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Schiller Learns

from the Best

P

hil Schiller had some mighty big shoes to fill on January

6, 2009. Schiller, Apple’s vice president of worldwide

product marketing, replaced Steve Jobs as the keynote

presenter at Macworld. (Apple had earlier announced

that this would be the company’s last year of participation in

the event.) Schiller had the unfortunate role of being compared

with his boss, who had more than thirty years of experience

on the big stage. Schiller was smart, however, and delivered a

product launch that contained the best elements of a typical

Steve Jobs presentation. Following are seven of Schiller’s tech-

niques that Jobs himself would surely have used had he given

the keynote:^1

 Create Twitter-like headlines. Schiller set the theme of the

day right up front. “Today is all about the Mac,” he told the

audience. This opening is reminiscent of how Jobs opened the

two preceding Macworld shows. Jobs told the 2008 audience

that something was in the air, foreshadowing the MacBook Air

announcement, and in 2007, Jobs said that Apple was going to

make history that day. It sure did when Jobs later introduced

the iPhone.

 Draw a road map. Schiller verbally outlined a simple agenda

at the beginning of his presentation and provided verbal

reminders along the way. Just as Jobs uses the rule of three

to describe products, Schiller also introduced the presenta-

tion as three separate categories. “I have three new things to

tell you about today,” he said (accompanying slide read: “3

New Things”). The first was a new version of iLife. The second