Rory Sutherland

Like in the camera world, there are people called measure baiters.

They're denigrated as measure baiters because they're obsessed with the numerical qualities of the camera.

You know, focal lengths and all that stuff.

And they don't take very good photographs.

Yes.

And saying that the best, I mean, undoubtedly, by the way, I mean, you know, Betamax is the famous example where they failed to capture network effects.

And in a world where there are network effects, yeah, by the way, the best technology probably often doesn't win.

I think that's probably fair.

Everybody was competing to make a slightly faster IBM compatible PC, but they were all gray and beige.

Now, nobody in the tech world would go, the slight problem with this PC isn't the fact that the clock speed or the processing power or the RAM is insufficient.

The problem is, if I put this device in any room of my house, it turns that room into an office.

If you put an IBM PC, a great IBM PC, in any room in your house, including the, you might as well put a fucking photocopier and a bloody filing cabinet in the room.

Whereas when Johnny Ive comes along and has that lickable, what was it, the iMac?

The iMac.

You can actually put that in any room of the house.

It actually enhances the fashion statement.

It's fantastic.

It's an adornment.

And so their failure to understand the wider context within which they were operating, which is the job of marketing,

is exactly the reason nerds hate marketing because they think in a perfect world, nerd metrics win out.