Presenting: Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates

In their contrasting keynotes today and yesterday, there was no contest of course. Steve Jobs presents an experience and Bill Gates presents data. But it’s worth a brief look to see their different approaches, so we can do the former, not the latter.

Macworld has about 40,000 attendees in San Francisco, and the Las Vegas CES show has about 140,000 attendees. Yet Macworld gets equal or more press. Why? It’s all due to Steve Jobs communicating an experience, and Bill Gates communicating data. (It helps to have a new product like iPhone to talk about, but even in those years without breakthrough products, Macworld outdraws CES in publicity.)

• Here’s one comment from Steve Jobs Keynote of today, from Engadget (you can see and read it all here):

“People are rapt, everyone is actually literally leaning forward and on the edge of their seat. We've never seen a presentation like this before.”

Jobs: ‘Isn't that incredible? Right on my PHONE! Look at this, the Eiffel Tower -- isn't that incredible? Here's the last one, the Colloseum in Rome. Incredible new technology for entering text, a real browser on the phone, we can zoom in, Google maps, Widgets... it's the internet in your pocket for the first time ever. You can't really think about the internet without thinking about google."

And then he brings up Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO – great touch. (Also he brought up CEO’s of Yahoo and Cingular.)

• On the other hand, here’s one comment from Bill Gates CES keynote of yesterday, from the Chicago Tribune where Steve Johnson writes how “Bill Gates Serves Up An Infomercial.”