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Apple's minimalist writing style Ping!
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Posted on 09/21/2010 5:16:16 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple’s continued glory eats away at me. I long for it to pick up some bruises. When the iPad came out, I prayed it would be awful.
LIKE most Brits, I find success in others pretty hard to cope with. When that success is combined with good looks, I can’t tolerate it at all.
Apple’s continued glory eats away at me. I long for it to pick up some bruises. When the iPad came out, I prayed it would be awful. My prayers were not heard: like all Apple products, it is sleek and gorgeous, and in due course I shall go to one of its temples of consumption and grumpily buy one.
Now I find that the company has succeeded in an area even more revolutionary than designing beautiful products that are easy to use. This time, though, I feel no discomfort. Apple has discovered something that other companies have long forgotten, if they ever knew: language can also be beautiful and easy to use. Words can be fun . They can look elegant. They can make you laugh.
Earlier this month it published a set of guidelines for applications sold at its App Store. According to the laws that govern this sort of thing, this document should have been doubly unreadable. It was a list of legal requirements and was aimed at techies. Instead, it was funny and clear, and I found myself reading it effortlessly, even though I barely know what an “app” is.
“We have over 250000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.”
The tone is direct and comic.
“We will reject apps for any content or behaviour that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, I’ll know it when I see it. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.”
Now compare this with the standard stuff on the Microsoft website. The brand new browser, it says, “delivers a richer, faster, and more business-ready Web experience. Architected to run HTML 5, the beta enables developers to utilise standardised mark-up language across multiple browsers”.
Reading this, I’m bored and restless, irritated and alienated.
Given the towering superiority of the first linguistic style over the second, will it catch on? Will other companies copy Apple’s language just as they have copied its design?
You might think there was a clear commercial advantage to be had in writing clearly and stylishly. But you would be wrong. There is no sign that Microsoft has been suffering from its stolid, dodgy way with words. Indeed it is one of the great mysteries of capitalism that there is no invisible hand that joins good language and good profits. If anything, the hand pushes the two apart.
Even in industries that make their money by selling messages there is no appetite for clarity. Just last week a reader sent me the following sentence from the blog of Bob Jeffrey, the head of JWT, in which he describes what his vast and successful advertising agency does: “Global consumers are rapidly re-evaluating and readjusting their value paradigms and purchasing decisions. Our job is to keep our ear to the ground with these consumers, providing relevant real-time insight to our clients that inspires cutting-edge, cost-efficient solutions.”
The Apple version of this would be something like: “Consumers can change so we try to keep up.”
An even better example of the link between high profits and low language was in the Financial Times . It was an advert from “one of the largest and most trusted banking and financial services organisations in the world”, which wanted a “customer journey re-engineering manager”.
This title contains three layers of obfuscation: the ludicrous yet ubiquitous idea that a banking customer is on a journey; the idea that this journey needs re-engineering; the notion that this needs managing. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: surplus profits generate bonuses and bullshit in equal measure.
The only customers who are really on a journey are those of the transport sector. And as I looked at a collection of them chugging along into Moorgate station last week, I thought of another reason why Apple’s brave effort to rehabilitate language won’t catch on. Words are finished. Customers on journeys don’t read. They watch videos on their iPads, iPhones and iPods. © 2010 The Financial Times Limited.
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May be easier to just ask admins for a caucus.
Given that the additional comments that "bulked-up" the Apple threads in the recent past were those of Apple-hating trolls and the ensuing verbal food-fights, NO GREAT LOSS.
It's actually rather nice to have a thread with lots of on-topic comments, and not much chaff.
And of course, the occasional complaint that the tech-thread cease-fire is somehow equivalent to higher taxes. :)
Ain't it amazing, that when the cease-fire was imposed, the trolls found out they didn't know how to post a relevant comment? My, my. All they could do is troll. Well, again, NO GREAT LOSS.
Now, the topic of the thread is language and profits. Have a comment to make?
I interpret Swordmaker's admonitions as requests for common courtesy and mutual respect. They're not rules, the way a caucus would have.
A caucus says (sort of): "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Disagree, yes; argue, no. (That's how I interpret the rules, YMMV.)
The tech threads are still a good place to have an argument, if it's on-topic and not personal. To quote Monty Python:
"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition."Whereas a verbal food fight is something else entirely.
No need for a caucus, since a good argument can be fun and enlightening, as long as we all manage to conduct ourselves as civilized adults.
it was tongue in cheek as his list of requirements implied somehow this topic is any different from any other threads on FR.
I thought your comment might be t-i-c although I answered straight.
It's not a list of requirements, so much as a plea for common decency and civility. The Apple threads had become different -- a battleground. The trolls had disrupted the Apple threads to the point where Jim Robinson himself had to step in and threaten a few of them. It was disheartening to see FReepers writing such things, and embarrassing as well.
If Swordmaker's entreaties to good manners have any positive effect, I don't see any problem with them.
Nope, just wanted to get some action started on what seemed to be a thread with little action.
We had so much action that the thread was going to disappear, like the Crevo threads.
The only reason for such vitriol on these threads, is a person just lives to spread hate, or they are paid hacks. What does it add to the discussion, to point out how stupid a person is if buys an Apple product, or believes in God?
I guess I didn’t realize the Apple threads were any worse than any other topic thread here. I don’t always read those.
You wanted to get some action, for what purpose?
If you had ever participated in a CreVo thread, you would understand why Sword asks for civility. The attacks were vicious, always the same, not unlike the attacks on anyone who has a positive view on Apple products.
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