INTRODUCE THE ANTAGONIST 67
Make note of how Jobs asks rhetorical questions to advance
the story. “Why do we need a revolutionary user interface?”
he asked before introducing the problem. He even raises prob-
lems to his own solution. When he introduced the concept
of replacing the keyboard with a touch screen, he rhetorically
asked, “How are we going to communicate with this?” His ready
answer was, “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the
world... our fingers.”
Nobody really cares about your product or Apple’s products
or Microsoft’s or any other company’s, for that matter. What
people care about is solving problems and making their lives
a little better. As in the smartphone example in Table 6.1, Jobs
describes the pain they’re feeling, gives them a reason for their
pain (usually caused by competitors), and, as you will learn in
Scene 7, offers a cure.
Making His Case to CNBC
“Why in the world would Apple want to jump into the handset
market with so much competition and so many players?” asked
CNBC’s Jim Goldman in one of the few interviews Jobs granted
immediately after the iPhone announcement. Jobs answered the
question by posing a problem in need of a solution: “We used all
the handsets out there, and boy is it frustrating. It’s a category
that needs to be reinvented. Handsets need to be more power-
ful and much easier to use. We thought we could contribute
something. We don’t mind if there are other companies mak-
ing products. The fact is there were one billion handsets sold in
- If we just got 1 percent market share, that’s ten million
units. We’ve reinvented the phone and completely changed the
expectations for what you can carry in your pocket.”
“What message is this sending to your competitors?” asked
Goldman.
“We’re a product company. We love great products. In
order to explain what our product is, we have to contrast it to
what products are out there right now and what people use,”
said Jobs.^4 This last sentence reveals Jobs’s approach to crafting