January 15th, 2007
An exegesis of the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates keynotes
Todd Bishop has come up with a new way to look at the keynotes from CES and Macworld. For the recent keynotes by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Todd, a Seattle PI tech reporter and blogger, ran the speeches through a tag cloud generator, ranking commonly used words, and more interestingly with UsingEnglish.com's free textual analysis tool, which provides word count, unique words, number of sentences, average words per sentence, hard words (three or more syllables), lexical density (difficulty level of the text–low index means easier to understand) and the Gunning Fog readability index (gives the number of years of education that the reader hypothetically needs to understand the text–shorter sentences written in plain English achieve a better score).
Based on the results, Jobs' keynote, primarily introducing the iPhone, was much more accessible (easier to grok) than Gates' keynote, which dealt with Vista, Office, Xbox, PCs and home servers. Jobs, by far the better speaker, in fact a legendary presenter known for creating a reality distortion field, clearly has mastered the art of the communication…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
