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The Horsemen and the Body Framework
The body framework—brain, heart, and genitals—bears directly on the
extraordinary success of the Four Horsemen.
Consider Google. It speaks to the brain, and supplements it, scaling up our
long-term memory to an almost infinite degree. It does so not only by
accessing petabytes of information around the globe—but just as important,
substitutes for our brain’s complex and singular search “engine” (and its
ability to shortcut at a fantastic speed across the dendrites of brain neurons).
To that remarkable physiological ability, Google adds the brute force of
ultrafast processing and high-speed broadband networking to race around the
world to find, on the right server, the exact piece of information we desire.
Human beings, of course, can do the same thing—but it would probably take
weeks and a lot of travel to some dusty library to find the same thing. Google
can do all that in less than a second—and offers to find for us the next
obscure fact, and another after that. It never tires, it never gets jet lag. And it
not only finds whatever we’re looking for … but a hundred thousand other
similar things we might be interested in.
Finally, and ultimately most important, we
trust
the results of Google
searches—even more than our own, sometimes fitful, memories. We don’t
know how the Google algorithm works—but trust it to the point of betting
our careers, even lives, on its answers.
Google has become the nerve center of our shared prosthetic brain. It
dominates the knowledge industry the way Walmart and Amazon,
respectively, rule offline and online retail. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that
when Google reaches into our pockets, it’s mostly for pennies, nickels, and
dimes. It’s the antithesis of a luxury company—it’s available to everyone,
anywhere, whether they are rich or poor, genius or slow. We don’t care how
big and dominant Google has become, because our experience of it is small,
intimate, and personal. And if it turns those pennies into tens of billions of
revenue, and hundreds of billions in shareholder value, we aren’t resentful—
as long as it gives us answers and makes our brains seem smarter. It is
the
winner, and its shareholder benefit stems from the brain’s winner-take-all
economy. Google gives the consumer the best answer, for less, more quickly
than any organization in history. The brain can’t help but love Google.
If Google represents the brain, Amazon is a link between the brain and our
acquisitive fingers—our hunter-gatherer instinct to acquire more stuff. At the
dawn of history, better tools meant an improved and longer life. Historically,
the more stuff we had, the more secure and successful we felt. We felt safer
from our enemies and superior to our friends and neighbors. And who could
ask for more? People dismiss Starbucks’ success as simply “delivering
caffeine to addicts.” But caffeine is Nicorette compared to the heroin of
shopping.
Facebook, by contrast, appeals to our hearts. Not in the manner that the
Tide brand appeals to your maternal instincts of love, but in that it connects
us with friends and family. Facebook is the world’s connective tissue: a
combination of our behavioral data and ad revenue that underwrites a
Google-like behemoth. However, unlike Google, Facebook is all about
emotion. Human beings are social creatures; we aren’t built to be alone. Take
us away from family and friends and, research has shown, we’ll have a
greater chance of depression and mental illness, and a shorter life.
Facebook’s genius was not just in giving us yet another place on the web
to establish our identities, but also the
tools
to enable us to enrich that
presentation—and to reach out to others in our circle. It has long been known
that people exist in groups of a finite and specific size. The numbers repeat
themselves throughout human history, from the size of a Roman legion to the
population of a medieval village … to our number of friends on Facebook.
These numbers have a very human source: we typically have one mate (2
people), the people we consider very close friends—as the joke goes, people
who will help you move a body (6 people), and the number of people we can
work with efficiently as a team (12), up to the number of people we recognize
on sight (1,500 people). The unseen power of Facebook is that it not only
deepens our connections to those groups, but by providing more powerful,
multimedia lines of communication, it expands our connections to more
members. This makes us happier; we feel accepted and loved.
Apple started out in the head, firmly in the tech sector’s vocabulary of
logistics. It boasted efficiency: “Ford spent the better part of 1903 tackling
the same details you’ll handle in minutes with an Apple,” read a print ad. The
Mac helped you “think different.” But finally, Apple has migrated further
down the torso. Its self-expressive, luxury brand appeals to our need for sex
appeal. Only by addressing our procreative hungers could Apple exact the
most irrational margins, relative to peers, in business history and become the
most profitable firm in history. When I was on the board of Gateway, we
operated (poorly) on 6 percent margins. Apple computers—not as powerful
—garnered 28 percent. We, Gateway, had been relegated to the brain
(Gateway didn’t make you more attractive), where Dell had already won the
(rational) scale game. We were in no-man’s-land and sold for scrap. Having
reached $75/share several years earlier, we sold for $1.85/share to Acer.
The lust for Apple-branded goods has given the company its cult-like
status. People who belong to this cult pride themselves on their hyperrational
choice to buy Apple products based on their ergonomic design, superior
operating system, and resistance to viruses and hackers. Like the kids who
sell them Apple products, they consider themselves “geniuses,” illuminati,
foot soldiers in the Apple crusade to think different and change the world.
Most of all, they think it makes them
cool.
But people outside the cult see it for what it is: a rationalization for
something a lot closer to
lust.
Android users assuage their jealousy with their
rational self. Buying Apple is irrational (spending $749 on a phone when you
can have a similar one for $99). And they would be right. You don’t camp
out in front of a store waiting for the next-generation iPhone because you’re
making a sound decision.
Apple’s marketing and promotion have never been traditionally sexy. The
message is not that owning an Apple product will make you more attractive
to the opposite (or same) sex. Rather—and this is common with great luxury
brands—the message is that it will make you
better
than your sexual
competitors: elegant, brilliant, rich, and passionate. You will be perfection:
cool, shit together, listening to music in your pocket and swiping through pics
of your latest trip that look professional but that you took on your phone.
You’ll have the ultimate earthly life. You’ll feel closer to God. Or at least
closer to the Jesus Christ of business, the pinnacle of success, the
uncompromising genius, sexy beast Steve Jobs.
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