This maybe just a coincidence but yesterday, both Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates published lengthy essays sharing their thoughts on DRM and Security respectively.Steve Jobs urged the music companies to start selling songs without copy protection software (to boost sale of music on iTunes store) while Bill Gates detailed the work being done at Microsoft on trustworthy computing.
The interesting thing to note was how the web reacted to the thoughts of these stalwarts which went online around the same time.
Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Music" created a virtual thunder-storm as these screenshots from Techmeme, Digg and Technorati suggest.
On the other hand, nobody even submitted Bill Gates' memo on Digg. And at the time of writing this post, only six blogs were linking to the Bill Gates letter and it never hit Techmeme.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-world-reacted-to-12000-word-essays.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Do people hate bill gates or Steve is famous than him. Well I never heard of Steve but Bill is known to me
Written on 7/2/07 6:40 PM
I dig Job's approach to most things. And he does one thing really well - spin everything to protect Apple's image. He's great at it. Really, Look how appealing he made a $600 cell phone recently. I was salivating after watching the keynote for iPhone.
Jobs has always had self (and Apple) interests at the forefront. It's what's made him successful. And he can go on saying what he's saying about DRM because of iTunes.
In my opinion, the man is a marketing genius and he taked advantage of every opportunity he can to give Apple an edge.
Written on 7/2/07 8:52 PM
Steve Jobs' letter makes me think a human being wrote it. I'm sure he had help from his minions and tossed it around the office getting opinions, but on the whole I believe he wrote it.
Bill Gates' letter makes me think a press office wrote it. Everything that could possibly seem interesting or colourful was surgically removed from it. Any piece of information that could not have been easily predicted from his previous speeches was taken out. The take-home message appears to be that Microsoft has worked hard on security and has a lot of security products.
Of course I'm sure they will all be every bit as friendly as User Account Control on Windows Vista.
Did you see Apple's wonderful 'Security' commercial? Do we want to run our whole lives that way?
In short, Steve Jobs wrote something newsworthy - that he would like to abandon DRM. Bill Gates wrote a dull speech that reads like his 500 previous speeches and contains about the same real news content.
They both deserves exactly the publicity they got.
D
http://www.amazing.com/users/show/1
Written on 8/2/07 7:11 AM