Posted on 10/05/2011 9:57:56 PM PDT by rlmorel
You’re welcome. Music means so much to me; hearing that a fellow music lover reconnected with it is very moving and makes me happy!
I also appreciated your initial stance on cell phones; I’ve been there for the past 3 years or so regarding smart phones but I’m getting much more interested in having one - free texting, navigation, internet, radio shows and music all on my phone is starting to sound appealing to me but only as of this year.
Your story inspired and challenged me. Thanks again for sharing it.
I am glad it did...it has demonstrably made my life fuller without taking it over (as it does with some people!)
Good luck!
I agree with nearly everything in your post, SamAdams76...
I find your comments about packaging completely accurate-it hasn’t always been so, but sometime in the late Nineties, something changed, and they began to focus on it.
My brother, who fixes PC’s for a living, now loves Macs after watching me use them all these years, and I gave him one of the older laptops when I got a new one.
He says it is like taking money out of his own pocket to recommend macs, but he absolutely loves going over to a customer’s house and opening all his “purchases” and getting it set up for that user.
The last thing I got was an iPhone because my other one had stopped working, and was still under warranty (Applecare is GOOD for laptops and iPhones!)
I walked into the Genius Bar, handed the guy the phone, he looked at it, tried a few things, verified my Applecare plan and just handed me a brand new one.
When I took it home and unpacked it, the box tolerances were so tight that it wouldn’t open...the suction prevented me from pulling the top off!
Everyone I know loves Apple packaging. Like you, I keep all my boxes...:)
That is the way that I feel...Jobs had a special blend of qualities that made him the perfect evangelist for his own product.
My brother and I used to watch his keynote addresses, because even though he was predictable “...one more thing...” his skill at demonstrating and selling his products filled me with admiration and envy.
It reminded me of the time I went to the Springfield Fair in Massachusetts, and we saw the guys in the pavilions doing their schtick, selling their wares. Those guys were good. I went to one and watched the guy using some kitchen implement, and found myself, at the end, surging towards the front with money in my hands along with a crowd of others.
I would jokingly call Jobs a “Snake Oil Salesman”, but the difference was (why I joked) is that he COULD have sold snake oil, but instead sold computers that did exactly what he showed them doing in his keynote demos.
Thanks for your compliment, RC...coming from you, that means a lot.
Thank you for that praise, Kimmers. I was glad to get some positive feedback, FR can be a tough crowd, but I think even people who didn’t like Jobs and don’t like Apple products grudgingly concede for the past couple of days that he was a giant of industry, and can be given his due respect for that.
Some of the comments on this thread are going to be the “worst thing for my vanity ever”! Thank you for that praise-I’ll never get my head through the door comfortably again at FR...:)
I have been writing little snippets for several years now that contain personal experiences, anecdotes and opinions.
I tried doing this many years ago keeping a MS Word document I put them in, but...it simply wasn’t the same. It was forced, or seemed to be.
Then, when I joined FR back in 2004, I found that I often wanted to save things I had written, to either re-use or to refer to.
(Note: Going down a little side road here: One of the unsung powerful capabilities of the MacOS (OS X) is its wonderful and powerful drag and drop capability. Windows has nothing like it. They tried to implement it to a degree, but the implementation is not uniform, and results can be frustratingly spotty, to the point that I don’t even use it on my PC at work. But on the Mac, it is enormously powerful. The reason is “Text Clippings”. If you select a large swath of text from a web page, then use your mouse to grab it and drop it on your desktop, you get a dinky little text clipping. But enclosed it it is nearly all the information, text, graphics, formatting,etc. If you take that text clipping and drop it into MS Word or TextEdit...voila! The stuff you copied is pretty faithfully recreated! If you drop it in a FR post...you only see the text, not the html. I have a folder simply called text clippings, and I save stuff in there, renaming it with keywords so I can find it later. It has changed the way I use my computer. I have not spent much time with Windows 7, so they may have caught up there. Interesting that not many people use text clippings, I guess it is kind of obscure...Note: leaving the side road!)
Anyway, I now have a large collection of anecdotes, opinions and information that is important to me and easily accessible...:) So, it frees me up to be able to write when I am in the right mood, and am able to connect better with what I want to say. It is a lot of fun.
I live down the road from where Wang used to be, and when I was there, before the advent of desktop publishing for the masses I saw Wang at the top of their game. (really, accomplished with the Mac and a Laser Printer early on)
It was SHOCKING to me how quickly Wang went down. They tried, but...their business model was completely destroyed by desktop computing.
I just tried to find a graph online that displays it, but couldn’t find it. You can guess what it looks like, with time on the x scale, in 1980 traditional publishing was up around 98% while desktop was down around 5%. By 2000, the graph crossed in the middle to form an “X”, and the positions were reversed. Stunning.
Whenever I drive by the old Wang building (now something else, but still located on Wang Drive, I think)I look over at it, and all I can think of is: “Buggy Whip Factory”.
And tunnel vision. IIRC, law firms were among their key customers in the beginning. The reason I credit the Mac more than PCs in general for the demise of Wang is because of the mouse and cut and paste. PCs, before Windows, were just electronic type writers with more storage space.
Good point...
A good story again. Have you ever seen Larry Ellison demonstrate his company’s latest and greatest? Scary how good he was. And how, to a cynic like myself, unpersuasive. But that is how he built his company, not through quality, but through salesmanship. There are tales of his salesmen’s aggression to beat superior in quality and in service competitors.
Jobs was something else altogether.
No, I am not familiar with Larry Ellison’s approach but I trust your description.
Well done. Extremely, WELL DONE!
Thanks, harpu...interesting thing is seeing just how common my experience was with so many other people!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.