[crackmonkey] Cryptonomicon

[Nick Moffitt]

	From: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning_print.html

   It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control
freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image.
Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing
suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff?
Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama
(except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels? 

   It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been
able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious
free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened
skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious
power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain
amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them.
It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the
history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad
agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent
people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for
people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has
won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they
don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon
did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to
his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two
companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple
purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow
fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people
want to believe that they are getting something for their money,
engaging in a respectable business transaction). 


-- 
"The software is intended to be as unobtrusive, unintrusive and
unconstraining as possible.  In software as elsewhere, good
engineering is whatever gets the job done without calling attention to
itself." -- Cynbe ru Taren, on Citadel (http://zork.net/cit/citadel.txt)
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