Jobs gives Microsoft a masterclass on keynotes

Net Results:  Most technology industry conference keynote addresses and product launches are rather staged affairs.

This is especially true in the US, where the pattern usually goes like this: some senior executive, perhaps the chief executive, discusses the company and its products. At some point, she or he invites some product manager or division head on stage to demonstrate a new product, feature or service.

Usually, the conversation between the two is embarrassingly, cringe-makingly staged - typically, overly jovial and artificially made to appear spontaneous when it is clearly anything but.

Sometimes the keynote speaker then exits the stage and the manager demonstrates the product or service in a tone of perky excitement that mostly makes any listener want to suffocate the presenter with a pillow.

Meanwhile, the presentation is enthusiastically applauded and cheered at relevant intervals by company employees scattered in the audience.

That they are the company's employees is usually made clear by the fact that they are all wearing the company polo shirt or T-shirt or are sitting in obvious clusters.

The purpose of such outbursts of feigned excitement (or to be fair, perhaps it is even real excitement, for those truly devoted to the company and chief executive) is to spur the larger audience to applaud.

Sometimes the audience complies, if they are feeling polite or sympathetic to the presenter or chief executive, or if the feature/product/service is truly innovative. Sometimes they don't.

Anyone who has ever attended a user conference or big technology event will recognise this format. Mostly it makes the attendee want to flee, shrieking, into the exhibit hall. As a more reasonable alternative less inclined to draw embarrassing attention to oneself, most attendees make it through by sending e-mails on their Blackberries, whose screens can be seen glowing faintly in the audience.

The only keynotes I have attended where this is not the case are those given by Apple founder and chief executive Steve Jobs.

To some extent this is because he often has something really innovative to demonstrate. In addition, his keynotes rather knowingly make fun of the "here's a demo I prepared earlier" format and there's a bit of ironic banter with the people who come onstage to do the demo.

And finally, he is just an incredibly charismatic and riveting speaker. The product could be nonsense, but I've no doubt Jobs could sell it. Even his detractors and the people who detest anything from Apple pretty much admit that Jobs is a master keynote giver.

For this reason, Apple has never needed flunkies to start fake applause in a keynote audience and the idea of having such plants is laughable. The audience is enthusiastic enough.

Many are too enthusiastic - for them, Jobs is a kind of tech messiah and anything he says is treasured and adored. But for the most part he easily brings any audience to where he wants it to go and they enjoy the experience.

All this came to mind last Monday evening in New York as I watched Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do a staged presentation at the launch of Windows Vista.

Both tend to talk about the abstract notion of the digital home and what people are doing and they will be doing, without giving us anything concrete, which makes it hard to get very excited.

They both pushed the "wow" aspects of Vista, as in the slogan "the wow starts now". But as Gates brought out the inevitable demo guy, all I could think was that the wow actually started a few years back, when Apple showed all this stuff as standard in the Mac operating system OSX and the iLife software suite for managing digital media.

Drag-and-drop DVD and CD creation - with a "burn" button handily on the window and browser - that was in iDVD, iTunes and iMovie yonks ago. Those gadgets that are small icons sitting on the desktop that show the weather, share prices, link to your music files? Apple's widgets were doing that last year.

Easy-to-use interface that makes running programs and doing things on your computer intuitive? That's been Apple's strength since the 1980s.

Don't get me wrong. Vista is a big improvement on earlier versions of Windows. There are some great features in it and the 3D and transparent window effects on the desktop are really cool. The revamped photo management software is excellent, from what I can see.

But it is really all so . . . Apple. The really innovative stuff in New York was in the demo of Word 2007 - but many of the coolest features will be recognised by Mac users as expansions of features Microsoft put into its Word for the Mac years ago - a much better, leaner, and more intuitive, graphically based program than the original Word for the PC.

When Jobs demonstrated these features months and even years ago, they were truly exciting and innovative - as in, no one else had put them into an OS - and they got a thunderous reception.

In New York, the little employee clusters were hooting and cheering the demo but the applause didn't spread across the theatre. I got the feeling that the customer and journalist attendees, mostly quietly, were thinking, well, that's really nice to see that in Vista now too.

I'm definitely looking forward to trying out Vista and playing with its features - but after those demos, I have a feeling that much of the experience will be very familiar to what I've been doing with OSX for the past half decade.