"Apple likely does not pursue minimalist designs for their own sake. Every time a company adds a feature to a product, it adds the opportunity to do it wrong. Zune was an opportunity for Microsoft to look at the subscription model that has bedeviled its PlaysForSure partners and exercise restraint. Instead, it must now deal with the complexity of accounts that it has further complicated with an abstract points system." [tx DD]
3. The dawning of the age of iPod
"When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, [Steve Jobs] simply said no. And that was it. It was a harsh aesthetic edict on a parallel with his famous refusal to include cursor keys on the original Macintosh keyboard. From Jobs' point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)" [tx Dan]
4. The difference between trying something and using something
"There's a big difference between trying something and using something. Trying something is more common than using something. That's why most products are optimized for trying."
The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate.
Pitching is about understanding what your customer (the investor) is most interested in, and developing a dialog that enables you to connect with the head, the heart, and the gut of the investor. If you want advice about pitching, you can ask a venture capitalist, but you probably won 't get a very good answer. Most VCs are analytic types, and so they will give you a laundry list of topics you should cover. They won 't tell you what really "floats their boat," mainly because they can't articulate it in useful terms. "I know it when I see it," is about the best answer you'll get.
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