"Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma."
I never saw the RDF in quite that light. It always seemed to me to be a way that Jobs could convince people that something was revolutionary, earth shattering, world changing...even when it wasn't (or at best, a well executed evolution built on previous ideas). It was the pinnacle of salesmanship -- turning customers into religious followers. Something to be admired and feared.
That's why the figurative iShitinabox was such an on target joke. The idea was that Jobs could have put shit in a box, but a diminutive "i" before the name and had people lined up around the block for a week before launch ready to buy it -- all swearing that it's going to change the world.
And always, nobody in that line was ever willing to just fess up that they were camped out in front of the Apple store because Jobs told them to be there and buy his stuff. On questioning, they would all say, and perhaps even think, that it was an original idea for them to go there and stand in that line -- and that they were especially smart and clever people for having arrived at that idea by themselves -- and this cleverness is supported by the other 500 clever smart people who are camped out a week before they can actually buy iShitinabox -- or at least an amazing coincidence. They're all different(ly thinking) in exactly the same way.
And then in the months following, there'll be some segment of that buying population that will, deep down, be dissatisfied in some way with their iShitinabox, but can't quite get the mental lens in focus to really notice it because the RDF has them in its grips, and they'll flood internet forums talking about how iShitinabox is the best thing in the history of things and will fight detractors to the death -- deflecting constructive criticism, covering over product flaws, giving testimonials about how their life has changed, start marginally successful businesses around the iShitinabox that would be more successful if they also sold almost their exact same product to the other 50% of the planet that doesn't think iShitinabox is a herald of the second coming.
That is what Job's magic power was, his Reality Distortion Field.
It's not blind loyalty, that's wrong. The iProducts really are very good -- you get a damn fine product when you buy it. But it's the religious fervor that Jobs could generate, the obedience and recitation of the doctrine by Jobs -- bolstered by a tangible thing that you could point to.
What was it about Job's delivery that caused this to happen? I remember the first iPhone launch and people were lining up with stacks of thousands of dollars in cash so they could buy 20 or 30 of the phones at launch. People literally weeping in the street when the inventory was sold out and they couldn't get theirs. I've known at least a dozen people who bought every single iPod, iPhone and iPad like they were collecting Pokemon -- some even while barely making rent.
I know of at least one divorce over this phenomenon. After every keynote, my friend's husband would run out and buy pretty much one of everything that was put up for sale right after -- annihilating their savings for a new home.
I have a professor friend that literally can't control himself and spend thousands of dollars a month on subscriptions to various services and apps for his iProducts. In class, he will try and inappropriately push this stuff on his students like a born again preacher pushing the good news.
It's not a Field-of-Lies that comprised Job's Reality Distortion Field, but it's not really an innocent Field-of-Dreams either.
The primary flaw with every RDF theory is that most Apple customers have never heard Steve Jobs speak. They only know new products are coming out when they see them on the shelves or when news hits CNN or by word of mouth. And if the media and word of mouth are so resoundingly bad at reporting on tech, how are they supposed to be so good at propagating the RDF?
How in the world could the RDF be so powerful as to bamboozle users over the utility and novelty of features, when most of the people buying new Apple products don't even know what the specific features of the next product are?
That's what's so damn offensive about people trying to push the idea of the RDF, even when they try to soft-pitch the idea by saying the products themselves aren't bad.
The entire theory insists that the person who just used an iPod and iTunes for two years doesn't know a thing about their own experience. That their high opinion of Apple is driven not by their actual experience but by the magical mind powers of a person they've never heard speak. That they're objectively wrong and some person who's never used an Apple product for more than five minutes is right, as evidenced by some techno-gibberish on a spec sheet. And that when the happy Apple customer decides to try a Mac, because the iPod thing went so well and the Dell PC thing went so poorly, that the only possible rationalization is that they've been brainwashed.
There was something there. It was even acknowledged in the bowels of Apple (RDF was coined inside of Apple). I'm not sure I know entirely how it's propagated, but I have a hunch it's through people who could best be called "evangelists".
They didn't know Jobs personally. But they took time off of work to watch every keynote and try and crash the MacWorld expos. They bought every sort of device they could get their hands on since the original iMac. And they insist to their nontechnical friends that the benefits of the platform "it just works" outweigh any downside.
My nontechnical friends who have iPhones and Macs and such all seem to have gotten into the platform that way -- they all know somebody who evangelized the platform. And with the brilliant integration between the devices, once you dip a toe in, you may as well just jump in all the way.
Now it may not be Jobs' RDF that initiated this, it may be Ive's design I don't know. But there is a strange sort of pseudo-religious phenomenon there. You simply don't see this kind of behavior with any other technology.
How in the world could the RDF be so powerful as to bamboozle users over the utility and novelty of features, when most of the people buying new Apple products don't even know what the specific features of the next product are?
That's the question isn't it? Today the iProduct line is well known. You can guess, based on the prior pattern, that any new iProduct will be very good at what it does. It may even innovate in a few key areas and shakeup the particular vertical it launches into.
But remember when the original iPhone came out? or the iPad? I don't know of anybody who actually knew anything about them, but they sure as hell were motivated to stand in line for 8 or 9 hours to get one. Why? I sure as hell don't know. They all already had phones, what was it about the iPhone that they just had to experience. There really wasn't any prior history there, and the original phones were pretty expensive for the time. I'd even argue that to a rational observer, Apple's near death not that long before hand would dissuade somebody from spending that kind of money on a device by a company that has had a very shaky history.
So what was it that moved people to empty their bank accounts and try to buy a dozen original iPhones? The iPod didn't have that sort of mania attached to it.
Why are they all there? What would it hurt to wait a couple of days until you next swung by the mall? Why are they hi-fiving and jumping up and down like they just won the lottery? What great thing did they just accomplish?
Remember, at this point in time (June 2007) all they know they've accomplished is to wait in line to buy a phone by a not very successful computer company who's other non-computer devices were by and large complete flops (sans the iPod). Remember the Apple printers? Newton, Pippin, the Quick Take, the Hi-fi? In June of 2007, Apple was rumored to be up-for-sale (with Google a possible buyer), the stock wasn't performing well.
Outside of the keynote and some coverage in the major media, there was literally no information on this device up to this point. Nobody in that line had ever used one, most had probably never seen one in real life, there were no owner testimonials, early reviews weren't exactly glowing, this could have just been a weird Apple curiosity like the Quick Take.
But all of these people, at sites all around the U.S. lined up in massive groups to buy, site unseen, and hi-five each other, over a device that they already pretty much owned as far as they knew.
The RDF is amazing, it's real and it speaks to its power that those most affected by it seem to not even be aware of its existence.
Maybe because it's a 'social event', like lining up to buy concert tickets, or a new video game, or going shopping on black friday, or getting to an amusement park early to be first in line for their favorite roller coaster.
Regular people do those sorts of things for products and experiences all the time and no-one feels a need to invent an "RDF" to explain it.
If you want to say "Jobs was persuasive" in meetings, that's one thing. What people who've worked at Apple and seen keynotes comment on and call an RDF is basically that. There is no doubt that he was a charismatic guy who prepared and presented well. But that's a far cry from saying it's at all reasonable to assert that his charisma motivates any statistically significant slice of people to buy Apple products without any regard for their quality or value.
I don't understand how Steve Job's personal charisma affects how majority of Apple customers feel about their products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, majority of Apple's customers don't go around looking for Steve Jobs (if they know the name in the first place - before he passed away of course) videos and sales pitches.
(RDF or NOT) --> (People around SJ) -/-> (Average Apple customer)
Well, Steve Jobs shaped the image of Apple as a company and it's products, and ensured things worked the way he wanted them to, right or wrong, from the inside out.....
There's a reason people go nuts over most apple products, and it's not because Steve jobs gets up on stage, and it's not because of technical specifications.... it's because he managed to setup the company to produce and market products that carried a bit of that magic with them for some reason. The packaging, the styling, etc...... we can argue that a box is just a box, but I can't help but notice when I give someone an iPod for christmas or something the fascination they have with simply opening the box. They start delicately examining the box and protecting it, usually keeping it afterwards for no explicable reason, even before getting to the product at hand.
So a box is more than just packaging obviously... if it has that effect on people, it bolsters the brand..... pretty simple.
The great thing about humans in groups - once you are charming enough to sell the right 10-20% of a population on your own, with luck, other people will soon start to copy them, and pretty soon you are the Catholic church, or Facebook, or Apple.
You mean 10-20% of Apple customers were exposed to personal interactions with Steve Jobs? I'm not sure on that.
Example: Apple had almost spent nothing on adverts or anything in India until a year (or two) ago. And yet the iPod was super duper popular. (Other products not as much as for the average Indian the price of the product + 30% tax by the govt. on the import puts them out of reach.)
The millions of Apple customers today have little in common with the tiny hardcore group of Mac users who were hanging on for dear life back in the late 1990s. For those people, Jobs was the savior.
The "Shitinabox" thing dates back to the Mac Cube, which actually did sell well for a couple months after release. (Presumably mostly because it was Steve Jobs Approved.) I think it was popularized by John Dvorak.
Probably. But today's Apple isn't built on those hardcore Mac users. I wasn't one of them. If I go back in time, I would prefer XP over what Apple was shipping in 2002. I only have Apple stuff _after_ they became good again. (Too young to have had a chance to buy the originals - Apple II et al.) OS X is UNIX - love that - and it has nice proprietary apps which to me add lot of value to everyday life.
Didn't the FBI background check on Jobs conclude that he was prone to not being forthright and honest with a tendency to distort reality? I don't think they got winged over by charisma.
I never saw the RDF in quite that light. It always seemed to me to be a way that Jobs could convince people that something was revolutionary, earth shattering, world changing...even when it wasn't (or at best, a well executed evolution built on previous ideas). It was the pinnacle of salesmanship -- turning customers into religious followers. Something to be admired and feared.
That's why the figurative iShitinabox was such an on target joke. The idea was that Jobs could have put shit in a box, but a diminutive "i" before the name and had people lined up around the block for a week before launch ready to buy it -- all swearing that it's going to change the world.
And always, nobody in that line was ever willing to just fess up that they were camped out in front of the Apple store because Jobs told them to be there and buy his stuff. On questioning, they would all say, and perhaps even think, that it was an original idea for them to go there and stand in that line -- and that they were especially smart and clever people for having arrived at that idea by themselves -- and this cleverness is supported by the other 500 clever smart people who are camped out a week before they can actually buy iShitinabox -- or at least an amazing coincidence. They're all different(ly thinking) in exactly the same way.
And then in the months following, there'll be some segment of that buying population that will, deep down, be dissatisfied in some way with their iShitinabox, but can't quite get the mental lens in focus to really notice it because the RDF has them in its grips, and they'll flood internet forums talking about how iShitinabox is the best thing in the history of things and will fight detractors to the death -- deflecting constructive criticism, covering over product flaws, giving testimonials about how their life has changed, start marginally successful businesses around the iShitinabox that would be more successful if they also sold almost their exact same product to the other 50% of the planet that doesn't think iShitinabox is a herald of the second coming.
That is what Job's magic power was, his Reality Distortion Field.
It's not blind loyalty, that's wrong. The iProducts really are very good -- you get a damn fine product when you buy it. But it's the religious fervor that Jobs could generate, the obedience and recitation of the doctrine by Jobs -- bolstered by a tangible thing that you could point to.
What was it about Job's delivery that caused this to happen? I remember the first iPhone launch and people were lining up with stacks of thousands of dollars in cash so they could buy 20 or 30 of the phones at launch. People literally weeping in the street when the inventory was sold out and they couldn't get theirs. I've known at least a dozen people who bought every single iPod, iPhone and iPad like they were collecting Pokemon -- some even while barely making rent.
I know of at least one divorce over this phenomenon. After every keynote, my friend's husband would run out and buy pretty much one of everything that was put up for sale right after -- annihilating their savings for a new home.
I have a professor friend that literally can't control himself and spend thousands of dollars a month on subscriptions to various services and apps for his iProducts. In class, he will try and inappropriately push this stuff on his students like a born again preacher pushing the good news.
It's not a Field-of-Lies that comprised Job's Reality Distortion Field, but it's not really an innocent Field-of-Dreams either.