Greetings from Norhill Heights, Houston

I have spent the last couple of days in a large oven filled with shiny luxury objects and piped-in techno music. Yes, I have been in Las Vegas. A work thing, and actually kind of fun, even for someone like me who finds Las Vegas fascinating mostly for being thoroughly repulsive.

Now: home!

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The New York Times wrote about an interesting new niche in iPhone apps: pocket debate guides for Christians and atheists. The idea, apparently, is that if some nice Christian is strolling down the street and an atheist accosts him and says, “Fie, your middle Eastern resurrection cult is silly!” he can whip out the iPhone, stroke the screen a few times, and proclaim, “We know the Bible is the inerrant word of God, because it says so in the Bible!”

Or something like that. Yes, it all sounds rather silly, but toward the end of the article, there’s this more-than-silly quote from the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

If smart-phone software can improve the conversation, all to the good, he said. “The app store is our new public commons.”

If that last sentence is true, then come, giant asteroid, come, and end this crazy experiment in primate sentience; it didn’t work out. Give the cockroaches their turn; they’ll probably come up with something better.

Does anyone really think that arming people with talking points for shouting matches is going to “improve the conversation?” What conversation? Serious debates about religion (or anything else) are rarer and rare these days; while people are talking to (or rather, at) one another about issues of the day more than I can remember at any point in my life, they’re managing to say less and less.

Unless “drill, baby, drill!” and “you’re with us or against us!” count as nuanced commentary on important questions facing the republic.

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So Apple has a new product out, and the faithful lined up to buy it, and now you can’t really read any tech-oriented blogs or web sites without hearing about how sucky it is. This HTC phone has that feature! This phone has a bigger screen! You’re stuck with eighty gazillion iPhone apps, instead forty gazillion Android apps (though apparently it turns out some amazing number of them are things like ringtone malware… oops, guess all that control has some benefits). Blah blah blah…

You know, if all products could be reduced to feature lists, we’d all drive Hyundais and every German car manufacturer would be out of business. Because it terms of features and quality for the buck, Hyundais are much better products. And no, I don’t want one.

Yes, people, it’s not just the features, it’s how they are rolled up into a product and what it feels like to use them, and there seem to be an awful lot of people who like their Apple products. (Including me.) And, lots of other products for people who don’t like them. Ain’t life grand?

(My favorite Apple complaint: they better do X, Y, and Z or they’ll be in trouble! Meanwhile, they sell millions of their products, they have a higher market cap than Microsoft, and they have enough cash lying around in Steve Jobs’ mattress to buy Dell outright. Yeah, they better listen to random blog commenters.)

As a marketer by trade, one thing I really admire about Apple is their laser focus on user needs. Their user experience focus is part of that; but one thing you notice about what they do and how they talk about their products is that they are always focused on things people want to do, not cool features.

And they are amazingly disciplined in their advertising (even when, as in the “I’m a Mac” ads, they take liberties with reality). The iPod ads are all designed to tell you that it plays music (or videos or games) and it’s really cool and fun. The iPhone intro video convinced me, initially a big skeptic, to go to the store and look at one – simply because after being completely unable to remember how to do anything with my Samsung Blackjack, I watched a video that demonstrated how you switch calls and get voicemails on the iPhone and thought, “OMG, brilliant.”

Here’s an example. The first iPhone 4 ad is out and it’s here (can’t embed it because, well, it’s Apple, sigh). It’s a fantastically well thought out ad.

And here’s a spot for the new Droid. (Not embedded because it’s 640 pixels wide and resizing YouTube videos is a pain in the ass, so screw it.)

So let’s see. The iPhone ad: you can use its videoconferencing to share important moments with loved ones, even if they’re on the other side of the world in the army or if your language is ASL. The Droid ad: your eyeball will turn to metal and you’ll become a Cylon! Yay!

(Awfulness has defined all Droid marketing, including their “Droid Does” billboards; I can’t believe that nobody in the creative reviews reacted to it the way I did when I first saw one: “Female deer?” Which may be why you can buy one and get one free, whereas people have been putting their names on lists to get iPhones, even though they seem to be similarly equipped products, both with solid operating systems.)

Droid is, from all I have heard and from what people who have them tell me, a really great phone. (It’s made by Motorola, so I expect it will fall apart after 12 months like every other Motorola phone I’ve owned, but come on, you’ll be tired of it by then anwyay.) I do wonder about their decision to go uber-geek on the marketing though; they seem to be working so hard to appeal to a specific nerd segment that I imagine everybody else seeing this stuff and thinking, “WTF?”

Sorry if this sounds too Apple fanboy, but… I spend much of life watching companies market tech products really, really poorly and I think Apple is just such a case study of how to do thing right, from deciding what to put in the products (and even more importantly, what not to) right through to delivering the products. Which is why people buy them. And why people stand in long lines to buy them.

Which is no reason to like or buy their products, but it is a reason to respect their ability to design and sell them, and not attribute it all to mass psychosis.

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