Ken Segall and I
had a long, chatty lunch a week or so ago. Once upon a time Ken and I worked together at LGFE. He’s been around tech advertising as a
creative type for years - many of them spent working on Apple at Chiat Day.
Jobs, he says, is passionate about keeping things simple - which dovetails in a way with a long ago lesson I learned from a New Yorker editor who, when I asked him what he did as an editor, replied “It’s very simple.” “I am a surrogate for the reader.” His job, in other words, was be sure that ideas, no matter how complicated, were easily understood. He was a sort of customer advocate who made things simple, as Apple has been striving to make computing simple for as long as I can remember.
Back in the era of green screens and DOS prompts, Apple borrowed the icons that had been developed at Xerox PARC and introduced them on Macintosh in 1984. Suddenly using a personal computer became hugely simpler. Microsoft saw the light and went to work developing Windows.
Continue reading "Everyting I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Steve Jobs" »