Reality Distortion Fields

I’m a big time Apple fan, I’ve spent 3 decades using the products of my favourite fruit company and I’ve always been in awe of Steve Jobs. One of my big regrets in life is that I never got to see his famous ‘Reality Distortion Field’ in action, this was his legendary ability to reframe and present a concept such that Apple could own a market.

Jobs did this many times and over time it stretched from the launch of the first Mac, to his return to Apple, the iMac, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and iPad and the rest is history.

So I was very curious to see Chorus attempt to build their own ‘Reality Distortion Field’ with a press release this morning saying they wanted the current ‘FPP’ copper pricing review process being undertaken by the Commerce Commission to be based on ‘New Zealand Reality”.

What they actually mean is that they want it conducted according to reality as defined by Chorus. This would then mean that the Comcom would simply base their findings based on Chorus’s books and current cost structures not the process the Comcom are required to conduct which is based on modeling a competitive network benchmarked against similar networks offshore.

Chorus are trying the ‘illusionist’s’ trick of distraction “look over there…” but they have broken the first rule of reality distortion, never, never let your audience know what you are really doing.

Can you imagine Steve Jobs ever saying ‘we want your mobile phone purchases to be based on an Apple reality’ ?

No, instead he painted a picture that was so compelling, you couldn’t see anything other than his reality and did it so well his keynotes became media events and stockmarkets moved as a result.