Demos are Forcing Functions

John Gruber writes about Apple Intelligence’s vaporware aspects in Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.

It feels quaint today, but this is why Steve Jobs so often immediately demoed using the feature he had just announced. A demo acts as a forcing function to produce real, working software. And preceding that was an inner forcing function of the software being demoed by its creator within Apple to Steve Jobs, who was notorious for nit-picking and finding where it broke.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac’s new user interface he said “let me show you a few slides on Aqua and then I’d like to demonstrate it for you”. He flicked through pictures of the new UI controls including the iconic window traffic lights and then sat down on a stool and interacted with Aqua as a user.

When Time Machine’s 3D windows-floating-in-a-galaxy design was first shown, was it in a video with catchy music? No, it was via Scott Forstall clicking on the Dock and demoing it live.

Apple’s high production event videos today often introduce new features using slick motion graphics. An animated version of the UI is recreated that looks to my eyes more impressive than using the software itself. The danger is that leads to a team making an ad for software that the team creating it has yet to create.

Steve Jobs did demo unfinished software, like when he presented the secretly precarious iPhone software in January 2007. But I believe there were many internal demos to get to that point on stage, and many after in the months to what eventually shipped in June.

Steve understood his role to be the proxy for the user: he had to experience it as a user during development, and then he had to demonstrate his own experience as a user to future users on stage.