& insidious strategy" rel="me">

PC users who’ve had to put up with mac own­ers going on about their pur­chase have always had a sin­gle rebut­tal: “If Macs are so great, why don’t they have a big­ger mar­ket share?”

My answer has always been to point at strate­gic busi­ness deci­sions that made it eas­ier for PCs to spread in the early days. An oper­at­ing sys­tem that works on any box trav­els well. We’re a resilient species and learned to live with the thorns that come from our love/hate rela­tion­ship with Windows.

But after 18 years of own­ing Macs and 12 years run­ning busi­nesses on them, it just occurred to me that Apple has had a vir­tual stran­gle­hold on it’s mar­ket since day one. It’s just a mat­ter of how you define the market.

I won­der why it never occurred to me before: What other brand is mea­sured by it’s sta­tus in the entire world? Not even auto­mo­bile brands are mea­sured by true inter­na­tional share. That’s silly.

We encour­age our clients to define their audi­ences as “com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est”: Enthu­si­asts inter­ested because some­thing a brand does res­onates with their val­ues. Most of us con­sumers don’t define our­selves by the brands we buy any­more (that’s so 80’s). So why would this Mac/PC mar­ket share dis­cus­sion be about any­one who could pos­si­bly use a computer?

Apple never tar­geted every­one. The folks they spoke to through smart, well designed tools were a smaller niche of peo­ple who would appre­ci­ate their efforts. And evan­ge­lize for them.

PCs are for “users”. Macs are for fans. Great strat­egy because it’s a win/win. Instead of look­ing at the mar­ket as prospec­tive buy­ers, Apple’s part­ner­ship approach puts the “co” in ‘con­sumer’. As a long time fan, I’m grate­ful they’ve been able to keep up their end of the bargain.

Howdy and happy. Just let­ting you know we’ll be away between the 24^th and Jan­u­ary 4^th.

We’re gen­er­ally reach­able through email, but we may not respond as promptly as we usu­ally do.

Thanks. Love,
Hypenotic

My pal Craig Swis­tun just sent over this exchange regard­ing spec work.

This is the begin­ning of a hys­ter­i­cal but also sad exchange. I’ve come across my share of enthu­si­as­tic folks with bad ideas and no clue why you don’t want to work on them instead of your pay­ing client work informed by good ideas.

Dear Simon,

Dis­re­gard­ing the fact that you have still not paid me for work I com­pleted ear­lier this year despite sev­eral asser­tions that you would do so, I would be delighted to spend my free time cre­at­ing logos and pie charts for you based on fur­ther vague promises of future pos­si­ble pay­ment. Please find attached pie chart as requested and let me know of any changes required.

Regards, David.

Do read the entire back and forth. It’s worthwhile.

Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free.

It par­tic­u­larly res­onated with me because the site reminded me of a book called “Let­ters from a nut” I read while in the hos­pi­tal recov­er­ing from an appen­dec­tomy. This was a prob­lem, because the book defined ‘side-splitting’ humour for me. I believe it was writ­ten by Jerry Sein­feld under a pseudonym.

That was slightly dif­fer­ent than the let­ters here because the foil in those let­ters is inane cor­po­rate pol­icy and the drones who ped­dle it. Here, we’re largely talk­ing about busi­ness own­ers with a sim­ple lack of consideration.

Clas­sic.

Hi there. I’m just try­ing out a new ser­vice and I wanted to see if I could actu­ally blog to our cor­po­rate blog from my phone. Maybe I’ll erase this maybe I won’t. One thing I am doing is speak­ing slowly.

Pow­ered by . Mp3

[audio http://​dial2do​.com/​1​y​g​z​4​2​e​t.mp3 ]

Van­dana Shiva is speak­ing at Hart House in Toronto on Octo­ber 22^nd. If you don’t know her, she’s the cur­rent VP of Slow Food Inter­na­tional, a pow­er­house work­ing on impor­tant issues that ulti­mately affect us all. I’ve reposted the entire invite page from Hart House here:

Hart House presents Van­dana Shiva
Octo­ber 22, 2009 | 7:00 p.m

Reg­is­ter by Octo­ber 9 to win tick­ets, click here.

Don’t miss the keynote event of Hart House’s World Food Week: inter­na­tion­ally acclaimed author, ecol­o­gist, physi­cist and activist Van­dana Shiva will engage audi­ences in an Earth Democ­racy dis­cus­sion — her phi­los­o­phy based on inclu­sion, non­vi­o­lence, reclaim­ing the com­mons and freely shar­ing the earth’s resources. At the core of this phi­los­o­phy is the idea of Food democ­racy. Con­tinue »

Authen­tic­ity in Social Media : Scal­able Inti­macy.

Just caught a nice post at Michael Troiano’S Scal­able inti­macy blog. He was observ­ing the effect of authen­tic­ity in social media, tak­ing the suc­cess of pun­dits and lumi­nar­ies as a barom­e­ter. And, appro­pri­ately, won­der­ing how this might scale for brands.

For me, authen­tic­ity is the answer. Authen­tic­ity is the foun­da­tion of con­sis­tent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and of sus­tain­able enthu­si­asm. It’s what we all crave and respond to. It is the fuel of fol­low­ship, in ways vis­i­ble and not.

He points out that Chris Bro­gan is a nat­ural helper–in real life and in the dig­i­tal world. Laura Fit­ton is strong on rela­tion­ships and empa­thy comes through.

I’m with him on how havi Con­tinue »

YouTube — The Ven­dor Client rela­tion­ship — in real world sit­u­a­tions.

It’s funny because it’s true. I think most peo­ple have been on both sides of this hilar­ity at one point or another.

I liken the dis­con­nect to the way mar­keters some­times neglect to con­sider how they would react to their own tactics.

Clas­sic, don’t know how I missed it: there are cur­rently 1,026,106 views on Youtube.