Curséd Are The Geek, For They Shall Infect The Earth

As you're no doubt aware -- you'd have to be living on Pluto to miss it -- Apple have been making leaps and bounds in many fields these past few years, not the least in how happy they're making the bankerscum. With US$72.8 billion in cash reserves, Apple's net worth surpassed Microsoft and Intel combined last week ... yet they don't pay dividends.

What exactly is it that makes Apple so successful? What is it Apple do that makes people shell out premium prices for their iDevices? Why can't other IT companies do what Apple do? I mean, it's not like Apple actually invent anything (despite their press releases). What is it about Apple products that makes their customers go back again and again?

The simple answer: the geeks are not in charge at One Infinite Loop. And this is their single biggest advantage over everyone else, and what allows Apple's profits to climb steadily whilst every other sector of IT is in a net-worth downhill slide that's been going on for nearly two years.

What is it that makes the tech-savvy Windows and/or linux user despise Apple products and deride owners of fruit-bearing electronics as "fanboys" and "stupid" and other derogatory remarks?

Because he resents and fears Apple's approach of taking power out of the hands of the specialists and restoring it to the common man.

Geeks spend a lot of their lives amassing knowledge in how to coerce powerful but badly designed & implemented information technology that other geeks have foisted onto the general public, and along comes Steve with the same technology that does the same things which not only has been redesigned to perform without needing specialist knowledge, but is essentially self-maintaining.

Geeks recommend Windows and *nix and their dependent hardware to people because the problems inherent with them guarantee they'll keep needing to come back to work around those problems. It validates their existence. Geeks who recommend Apple are recommending themselves out of a job.

Geeks are forever coming up with different ways of doing things, adding extra features, more choice, expanded flexibility, more options, without any real understanding of what people actually want. They become puzzled when their new ideas and new methods are ignored by the market, mistakenly assume there was something fundamentally wrong with them, and come up with even more new ideas, more new options, which meet the same reception. Because geeks all share an almost-identical mindset, they become enthused and pick up the new ideas and run with them because they mesh with how they already think, and eventually one variant will catch the attention of a technologically-incompetent power broker and it will end up in something that actually sells.

What geeks seem incapable of is a funtamental aspect of human psychology -- it's not figuring out what people want that matters, it's understanding what people don't want. They don't want a universe of options, they don't want complexity, and they definitely do not want to learn new skills. They don't want choice, and they don't want change. Anything new that comes along has to fit in with what they already know, otherwise they feel uncomfortable. If they are presented with too many choices, they become confused, and frustrated.

People resent being asked to step out of their comfort zones.

For the last thirty-odd years we've had an ever-growing number of technologically masterful but socially inept people (the geek) generating hundreds and thousands of different ways we can use technology, with a fraction of a percent being good enough to gain acceptance with greater humanity. The once vibrant IT industry that grew out of the personal computer boom of the late 70's has become an autistic, wheel-chair bound cripple that moves forward in fits & starts because it is suffering from geek. Code manglers move up the corporate ecosphere to become project managers and CEOs, with new geeks flowing in to fill shoes and make new ideas, the end result is an industry that is socially inept to the very roots and has absolutely no idea of what it is people actually want. It churns out minor variant after minor variant of the same thing over & over, and people buy them because geeks keep telling them they need it. Trouble is, 95% of the variants have problems, or are too complex, or are too expensive in terms of time, efficiency and effectiveness, so it gets dumped and another one bought, and that gets dumped and another one bought.

The end result is that you end up pissing people off with problematic products for so long that they've grown jaded and have gone back to pencil & paper, leaving several hundred thousand geeks scratching their heads wondering where they went wrong.

Along comes Steve Jobs, a strange man with no innate technical know-how, but the gift of seeing the bigger picture, finding out exactly what it is that pisses people off, choosing the right technologies & tricks to eliminate them, and being stubborn enough and charismatic enough to see his visions become reality. Steve is an early adherent to concepts first put forward by PARC alumnus Alan Kay, and his philosophies are what guide Apple:
- Teach computers how humans work, never teach humans how computers work.
- Sweat the small stuff so they don't have to.
- For technology to be accepted, it must become invisible in the environment.
- Interface first.

Business wants to ensure you keep buying and buying, doesn't matter if they make videocards, mobile phones, toothpaste or toilet paper. Apple have looked at what everyone else has been doing, found out what people don't like, and turning the complex into an appliance. Make people's lives easier and they'll happily pay the up front premium, and keep coming back because they finally found something that works like they do. Apple products do not make people more stupid, it makes them complacent and raises their expectations of technology in general.

Brand loyalty arises from satisfying people's desires, and only Apple seem to have perfected the better mousetrap.

Telling people to read the manual is also something Apple don't believe in. Geeks say "If you want the user to read the manual, write a better manual." The user interface & HCI specialists' rejoinder is, "If your product needs a manual then you're doing it wrong."