Introduce the Antagonist.
Every Steve Jobs presentation has a hero and a villain. In the iPad presentation, Netbooks played the role of the villain—a problem in need of a solution. Jobs showed a slide with an iPhone on one side and a MacBook on the other. A question mark appeared in the middle. He asked rhetorically whether there was room for a third category of device. “These devices would have to be far better at doing some key tasks,” he said. “Some people think it’s a Netbook. The problem is Netbooks aren’t better at anything. They have slow, low quality displays and clunky old PC software,” he said. Only after he had set up the problem did Jobs introduce the hero: “We have something better. We call it iPad.”
