46 CREATE THE STORY
are familiar with both formats prefer to work in the more ele-
gant Keynote system, those same designers will tell you that the
majority of their client work is done in PowerPoint.
As I mentioned in Scene 1, this book is software agnostic
because all of the techniques apply equally to PowerPoint or
Keynote. That said, Keynote is still the application that Steve Jobs
prefers, and the Twitter-like headline he created to introduce the
software was certainly an attention grabber. “This is another
brand-new application that we are announcing here today, and
it is called Keynote,” Jobs told the audience at Macworld 2003.
Then:Keynote is a presentation app for when your presentation
really counts [slide reads: “When your presentation really
counts”]. And Keynote was built for me [slide reads: “Built
for me”]. I needed an application to build the kind of slide
show that I wanted to show you at these Macworld keynotes:
very graphics intensive. We built this for me; now I want to
share it with you. We hired a low-paid beta tester to beta test
this app for an entire year, and here he is [audience laughs
as screen shows photo of Jobs]. Rather than a bunch of slides
about slides, let me just show you [walks to stage right to
demo the new software].^13Again, we see a remarkable consistency in all of Apple’s mar-
keting material surrounding the new product launch. The Apple
press release for Keynote described it as “The application to use
when your presentation really counts.”^14 This headline can eas-
ily fit in a Twitter post and, without revealing the details, tells
a story in one sentence. A customer who wanted more details
could read the press release, watch Jobs’s demonstration, or view
the online demo on Apple’s website. Still, the headline itself
offered plenty of information. We learned that it was a new
application specifically for presentations and made for those
times when presentations can make or break your career. As a
bonus, it was built for Jobs. For many people who give frequent