108 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
market share of the remaining three competitors—in the first
ninety days of shipments. The numbers, of course, were very
specific, relevant to the category, and, above all, contextual (Jobs
was addressing investors). By comparing the iPhone against well-
established competitors, Jobs made this achievement—selling
four million units in the first quarter—far more remarkable.Dress Up Numbers with Analogies
When I worked with SanDisk executives to prepare them for a
major announcement at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show
in Las Vegas, we took a page from the Steve Jobs playbook. The
maker of flash memory cards was introducing a card small
enough to fit into a cell phone’s micro SD slot. That’s very tiny.
Even bigger news was that it held 12 GB of storage in that small
form factor. Now, only gadget geeks would find 12 GB exciting.
So, we had to dress up the numbers à la Steve Jobs. Our final
announcement went something like this:
“Today we’re announcing the first 12 GB memory card for
cell phones. It has fifty billion transistors. Think of each tran-
sistor as an ant: if you were to put fifty billion end to end, they
would circle the globe twice. What does this mean to you?
Enough memory to store six hours of movies. Enough memory
to listen to music while traveling to the moon... and back!”
The number 12 GB is largely uninteresting unless you truly
understand the implications of the achievement and what it
means to you. When SanDisk compared fifty billion transistors
to the number of ants that could circle the globe, the company
was using an analogy to jazz up the numbers. Analogies point
out similar features between two separate things. Sometimes,
analogies are the best way to put numbers into a context that
people can understand.
The more complex the idea, the more important it is to use
rhetorical devices such as analogies to facilitate understanding.
For example, on November 17, 2008, Intel released a power-
ful new microprocessor named the Core i7. The new chip
represented a significant leap in technology, packing 730 million