The man who put the 'i' in iMac

Meet the creative director who named a generation of Apple products

[Originally published Nov. 4, 2009 on Fortune.com]

The TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team was horrified in 1998 when Steve Jobs pulled back a cloth and revealed the bulbous teardrop that came to be known as the Bondi-Blue iMac.

But then Jobs wasn't so crazy at first about the name they proposed for it.

No one had ever seen anything like the new computer, veteran creative director Ken Segall tells Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an exclusive interview published Tuesday evening.

"We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank," Segall recalls. "We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, 'Jesus, do they know what they are doing?' It was so radical."

Segall eventually came up with "iMac," a name that connected the original 1984 Macintosh with the rapidly expanding Internet. But Jobs took some convincing.

Below the fold, excerpts from the story as Kahney tells it:

Battle of the buzzwords: Apple vs. Microsoft

[Originally posted Sept. 20, 2009 at Fortune.com]

Apple (AAPL) is awesome. Microsoft (MSFT) is muscular. Apple execs speaks in adjectives; Microsoft's in gerunds. Cupertino wants to show us how cool its products are, and how easy-to-use. Redmond wants us to know how hard it's going to compete to grow its market share.

That's the take-away message from the pair of videos pasted below the fold.

The first -- Apple's Sept. 9 "It's only rock and roll" presentation boiled down to just the adjectives -- has been viewed nearly half a million times since it was posted last week by justanotherguy84.

The second -- which we put together Sunday morning at the suggestion of TechFlash's Todd Bishop -- is Microsoft COO Kevin Turner's July presentation to analysts boiled down to just the buzzwords. Turner is, as Bishop promised, a modern master of techno-business jargon.

Let's go to the videos. Each is less than two minutes long.

Boiling Apple down to its adjectives

[Originally posted Sept. 15, 2009 on Fortune.com]

Last week we counted how many times Apple (AAPL) marketing chief Phil Schiller used the words "amazing" and "incredible" in his presentation at the "It's only rock and roll event." (Answer: an incredible 15 times each.)

Now someone who calls himself justanotherguy84 has taken the exercise one step further. He (or possibly she) has posted a 2-minute YouTube video of the entire Sept. 9 event stripped of just about everything but the adjectives.

Ever wonder how Steve Jobs and company leave the indelible impression that Apple's products are really great, really easy and just plain awesome?

Check it out below the fold.

Steve Jobs, chained to a rock

[Originally posted January 18, 2009 on Fortune.com.]

He was a Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave to mankind the tool that allowed mortals to rise above the beasts. For his sins, Jupiter had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus. Every day a vulture feasted on his liver, which grew back overnight.

Steve Jobs, who announced on Wednesday that he is taking a medical leave to focus on his health, must feel something like poor Prometheus, chained to his rock in the hills above Palo Alto. The vultures this week are an ever-expanding team of reporters from Bloomberg News -- and whoever is feeding them medical updates.

Why does Steve Jobs look so thin?

[Originally posted June 13, 2008 on Fortune.com]

Much of the speculation about Steve Jobs' rail-thin appearance at the unveiling of the new iPhone on June 9 has tended to be all or nothing.

Either his cancer has returned or he is recovering from a bout with a "common bug," as his spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. "That's all there is to it," she said. (The talk may have unnerved investors a bit: Apple (AAPL) shares fell 4.1% on Thursday and another 2.4% by midday Friday.)

But this is not the first time Jobs' appearance has raised concerns about his health, and the "common bug" doesn't explain the weight loss that's evident in a review of his keynote videos over the past few years.

There's another possibility, one that is consistent with both Jobs' medical history and the changes in his appearance. It stems directly from the type of cancer for which he was treated four years ago and the nature of that treatment.