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"A year and a half ago Apple announced the new swivel-necked iMac. The raging controversy at the time was whether Apple's unprecedented hype before the show was justified, so I wrote this story about the indignation that everyone seemed to feel. Then I lost the story. Well, I just found it again and while it may be old news, it's a darn good story and it still makes a pretty good point."
Learn Something You'll Never Forget
by Del Miller
August 14, 2003
It was an August night in 1928 and the carnival had come to town.
Which was a bigger deal than you might imagine. This was long before television and even before radio was heard outside of a few metropolitan areas. There were some telephones here and there, scattered among the richer folks in town, but not out on the farm where my father lived. Rural electrification was two decades away and indoor plumbing was the sort of luxury that prompted jealous gossip from the neighbors. The nearest picture show would have been in St. Louis, a two day drive over dirt roads just to get there and a journey so seldom made that the intrepid travelers would have made headlines in The Pilot.
The hill country was as remote from popular culture as one could find in those days, mainly due to a fiendish trick of geology. The Ozark plateau is a five-hundred million year old slab of limestone, three-hundred miles on a side, that bobbed slowly to the planet's crust and then weathered into a bewildering convolution of valleys and ridges. The corrugated landscape turned roadbuilding into an exercise of connecting painfully sharp curves on nearly vertical hillsides. The terrain was so crinkled that the shortest path between two points was a theoretical notion, and a village just a few miles away might as well have been in Paraguay.
So most people just stayed home, which was just as well since all the towns were alike anyway. Dotted among the maze of hills were little burgs of two or three hundred people, populated by dour German Catholics and surly French Protestants that were still peeved at how the Thirty Years War had turned out, and who brought to the new world a noble and finely honed tradition of piety, penance and tedium.
It was into this vibrant cauldron of truly spectacular boredom that the carnival arrived.
A Middling Midway
Now, if you've already painted your fervent imaginations with a carnival image of ferris wheels and Octopi, neon lights and Whack-A-Mole, that means you're operating in the wrong century, the wrong part of the country and in an entirely different economic infrastructure. The sort of carnival that toured these hinterlands consisted of a poverty stricken caravan of banjo minstrels, the geriatric remains of a once popular Wild-West show, a Sausage-On-A-Stick vendor, a zoological wonder (say, maybe an emu), a medicine man/moonshine vendor, the customary bearded lady and a ragtag collection of droopy tents housing various species of con artists.
The very mention of such an enterprise scandalized the church ladies who organized sad, solemn, square-jawed little marches up and down the town's only street, spreading the word that Satan's spawn had come to corrupt the men and little children with pure, Godless evil. With the exception of the church ladies, every soul in town would pretty much have sacrificed a limb for a little bit of corrupting and thrown in another for a shot of pure, Godless evil. So, despite the missionary badmouthing, the carnival was the social event of the summer and it was the breath of life to a ten year old boy - my father was was the first one through the gate.
He ate some half-burnt sausage and listened to the fiddles. He marveled at the biggest damned chicken he'd ever seen. He watched an ancient cowboy and a leather-faced Indian shoot blanks at one another, though he could tell their hearts weren't really into it. He wondered why perfectly healthy men were so interested in medicine and why anyone would spend a dime to see a bearded lady - he had an aunt with a pretty formidable mustache and nobody seemed to think she was much of an attraction.
Then he spotted a tent with a banner unfurled over the entrance that boldly proclaimed:
STEP RIGHT UP!!
10¢ - LEARN SOMETHING YOU WILL NEVER FORGET - 10¢.
The folks who put up that sign were awfully proud of their wisdom - not only did they charge a dime for it, but they seemed mighty confident that it was the good sort of stuff you kept around. He thought about it for a moment and decided that information like that was bound to come in handy.
He paid his dime at the door, to a raggedy man who smelled of chewing tobacco, beer and dust, and stepped into a shadow filled tent already full of men waiting to "LEARN SOMETHING THEY WOULD NEVER FORGET." He wormed his way through the crowd, to a roped off area at the back of the tent, and waited. The tent smelled of mouldering canvas and of the crowded sweat of men on an August night. The kerosene lantern cast faint yellow glories through the cigarette smoke floating in lazy layers above his head. In front of him was a stool and a carved up chunk of wood laying in a pile of wood shavings. They all waited in the self-conscious silence of crowds in small places. The minutes crawled by.
Finally a canvas flap at the back of the tent parted and in stepped a formally dressed man with a stiffly professorial air. He said nothing - only nodded at the crowd and took his seat on the stool. He picked up the chunk of wood, pulled out a big knife and he began to carve. The man carved a bit on one side of the log and then upon the other. He gouged here and he scraped there; all with the solemn intensity of a true artist at work. The only sounds were the hissing of the lantern, the scratching of blade upon wood and the dry plink of of the chips as they hit the ground. This went on for several minutes, the crowd in silent anticipation of the forthcoming lesson - the great, unforgettable truth, soon to be revealed.
Finally the woodcarver stopped, set the piece on the ground and stood up. Now, a collective question mark filled the tent, for the carving wasn't really anything at all. It was just the same old piece of wood it had been at the beginning, minus a few more chips. Sheathing his knife, he strode majestically to the tent flap, turned to the crowd and, in a loud, theatrical voice, announced:
"Always whittle away from yourself and you'll never get cut."
And he just...left; taking everyone's dime as he went.
My father never forgot that.
He told me the story when I was six years old and I've never forgotten it.
There's a pretty good chance that you'll never forget it either.
Steve Jobs: Carnival Barker
All of this came to mind as I followed the fevered debate following the last MacWorld - You remember, the one for which Apple finally stopped pretending that one of the larger trade shows in the world of computers should be advertised as if it were an Amish quilting bee?
This time, not only did Apple advertise, they went out of their way to fan the fires of fevered expectation. The company set up its homepage carnival tent in the middle of its website pasture and hung a boldly fonted banner across the virtual canvas doorway proclaiming:
"STEP RIGHT UP!"
"10¢ - WHERE NO PC HAS GONE BEFORE - 10¢"
And...
"Here Ye, Here Ye!"
"10¢ - PREPARE TO BE BLOWN AWAY - 10¢."
...and other such horn tooting exclamations. This was so uncharacteristic of Apple that the clear message was that something fleeping stupendous was afoot and it set absolutely everyone talking, even the mainstream press. The rumors mills ground furiously trying to just keep up with Apple's own hype machine and the teeming millions burned up the boards with breathless visions of an announcement of burning-bush importance. And much like the country carnival, the techno-rubes came out of the hills, putting down their dimes to behold "THAT WHICH WILL BLOW US AWAY."
The big day finally came in a boiling vapor of unrestrained expectation. Steve Jobs mounted the stage in his classic style: He sang and he danced and he demoed. He showed us pretty pictures and painted grand futures. He preached and he exorted and he revved the crowd right up to the climactic event - the brand new iMac rising from the floor, all Klieg lit and dramatic, like a David Copperfield magic trick. He gushed over it. He told us that it floated like a butterfly and it stung like a G4. It defied gravity and broke the speed of light. He cooed and stroked and lavished praise upon this most unique of computers and the cheering audience was bouncing up and down like protoplasmic docklets. And then, when the crowd was amped for his customary "One Last Thing" -- he just...left.
As the Reality Distortion Field ebbed back to within accepted EPA limits, the wild applause picked up a slight hesitancy; hinting a vague uneasiness that there just might be a teensy something missing. A giant, virtual eyebrow lifted skeptically as the MacWorld carnival crowd asked, "So uh, ...just how blown away are we...exactly?"
Sure, the iMac was nice. It was just dandy, in fact. But somehow the sense was that being "blown away" would be a bit more profound of an experience - like plastic explosives and scattered body parts, maybe. Articles began to immediately appear on the Mac web debating the exact, technical definition of "being blown away" and attempting to precisely place the actual, felt sensation somewhere along the "blown-away" spectrum that runs from Soft Breeze all the way up to Molecular Decomposition.
A nasty little edge crept into the discourse, as one correspondent after another counted his fingers and toes, checked his hairdo and decided that no, in fact, he had most definitely NOT been blown away and therefore WE HAD BEEN DUPED!
In Marketing We Trust
It has been a very long time since I've let my emotions run mongoose-wild based upon the promise in some vendor's marketing campaign. I think the turning point for me was the realization that the little boy in the commercial didn't really want to be an Oscar-Meyer weiner, despite such apparent hot dog envy that he spontaneously broke out in song.
As it turns out, Chevrolet isn't, strictly speaking, "The Heartbeat of America" either and no matter how many bowlfuls you eat, Wheaties will not improve your time in the high hurdles. Cars and breakfast cereal and frankfurters can only do so much no matter what the billboard says. So when Apple Computer suggested that I would be blown away by the upcoming, MacWorld announcement, I naturally kept a tight grip on my hormonal balance because, after all, we're talking computers here and not hand grenades.
Now that may sound so obvious that it isn't a point worth making, but mark my words, the expectation cycle for Apple product announcements will continue to be marked by nuclear fueled anticipation, followed by massive discouragement when the reality turns out to be less than hoped for. The whole process just seems so exhausting, and what's the point of that?
Getting our money's worth
When I recall my father telling me his carnival story, what I remember most is his laughter. He never felt that he'd been cheated by that carnival shyster; he was grateful for the experience. His dime bought him a story that made him chuckle for the rest of his life - and that's a helluva return on investment.
I fear that too many of us are spoiling the pleasure we could be getting from the Apple scene; so heavily invested in expectations that we lose the the ability to be happy with what we have. Steve Jobs obviously figured that the iMac would blow us all away, and he would have been right too, if we didn't insist on being such hard-asses all the time.
Apple's drumbeat for MacWorld is supposed to get us all worked up. It's like the comedians that warm up the TV game show audiences so they can really get enthusiastic about a Maytag refrigerator. Of course it doesn't work for everyone but, hey that's the price of admission.
So follow the rumors and keep making the wish lists for Apple's next product announcement. But keep in mind that this is show business and the point is to enjoy - not keep ourselves in a constant froth over ginned up expectations. We ought to have a little fun with this stuff.
That's a lesson we should never forget.
Copyright 2003, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Comments are eagerly welcomed. Drop me a line here.
Check out the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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