Presentation styles: Bill Gates & Steve Jobs—Take 2

You and I don't get to pull gadgets out of our pockets that wow the faithful, generates rabid applause, and set the blogosphere abuzz. But here's something we can do. Steve makes great use of that old comparative standby—tables. Here's a sample from the introduction of the first iPod, back in October 2001.

In this case, he was highlighting a negative. I'd have used orange.

Watching the performance on YouTube, one is struck by several things: First, it's a very small audience compared to what Steve draws these days. Second, the mood is quite subdued. This is 6 weeks after 9/11, and this is an audience mostly of the press, not of MacHeads. Steve gets very little applause compared to what he's used to (also, the press of the day was rather underwhelmed by this whole "iPod" concept). Very interesting to watch Steve soldier on in front of this crowd.

Notez bien the earlier point about him not having titles on the slides.

Here's another great example from the MacBook Air intro. In this case, the table isn't comparing things per se, it's examining the attributes of competitive products. The simple and elegant use of green checkmarks and the orange x's enhanced the message about what they liked and disliked in this product class. This is the setup. You know what the payoff is going to be: each x for the competitors gets turned a checkmark for his product. BS, sure, but exquisitely executed BS.