Jobs vs. Gates, a grammatical analysis
Blog compares various stats on the oratories of the two tech titans. Of note, Gates' keynote requires comprehension at the ninth grade level, while Jobs' speech could be understood by an above-average elementary school student.
Most people compare Bill Gates' keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show and Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo address by analyzing the relative strength of the products announced.
That's all fine and dandy, but what about looking at the words themselves? That's exactly what the ever-resourceful Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has done. In a blog posting Tuesday, Bishop includes a tag cloud showing the most frequently used words by each, as well as an analysis of the rate of big words used by each.
In terms of which words came up the most, a tag cloud shows words such as "digital," "device," "great," "phone," and "Windows" atop Gates' list, while Jobs most frequently used "great," "iPod," "iPhone," "Mac," and "MacBook."
So both execs think their own products are great. No surprise there.
Gates' speech scored a 9.37 on the Gunning-Fog index, a measure of the number of years of education required to read a particular text. Jobs' address, meanwhile, clocked in at 6.9. Of the words used by Gates, 5.2 were classified as "hard words," while only about 3 percent of Jobs words were given that distinction.
It's up to you whether you think big words are better. I'll stay out of that one, but it's a fun read. Check it out.