Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs: How to Be Great in Front of Audience

USE “AMAZINGLY ZIPPY” WORDS 115

Table 10.2 compares some exact phrases from the 2007
presentations. Excerpts from Bill Gates’s remarks are in the
right column.^5 The left column contains excerpts from Steve
Jobs.^6
Where Gates is obtuse, Jobs is clear. Where Gates is abstract,
Jobs is tangible. Where Gates is complex, Jobs is simple.
Now, I can hear you saying, “Bill Gates might not speak
as simply as Jobs, but he’s the richest guy in the world, so he
must have done something right.” You’re correct. He did. Gates
invented Windows, the operating system installed in 90 per-
cent of the world’s computers. You, however, did not. Your
audience will not let you get away with language they’ll accept

TABLE 10.1 LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY: STEVE JOBS VERSUS

BILL GATES

PRESENTER/EVENT

STEVE JOBS,

MACWORLD

BILL GATES,

INTERNATIONAL

CONSUMER

ELECTRONICS SHOW

Jobs’s 2007 Macworld Keynote and Gates’s 2007 CES Keynote

Average words/
sentence

10. 5 21.6

Lexical density 16.5% 21.0%

Hard words 2.9% 5.11%

Fog index 5.5 10.7

Jobs’s 2008 Macworld Keynote and Gates’s 2008 CES Keynote

Average words/
sentence

13.79 18. 2 3

Lexical density 15.76% 24.52%

Hard words 3.18% 5.2%

Fog index 6.79 9.37