Corporate Announcements - Hey That's Communication

I read through, sat through the Apple keynote today and realized something.  It is hard to live up to the hype.  And man is there hype.  Apple is a great consumer products company and possibly has even moved into the corporate world now that you can run windows as well as MacOS on their hardware.

I will leave the technical discussions to the gadget folks.  But here is what I could not help but think about.

Communication

Man is this important and boy can this level of hype make it near impossible to properly communicate.  Steve Jobs is known as an amazing communicator and what I saw of him, he did a great job of communicating the message he was planning to communicate.  But there was so much speculation and discussion ahead of time, this communication was bound to let someone down.  So a lesson here is that often preparation around the message can be as key as the messaging itself. 

So if you are in a meeting and someone starts to speculate on the content or nature or even on the messaging, there are expectations that will be missed - above or below.  Nobody likes surprises.

Comments

[Jim]

So did you get the message that they wanted you to get or did it get lost in the hype. I was not clear from the post whether they disappointed you or got you all excited. Sounds to me that you were not sold and that you were more than a little disappointed.
Did you intend not to communicate cause I was expecting to learn something and was confused? I guess my expectations were too high.

[Stephen]

Jim: The message that they sent was great and not lost in the hype. Certainly well placed, executed and filled me with desire for some products.

I was disappointed as I had been expecting to hear about some changes in their more corporate/consumer products and did not. I feel that this is a tipping point for Apple and a great opportunity. That was my hype and missed expectation.