A couple of weeks ago Robert Scoble opined that Microsoft was learning a PR lesson from the hype surrounding the iPhone: Don't talk about what you're doing.

Steve Jobs is MANUFACTURING great PR by keeping everyone’s mouth shut. Heck, I’ve met some people I KNEW had an iPhone and they were so scared of retribution or consequences that they wouldn’t answer a single question.

Have you noticed that no one has started talking about the next version of Windows? I have. That’s on purpose. They learned their lesson and realized that letting you see inside the meat factory is a little too messy for this new world of PR. Rather keep all that mess behind corporate walls and come out when something is actually finished.

There's certainly a time and place for keeping things mum, but the idea of adopting it as a general approach to PR runs into one major problem as far as I'm concerned. It's that Apple is Apple and you are not.

This will probably come as a surprise to no one, but I was a geek in high school, and so were a lot of my friends. And one of my friends, Nick, had a theory about why it was so hard for a geek to change his image and become cool. Nick thought that geeks observed cool people and concluded that their degree of social acceptance came from easy to duplicate traits such as hairstyles, music preferences, and wardrobe.

"Ron has a black jacket," the geek will think, "and Ron is cool. Therefore, if I have a black jacket, I will be cool like Ron!" But because he isn't cool to begin with, he picks out a terrible-looking black jacket, something really awful and shiny with a stupid patch on it, and he looks even geekier than he did to begin with.*

Apple's relative lack of transparency is cool because Apple is cool, not because a lack of transparency is cool. Apple is like a magician: those of us in the audience are waiting breathlessly for the moment when Steve Jobs whisks away the cape to reveal whatever amazing doohicky he's been hiding from us. It's a carefully orchestrated spectacle, a performance, born of Jobs' natural instincts as a showman and perfected over the decades.

If another company with a different corporate personality tries to pull it off, that company runs the risk of simply looking weird.

I don't know - what if Microsoft had maintained Apple-level secrecy around Windows Vista? Would it have increased excitement around the product, or would it just have been irksome? I vote for "irksome", and think a more apt basis for comparison than the iPhone is the delayed Mac OS X Leopard.

*This example is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the actual high school experiences of the author is purely unintentional.

Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Windows Vista, iPhone, Leopard, the New Secrecy