{"id":46,"date":"2005-01-30T17:52:31","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T01:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/?p=46"},"modified":"2005-01-30T18:06:26","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T02:06:26","slug":"the-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/46","title":{"rendered":"The Switch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\"><strong>Warning:<\/strong> What follows could be considered extremely <em>&#8220;geeky&#8221;<\/em>.  If you feel above it, or you simply do not have an interest in it, you might as well skip this lengthy entry.  You&#8217;ve been warned.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\">Instead of being a good student, this weekend, I watched keynotes given by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  I know it&#8217;s a bit late, as they both occurred in early January, 2005, but I can&#8217;t resist commenting on them.  I&#8217;ve provided links to streaming video of both of them, below:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/billgates\/speeches\/2005\/01-05CES.asp\">2005 CES Keynote &#8211; Bill Gates  &#8211; about 1 hour 20 minutes<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/quicktime\/qtv\/mwsf05\/\">2005 Macworld Expo Keynote &#8211; Steve Jobs &#8211; over 2 hours<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\">The contrast between the public speaking abilities of each is like black and white.  Steve Jobs has a couple segments where he gets guests to come in to do their own bits, or help out with a section &#8211; like having a band come in to play music which is recorded onto the mac to later demo editing capabilities.  Other than that, Steve Jobs holds up a two hour plus presentation extremely well; he&#8217;s a great public speaker.  Bill Gates, on the other hand, has to go out of his way to hire Conan O&#8217;Brian to host him on his own keynote.  Obviously, a desperate attempt at making his presentation more interesting.  While some of Conan&#8217;s commentary was funny, it ended up just adding a lot of fluff to the keynote.  Add to that, the nature of a late-night show, and the sheer size of Conan next to Bill Gates, and Conan appears to dominate Bill Gates&#8217; own keynote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\">That brings up another issue: actual content.  According to Microsoft, everybody wants to watch TV and watch recorded shows on portable devices.  Most of Bill Gates&#8217; presentation talked about integrating next-gen TVs with home networks, phones, and portable media players &#8211; nothing about their bread and butter: Windows.  Steve Jobs introduced new products and updates to existing products, providing demos on each.  Bill talked a lot.  In a chair.  Without much visual aid or demos.  In a chair, talking.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\">Let&#8217;s not forget that Bill encountered TWO bugs in the course of the event.  One was resolved at a later point in the show, and the other was simply ignored.  Steve Jobs encountered ONE bug, and he simply segued to a backup system stating, &#8220;This is why we have backup systems.&#8221;  People clapped.  Not so much clapping for the Microsoft side of things.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\">So I wasn&#8217;t that interested in what Microsoft had to sell.  I could be biased, though: I don&#8217;t watch much TV, and I don&#8217;t see the point of hard-disk recorders.  Nothing shown at the Microsoft keynote made me go &#8220;Woah, that&#8217;s cool&#8230;.&#8221;  However, after watching all 2+ hours of the Apple keynote, I would seriously consider a couple Apple products: <em>Apple Mini<\/em> and <em>iPod Shuffle<\/em>.  The only thing I didn&#8217;t like about Steve Jobs&#8217; presentation was that I had to watch it on my Windows computer &#8211; I still haven&#8217;t figured out how to get streaming Quicktime working on my linux box.  Go figure.  Every time I have to use my Windows PC, I cringe.  I should really spend some time cleaning it up&#8230; something Windows requires every now and then. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph\" style=\"padding:0.5cm 0 0.5cm 0\">Watching both of these keynotes reminded me of one of my favourite movies: <em>Pirates of the Silicon Valley<\/em>.  I <em>must<\/em> buy that DVD.  If you&#8217;re interested, you should check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=1984macintro\">this video (~21MB)<\/a> of Steve Jobs introducing the world to the Macintosh computer in 1984.  Excellent video.  So will I make the switch?  Well, I&#8217;ve already stopped using Windows, so it&#8217;s not that big of a jump for me.  We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Warning: What follows could be considered extremely &#8220;geeky&#8221;. If you feel above it, or you simply do not have an interest in it, you might as well skip this lengthy entry. You&#8217;ve been warned. Instead of being a good student, this weekend, I watched keynotes given by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I know it&#8217;s&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/46\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Switch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4jEMb-K","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}