Everyone will be talking about the announcements but I love watching the Keynote. Notice how they all dress. Yes, it is casual, like Steve but look at the colors.
The ones that work the best wear dark shirts and pants. They walk back and forth on a mostly dark stage with a dark background.
They fool the eye into really only looking at the screen or at the speaker’s head and hands.
There simply is nothing else to really look at, no other distraction.
Now look at Microsoft’s recent keynote.
All sorts of distracting colors, the clothes even distract from the speakers. They are showing off hardware but do a poor job of highlighting each piece of hardware separately.
Finally – and this is the cardinal mistake – they have the stage set up so they have to turn away from the audience. They lose contact with the people they are speaking to.
Apple would have displayed the hardware up on a large screen for everyone to view, would have had captions pop up to show the parts, rather than the speaker pointing at it and would have had only 1 person on the stage at a time.
There is no reason for the large red background or for Ballmer to be on the stage. The speakers distract from the very thing they are trying to demonstrate.
Here is some more. At least Ballmer leaves the stage but the red background simply distracts from the key aspects of the speaker.
Apple demonstrates from its speeches that it knows how to remove extraneous stuff to get to the core of its message. Like a great movie, it removes even great scenes in order to maintain the narrative.
A Microsoft keynote has all these extra things flashing around, shows way too much, has a tremendous amount of jargon and really distracts the viewer from their core message. I am still not sure what they are trying to demonstrate.
Both companies are presenting to hardcore developers. But Apple keeps jargon to a minimum and presents few distractions away from its message.
Microsoft is brimming with jargon and simply covers up any message it is trying to disseminate by so many distractions.
