Gates vs Jobs - TMD - Week 1 Discussion

I did watch several clips on both presenters. First, I chose to watch a presentation by Bill Gates on creating great teachers. I am very interested in the topic and I am very familiar with many of the topics that he mentioned such as KIPP schools and education. He was very knowledge about the topic and reasonably comfortable in front of the large audience. Gates had some visuals, gifts for the audience, and some humor that made the presentation more interesting. I also watched some others like when he let mosquitoes into the audience to “prove a point” that malaria should not be limited to poor people, which I found to be quite bold of him and as a presenter, quite memorable. I really enjoyed his Harvard graduation speech, which was humorous and full of stories that showed a great deal of his personality. Overall, I found him to be more interesting when not talking about his software, because during those presentations he was very dull and focused on facts and vocabulary that is not necessarily interesting to the average person. His personality and charisma seemed very limited when talking about his business and much stronger when talking about worldly problems. I, too, would be much more passionate about world problems rather than a new software.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, seemed to be very charismatic whether he was talking about iPods, iTunes, or his recover from surgery. His presentations always had a beginning, middle and an end. He tended to capture my attention and use suspense to keep my attention. Even though he always mentioned what would be discussed next, he never gave away all of the details. He had catchy little phrases that were memorable to clearly show his purpose. He also had “zingers” towards PCs and other shots of humor throughout the presentation. He had many visuals and props to entertain the audience. Jobs also used facts, like Gates, but he tended to break them into more meaningful bits of information that made them more powerful. For example, he mentioned selling 5 million songs a day (5M) and then broke it down to 58 songs per second. Most people don’t understand 5 million of anything, but most can understand and be impressed by 58 songs per second.

Overall, I would compare Bill Gates to the “average” college professor (not a Full Sail professor), that is very knowledgeable of his topic, but is not a “teacher”, He is very informative and can be slightly entertaining, but mostly just lectures. I would say that Steve Jobs is more like a kindergarten teacher that is just as knowledgeable, but much more entertaining. A kindergarten teacher generally has lots of charisma, stimulating presentations with props, enthusiasm, and energy and speaks in simple terms, so that everyone can understand.