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Wed 25 Jun 2003
Emotional Connection
Category : Commentary/emotionalconnection.txt
While watching the WWDC keynote coverage, I needed to remind myself that this is not MacWorld. The crowd here are developers. They're the ones who were supposed to have left the platform long ago in droves. Yet they're still here, ethusiastically receptive. They're obviously liking what they're seeing. Steve Jobs seems to have made an emotional connection. That's also the idea he used to describe the design of the iSight video camera. This makes it possible for people to see the other party's full facial expression in a web-cam conversation, and thus more likely that they'll connect emotionally. This is a good example of how Apple "gets it" - that the whole idea of information technology is to improve the quality of human communications. And so it goes, with the shift from computer-centricty to user-centricity in the design of the new Finder. Until I watched the keynote, I couldn't imagine what else Apple could do to improve the user's experience, besides a little improvement here and there. As it turned it, they could still do a lot. Nothing would have prepared me for Expose. Now that we've seen it, it's obvious that that's the prefect solution for managing desktop clutter. And did you hear the crowd gasp when he showed the Mac switching from one user's workspace to another? This is called delighting the customer. I'll leave the last words to Derrick Story at O'Reilly : "Over dinner do you think we were talking about how some Wall Street analyst thinks Apple stock should be valued? No way." These are hard core developers here. "The hardware is robust, the operating system is evolving, the developer base is growing, and customers worth having are taking notice of Apple once again. I call it peanut brittle computing: You have 'salt of the earth' Unix blended with the sweetness of GUI applications. My gosh, what a good time to be an Apple developer."
Posted at 4:15PM UTC | permalink
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