Scott Adams on Antennagate and the ‘High Ground Maneuver’

Scott Adams, unlike many others, thinks Jobs’s handling of the press conference was genius:

If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 in particular to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to “all smartphones have problems,” the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.

The single biggest problem Apple faced last week — the only reason Apple responded at all, let alone with a major press event — is that their flagship product was being subject to ridicule. Ridicule is powerful, and difficult to deflect. It was the “look at the similar problem with these other phones” demonstration that deflected the ridicule. (That, along with the iOS 4.0.1 update which rejiggered the bar-display algorithm such that a finger on the spot no longer made more than one or two bars go away.)

★ Monday, 19 July 2010