January 22, 2008 3:16 PM PST

Jobs vs. Gates, a grammatical analysis

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.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary
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Add a Comment (Log in or register) 1 comment (Page 1 of 1)
Wow! thats awesome!
by zcollvee January 23, 2008 3:37 AM PST
Cool. I always thought that Jobs english sucked... But I dunno Jobs is cooler than Gates;) But I like gates too! RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR I can't make up my mind
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