to make a good presentation. I still find guys in my firm filling up every square inch of the slide with some text (think Ramki circa our final year), when a single image, a few words in the right font and a simple joke can do a better job. And I like his pizzazz and the way he's going about it -check out the other mac expo videos on the same site.
Oh come on, confess it - you clicked on the links, figured that you had to first re-enable popups, found that a plugin was missing, searched, donwloaded and installed it, watched each video and even burnt them onto a dvd.
ps: Ramki is the other Tauran in the Sumant-Jai-Ramki troika. I've always been amazed at how similar these guys are.
You can be a passionate salesman if your sales are backed by the right ideas and conviction. It obviously doesn't matter what (views, advice, or products) we're trying to sell, or how (writing articles, consulting, marketing) but why? I like what Apple brings to its products and think that Steve Jobs has a great knack for communicating ideas - it is very much an emulate worthy trait.
http://us.rediff.com/money/2005/feb/09carly.htm
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