But I don’t want you to think it’s all unconditional Applelove from me: Jobs himself is also often lauded as one of the greatest public speakers of our time. (You can buy books which claim to let you in on his ‘presentation secrets.’) I don’t buy it. There’s no doubt that he’s good – but great? Up there with Churchill or Martin Luther King?

 

So, despite my massive bias, I couldn’t help wondering if perhaps, when it just came down to the words, I’d be surprised. Perhaps the ‘great’ Jobs and the ‘unconvincing’ Ballmer will actually turn out to have a lot in common. Perhaps the real factor at work here is pre-existing prejudices about the two companies products? Especially Jobs – is he really just basking in reflected glory of Apple’s beguilingly seductive gadgets?

 

So, the speeches: Ballmer’s was billed as being about ‘creating compelling experiences’ through the possibilities of cloud computing. Jobs’s was his 2007 keynote, in which he launched the iPhone.

 

Ballmer’s speech seemed big on enthusiasm. Yet it rang oddly hollow. And just a few hours later, I was at a loss to explain to a friend what Ballmer’s take on cloud computing actually was. “What exactly is a ‘compelling experience’?” my friend asked me. I couldn’t rightly say.

By contrast, Jobs’s speech seemed, how to put it, a little underwhelming at first. Yet later, I was able to reel off in great detail quite a bit of Apple’s iPhone thinking – much to the annoyance of my friend, who didn’t really seem that interested in my recital of Apple’s touch-screen strategy.

 

Interesting. Let’s see what light the word clouds can shed on all of this:

The first thing that catches my eye about Ballmer’s cloud – just look at all those big industry-related words: applications, windows, platforms, capabilities. Given that he was supposedly talking about ‘compelling experiences’, that’s a lot of talking shop.

 

And after the techy stuff, a fair number of sales-y adjectives: enthusiasm, unbelievable, exciting, important. Perhaps the reason it all felt a bit hollow was that he was protesting too much? In contrast, look at Jobs’s cloud: he’s talking about the iPhone, the phone that changed everything, yet the word ‘revolutionary’ is really small. In fact, the most prominent emotional word is the understated ‘cool’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But here’s the biggest difference: just compare the length of the words: Ballmer’s cloud is stuffed with multi-syllabic mouthfuls – communicating, capabilities, information, infrastructure. That’s a lot of stodge to chew through. And Jobs? It’s all much more simple, with short, one syllable verbs: Look. Get. Go. See. Take. Push. Make. Touch. He might be launching the most technologically advanced phone the world has ever seen, but his focus is all on small, real, everyday actions. We all know it’s the short Anglo-Saxon words that serve you best if you really want to get your message across. But it’s still fascinating to see the evidence writ so large in Jobs’s cloud. Writ so large, in fact, that I realise it’s probably this – a relentless down-to-earthness in his language – that people are tuning in to when they say he’s a ‘great presenter’.

 

Oh, and I’m afraid it’s unmissable: in Ballmer’s cloud, the word ‘people’ is the same size as the word ‘data’. Whereas in Jobs’s cloud, ‘People’ is huge – right at the heart of everything. If you wanted to neatly sum up the difference between Microsoft and Apple? Well, that would be it, wouldn’t it?