By SteveJack
There is a small town that stands astride a decent-sized stream behind a thick forest of evergreens, deep at the bottom of jagged peaks covered with snow. And in that town, at the end of a long, narrow, cobblestone street is a small shop that sells chocolate. Not just any chocolate, but the chocolate; the one chocolatiers the world over try to achieve, but never seem to come close. The shop makes and sells this one chocolate, not a variety of sweets, just perfect bars of chocolate, sold by the pound. All of the townsfolk know of the tiny shop, so that’s where they buy their chocolate. This is the town to live in if you’re a chocoholic.
The tiny shop’s proprietor, a middle aged man, is a master chocolatier who seemed to have been born knowing how to mix cocoa and sugar and cream in the correct amounts to produce perfection. He had long ago hung a small sign outside his shop that states simply, “chocolate shop.” The townspeople know they have a genius in their midst and they gladly pay a small premium for his wonderfully smooth and rich confection.
Years before, as a younger man, the chocolatier had taken an apprentice who was eager to learn how to make the chocolate, but on a much grander scale, with modern factory equipment. The apprentice knew this was the chocolate, the kind the world only dreamed about, and he wanted to make it by the ton, not the pound, and he wanted to sell it everywhere, not just in the small town surrounded by mountains and forest. The master chocolatier explained that his chocolate could not be made and sold this way. The magic was in the recipe and the care with which the ingredients were folded together. A large factory wouldn’t be able to produce his chocolate in the perfect way and it wouldn’t taste or feel the same.
The apprentice tried to explain to the master that it didn’t matter, that it would still be better than almost any chocolate anywhere and the world would beat down their door to buy it. It just had to be good enough. They could advertise it on signs everywhere and give out samples in stores in every city and town. They would make millions, the apprentice pleaded over and over, but the master simply wouldn’t hear of it. “It won’t be perfect and I don’t really believe in advertising anyway,” he finally said. And with that, just six months into a five-year apprenticeship, they parted ways.
Of course, you already know what happened: the apprentice knew enough of the recipe to go off on his own, gather financing, build factories, bring aboard partners, hire advertising agencies and marketers and ended up selling the world his chocolate. And the world is none the wiser, it tastes good enough to them, for they have never been to the small town deep in the woods behind the mountains and tasted the chocolate at the end of the cobblestone street.
To this day, the master continues to sell his chocolate, the chocolate, to the small town’s grateful townsfolk. He was content to make the perfect chocolate until he received, by his count, the one-thousandth flyer for the apprentice’s chocolate proclaiming it to be the “world’s perfect chocolate.” By then, those flyers’ claims had worn the master’s patience thin. He said to himself, simply, “it’s time.”
And so, the master went to work, blending, and mixing, and testing, and retesting. After almost a week of continuous work, he stopped and looked at the product of his labor: a machine that could produce millions of identical small confections that weighed just a few ounces. The secret of his tiny new sweet was that, once eaten, it produced a hunger that only his chocolate, the perfect chocolate, could satisfy. You see, each of the new tiny white treats, while not exactly chocolate themselves, held a bit of the master’s magic hidden inside.
The master took some of his chocolate savings and, despite his reservations, purchased advertising, brought aboard a few select partners of his own, hired marketers and began to sell the world his new little sweet. Upon hearing of it, the apprentice scoffed at the tiny new sweet, having convinced himself long ago that his chocolate actually was the best in the world, and thought that the master had given up trying to compete with him in the chocolate business and was desperately trying something new. Bored, and without bothering to even taste the master’s treat, he half-heartedly instructed his workers and partners to come up with something similar – after all, he might as well profit from this new dessert fad, too.
That’s where the story stands today. The master does not advertise or promote his perfect chocolate, he sells the world his smaller confection, believing that it will soon begin to sell his chocolate for him. All the while, right now in fact, he is busy making extra chocolate and storing it away in preparation for the future. It’s an interesting way to go about it, and the rest of the story’s still to be told, but already some who have tasted his small-but-tasty treat have traveled from far and wide to the small town that stands astride a decent-sized stream behind a thick forest of evergreens, deep at the bottom of jagged peaks covered with snow just to satisfy their hunger for his perfect chocolate.
Now they know what the townsfolk have known for years. And they’re telling their friends.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
Awesome story
Gives me warm fuzzies
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Ah, white chocolate (that’s not really chocolate).
Pass the plate, please.
Interesting. Very interesting.
The M.B.A. will still tell you it’s all about market share. God save us from ‘suits without souls”. Great Read.
This is a fantastic analogy. and we all know what happenes to the padwans (I hope I spelt this correct), they go over to the dark side and eventually are beaten.
May the iForce be with you…
I hope that the PowerChocs, um I mean PerfChocs won’t go stale on the shelf before the next shipment of fresh cocoa beans.
oh, i get it… the master chocolatier is really apple – how clever. Come on – how long did it take to write this patronising drivel? It’s barely even an analogy. I think we can all understand how good Apple products are without having the point wrapped in a palatable story as though we are children. But we all lap it up because we are the converted and we are being preached to. ho-hum.
Whoa, that story was way too drawn out. I hope the master can figure out how to stuff a G5 into his portable chocolates, posthaste!
GIMME CHOCOLATE NOW!! *drool*
Why do it this way, why not just advertise Mac OS X, er, the perfect chocolate directly? Why bother with the iPod, uh, tiny white treats?
Perhaps because people eating the apprentice’s chocolate can’t or won’t allow themselves to believe that there could be better, that they’ve been duped?
Psych 101. People don’t want to be told there is a better way, but if they are led to believe that they’ve “discovered” a better way all by themselves they will change their mindsets. iPod allows them to “discover” Apple and Mac OS X and allows them to be mentally able to ditch all they’ve invested in Windows crap.
Steven P. Jobs is a friggin’ genius!
Very [the magic word] nice fairy tale; no doubt written over a glass of port or something stronger or soon after — perhaps even in front of a warm crackling fire late one night. But warm your hearts or tickle your palate, the story is only a fairy tale.
There’s no such thing as the chocolate. I like mine dark and almost bitter; you might like a sweeter, overlacted confection. This is, as blingo surmised, another one of those declaration of brand love stories. There’s no need for it anymore. It’s time, I feel, to tackle the chocolate’s sucking issues.
I’m obviously over-reacting to Steve Jack’s very-wet prose — but if we all suck-up to Apple, the end result is that we’ll get it back in products that suck. For example: I’m constantly tweaking Preferences striving to improve the look of anti-aliased text on OS X. I’m not succeeding. Something about it sucks.
Another example is the “repair permissions” requirement. I still don’t get it. Why should I ever need to do such a thing? If you can repair it, why can’t you engineer the requirement away?
Even weirder; OS X fights you in some instances. Some windows don’t behave as you would intuitively expect them to. The Finder doesn’t update with the snappiness of OS9 with the result that I mislaunch an item more frequently in X than 9; or adjust views and window sizes more in X than 9.
I could go on but I won’t. I’ll agree instead that Apple makes good chocolate. Windows sucks so badly that it makes good chocolate look like the chocolate. That the masses consume crap should raise no eyebrows. It’s usually the case.
Suffice to say that I hope that after Tiger or Leo (where do you go from a lion?), I think there should be a redirection towards something more akin to Less is More or KISS.
blingo wouldn’t know a great analogy or a proper bit of writing if it bit him directly on the arse.
Plllleeeeaazzzze.
Rolling eyes.
Steve Jack…Move on….your day is over.
PP
That was fun.
I’m hungry.
Thats not the story I heard…
Yankey Doodle went to town,
Riding on a rocket,
Stuck a finger up his ass,
and called it Hershey’s Chocolate.
So, bill gates has a very talented ass, that can invent an OS, i just hope that they can fit a phone and color screen and wi fi and bluetooth and 60 gb hard drive in the next chocolate mini.
Actually, quite a bit of great writing here. I liked that SJ decided not to explain it at all. He just told his story and told it well. I enjoyed reading it.
ALl of you who think it’s so much dreck and no big deal: Give me a break. It’s a good little story.
And it makes a good point.
Coming at the stupid masses — who are either too distracted, too busy, or too drone-like to know they’ve made a poor decision — from the opposite direction as Jobs is doing IS inspired. It’s a killer strategy — especially when “advertising the features of the OS” in 30 second television spots won’t achieve anything. People are too biased and too inattentive to notive that approach.
But give them a trojan horse of sorts, and BAM! Before they know it they’ve been converted and Apple’s user base grows significantly. I’m hoping that Apple gets to 10% within 3 years. If they top out at 25% before the PC itself morphs into something different and goes away, great.
I know my stock portfolio will be happy.
And lay off the story. Fairy tales are supposed to be subtle. And subtle marketing tactics are how Apple will grow and grow AND GROW . . .
“why not just advertise Mac OS X […] directly? Why bother with the iPod?”
Well, there are a few reasons I can think of.
First off, advertising Mac OS X is a great idea. The problem is that, in order to actually USE Mac OS X, I need to go spend at least $799 on a Macintosh and I already have a perfectly good computer right here. That’s going to stop lots of people short.
If I buy an iPod, I learn a few things:
1. Apple still exists.
2. Apple’s computers are just as good–if not better–than Dell’s.
3. If they end up on Apple’s mailing lists, which is quite possible, they learn about all the new and cool things they could be doing if only they had a Macintosh.
So when it comes time to consider a new computer, they’ll at least consider a Macintosh.
3. If they end up on Apple’s mailing lists, which is quite possible, they learn about all the new and cool things they could be doing if only they had a Macintosh.
Reality check required. If you put yourself in a Windoze-user shoes, they feel they can do more things on their OS and save money. From a Mac user perspective, we can do many things with an ease they could never understand.
If Apple were serious about increasing market share, they’d make a two-button mouse [which I hate] with a scroll-wheel [which I can’t deny is a convenience] standard — or come up with something better.
iTunes might be great but it’s not perfect if you need hierarchical playlists as some polycultured people do. Of course, that would involve some inelegance when it comes to drag-and-drop functionality. So in the interests of satisfying most users with elegance, iTunes is tailored to well-managed, tight music collections. Same with iPhoto, OS X, etc.
Another example: The Applications/Documents folders disciplined approach has almost lost its meaning to me. It’s too much of a hassle to separate some documents or libraries from their applications. So I still need some hierarchical launcher system that I have to create using aliases.
As for the dock, it’s nothing but a window that behaves differently. Why limit its position or aspect-ratio? One-click will launch a dock item; two-clicks will launch a window item; I can imagine certain dock functionality added to every or any user-designated window. That involves complicated aspects, of course; perhaps even a complete Finder redesign. Whatever.
OS X is good chocolate; way better than any Windows variant. But I can imagine something better.
This post is brought to you by the magic word trade, as in “Windoze users would benefit from trading-up from their pathetic malware-magnet of an OS.
what a silly bit of prose…
so in the end, the master chocolatier sold out.
how sad.
gimme a break…
How did the master chocolatier “sell out” when he continues to make the chocolate his way and stockpiles it for the day the world beats a path to his door after tasting his tiny white treats?
No “sell out” that I can see. And a great parable, by the way! SJ is at the top of his game!
To me the story sounds like a Metaphore to Apple’s own switch strategy/story…. with the ipod being the samll piece of chocolate sold to the world in anticipation that the world would want the real chocoalte ( MAc computers)
was that a joke protocol?