Dress like Steve Jobs day

Today is “Dress like Steve Jobs day”.  I have never owned an Apple product yet I still feel a great personal sense of loss at Steve’s death.  I don’t dislike Apple though many who know me feel that I do. I have always had a very rational reason for buying the non-Apple thing.  With the iPod and iTunes my objection was lack of Rhapsody support. I believe in the subscription model for digital content. When the iPhone was introduced I objected to the exclusive arrangement with AT&T who had poor coverage in areas I frequent.  I bought an Android Smartphone and still feel that it has been the best user experience I have had for any consumer electronics product. By the time I became interested in getting a tablet I was a committed Android user so I wasn’t going to buy an iPad.  With Apple PC’s it is more complicated.  I was a Political Science major in college, not an engineer. I became a self taught PC user out of necessity. It became a badge of honor for me that my friends and family came to me to edit their config.sys, win.ini and autoexec.bat files to make their PCs run better or recover from a disk crash. I didn’t need Apple’s ease of use. In fact, struggling with broken and virus infected PCs has really helped me understand technology which has in turn enabled me to carve out a great career in “high tech”.

I found my technology niche is giving voice to extremely talented engineers who need help marketing their products. This may not have been possible without Steve Jobs. Apple’s success fueled by Steve’s focus on marketing and his reputation as a marketing genius makes even the brightest engineer realize that nothing sells itself.  The genius of Steve Jobs marketing lies in keeping the story simple.  For Apple the key message is delivering exceptional user experience and everything they do is focused on this.

Developing a simple yet powerful message that captures the essence of complex multicore devices is challenging. Without good marketing all multicore devices look very much alike.  The high level analysis relies on core counts, clock frequency etc.  TI is well known for developing great processing cores so our key message is centered on the rest of the story.  We like to talk about “full multicore entitlement”, the fact that all of the processing elements in KeyStone devices can process at their full capacity all the time. This is the key to their value.  Much like how Apple developers focus on the user experience TI developers focus on “full multicore entitlement”.  Our engineering teams understand that this is what differentiates KeyStone devices. As we move from generation to generation they are committed to maintaining this differentiation.  “Full multicore entitlement” as a marketing message has morphed into an engineering mantra.

So, I’d like to thank Steve Jobs for showing the world that great marketing isn’t about misleading the customer or just for selling soap and cars. Great marketing is necessary for every product and is helpful to customers.  Great marketing is about helping the customer understand your value and making it easier for them to buy your product.  Oh, and one more thing…here I am on “dress like Steve Jobs day”.