"To Steve"

We were in a restaurant when I got the news on my iPhone. Unable to digest the finality, we simply toasted his legacy. The couple next to us promptly raised their glasses to ours, “To Steve”.

To you, Steve. Thank you for everything.

Google, Apple and Bob Dylan

I had a short discussion on Twitter this morning — I’d link to it, if Twitter had thread permalinks — sparked by Danielle’s tweet, in which she calls bullshit on Gawker’s article on the new Google Instant commercial, in which Ryan Tate (who has had a brush with Jobs earlier this year, and with whom I don’t agree in the slightest with regards to the iPad) asserts that regardless its intentions, this is one ad Steve Jobs will hate:

I’m with Ryan Tate on this. Not only is this ad unusual for Google, which even when it gets imaginative, is obviously an engineers club, not a poets society (with exceptions). And while the Google Instant commercial still sacrifices actual charm and humanity for a factual message — contrary to Think Different — since both companies operate in the tech industry, the very use of Dylan, intentionally or not, is absolutely comparable.

Think Different was a major milestone for Apple. Aside from building Apple’s current image, it marked Steve Jobs’ return and in many ways the start of what we now know as Apple. It was a campaign that was not only tremendously important to Apple as a company, but it was very personal to Steve Jobs:

But his well-known relationship with Bob Dylan goes way back, to well before his return to Apple. Here in the 2003 Rolling Stone interview:

Steve Wozniak turned me on to [Bob Dylan]. I was probably … oh … maybe 13, 14. We ended up meeting this guy who had every bootleg tape in the world. He was a guy that actually put out a newsletter on Bob Dylan. He was really into it — his whole life was about Bob Dylan. But he had the best bootlegs — even better stuff than you can get today that’s been released. He had amazing stuff. And so we had our room full of tapes of Bob Dylan that we copied. #

In fact, I think Steve Jobs probably sees a lot of himself in Dylan:

He was a very clear thinker, and he was a poet.

Or maybe that’s just me projecting… Either way, here’s the opening of the 1984 shareholders meeting where he first revealed the Macintosh:

Here’s Bob Dylan in an iPod commercial:

And the list goes on.

This isn’t about Dylan, and whether or not he’s willing to do commercials or not (Danielle brought up Victoria’s Secret and Pepsi as examples), this is about the iconography that he brings with him, when used in specific contexts.

Google’s commercials have most often been about the product. Whether it’s fast, secure, easy to use and so on. Google is a very fact-centric company, by heart. I love Google, but they have for a long time been an image-challenged company, and have only in recent years started to do commercials at all, let alone ones that convey more than facts.

Apple on the other hand is a counter-cultural company; radical in a way. For a long time that’s been the defining trait of Apple’s brand and the way Steve Jobs saw himself and his products in relation to the rest of the tech industry. And few companies, in particular a company like Google, are driven so much by the personality of the CEO as Apple has been.

And that’s why it tastes a little bit funny when another tech giant, in direct competition with Apple, puts out a — for them — atypical commercial using imagery, which filtered through a post-Think Different world, will always be associated with Apple and Steve Jobs (the two being virtually inseparable).

Whether the radical counter-cultural underdog image is still sticking to Apple these days, is another discussion entirely, but to put it in context, Google using black and white Bob Dylan imagery is a little like 1980’s Coke using Michael Jackson.

It would be a lot of things. A coincidence wouldn’t be one of them.

To Those Wonderful Books

I love books. And I amass books. So much so, that between the two of us—Rikke and I—there is no doubt who is in charge of the appropriation and storage of dead trees, which might not have been so paradoxical, had Rikke not been a librarian…

In fact, bringing home new books has stopped being a monetary concern and turned into a volumetric one. Yet, against all odds, I brave both the imminent collapse of this 17th century building at the hands of ‘just one more Gibson, there’s good in him still, I can sense it!’Spook Country. I can’t read that thing, it just feels so… irrelevant. and such worldly concerns as where to store these damned things, and one-click-buy like there was no tomorrow and I had a fallout shelter to stock.

A few ‘art of’ books, a sci-fi romp here and there—which I usually find boring and long-winded, being rather hard to please—the occasional ‘real’ novel—which I inevitably find much more rewarding, and spend twice the time reading—some Alan Moore comics, a batch of Star Wars books—because I can’t be stopped—anything by Michael Herr, a stack of director biographies, some books on writing books—keeping the dream alive since 1978—and the occasional technical manual of sorts, preferably ‘the definitive guide’ to something.

I wish I went wider. Insightful political commentaries or something similarly serious. Hell, even a self-help book here and there. But I don’t go wide, I go deep. No, not in the ‘4am-drunk-philosophy-deep’-sense. Rather, the completist-deep.

It’s not exactly new to rave against such utterances, but still; in spite of what Steve“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” # might think, some people do read (you go Khoi!). You probably know a few of them. You might be one of them. I sure wish I was.

This is the real paradox, since I love reading as much as I love the books themselves. But in the cold hard light of day, I simply have too many other ‘things’ that creep up and peck away at my time, so that when night-time rolls around, I strip down and crawl under the covers, I either have no time at all or no scarcely 20-30 minutes for a small chunk of whatever book I’m currently deluding myself that I’ll eventually finish.

Insane! Because as much as I love the books themselves—the design, the layout, the type and all of that, which the American publishers do so much better than we Europeans can ever hope for—I love to read just as much! Hell, our trip to the summer house a few weeks back was literally all about reading books and watching films. That’s what we did, and that was all we did, and I loved every minute of it, finishing several booksThe Pixar Story by David A Price, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Skywalking by Dale Pollock—which I wrote about—and The Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K Dick. Oh, and some comics, but they don’t really count for this. and thinking to myself these very thoughts: Gee, I know what? I should really put some effort into reading more.

But it’s one of those annoying things that is apparently easier said than done, which is evidenced by the fact that on this perfectly readable sunday evening, half-past nine, instead of reading Blindness or Citizen Spielberg two books on my active reading list—I’ll let the ones I’m ‘passively’ reading go uncounted for now—I’m writing an entry on my blog about not being able to find the time for reading…

How about that.