The third tip that I have for you about churning is: eat your own dog food. This means that you have to use the products that you create. You absolutely have to. If you won't use it, you shouldn't expect anybody else to use it. One very good test is this—how many of you have Web sites for your company? Okay, everybody. How many of you have ever looked at your Web site with a 28.8 modem via AOL? These are the people who have eaten their own dog food. Everybody else, you are dopes because you have not eaten your own dog food. You are sitting on your corporate network on a T1 or T3 or a DSL line and some Web master is saying, "Look how fast our Web site is! Don't you think we should add more graphics? Let's put in more Java here. We could change this so every time you move the cursor it highlights a different color and brings up a graphic here."

Eat your own dog food. If you want to see how most of the world is looking at your Web site, go see it at 28.8 via AOL. Eat your own dog food.

4. be prepared to break down barriers

The fourth point is, if you are a revolutionary, be prepared to break down barriers. That's what you are going to have to do. No matter how great your revolution, you will find barriers in front of you. I honestly thought, in 1984, that Macintosh was so great that all we would have to do is ship it and they would come. It did not happen that way. There were barriers.

These are the kinds of barriers you will face. Ignorance, where people still don't know that you have a better nuclear-powered mousetrap. Inertia, where now they know that you have a nuclear-powered mousetrap but they are so used to buying spring-loaded, cheese-baited mousetraps, they just can't adapt to this new technology. Complexity, where your mousetrap is so much better that it takes two weeks at Lawrence Livermore Lab training to use a nuclear-powered mousetrap. Channel, where Home Depot has never quite ever sold a nuclear-powered mousetrap and so they won't take it into the channel. And, finally, there is price, where you have a $10,000 mousetrap. Admittedly, once the mouse goes in there, you see nothing left of it, but it costs $10,000.

I have found that there are two great ways to fight and break down these barriers. The first is to enable test driving. It means that you have the respect for the intellectual prowess of your customers and prospective customers that, rather than trying to bludgeon them into becoming your customers, you give them a way to decide for themselves. They can test drive your software, go to your Web site, download a demo version, try it and, hopefully, they will like it and buy it. That's the scenario in software, and there has to be this kind of scenario in everything that you do.

If you go to the BMW Web site (http://www.bmw.com), you can select a model, a color and an interior color, and they will show you what that model will look like. If you go to the Clairol Web site (http://clairol.com), you can scan in a picture of your face and play "what if" with Clairol—what do I look like as a blond, brunette or red head? That's enabling people to test drive Clairol hair color.

The second thing you do is to create a sense of ownership. People have a very hard time erecting barriers in front of something that they feel they have created. When I was the president of a software company, we frequently would meet with members of the press who would give us their feedback on how to make software better when it was in its alpha or beta stages. The interesting thing is, they often had fair comments. I mean, nothing earth-shattering, but they said, "Why don't you move this box here?" or, "Change this check box," or, "Change the interface or the menu structure a little bit." Finally, I figured out that we would do this for members of the press, not because they had a great insight that made the product any better, but if you change something for the press, and you send it back to them in that changed form, you are much more likely to get a positive review. Since they helped design the product, they are not going to condemn it.

5. make evangelists, not sales

The fifth thing is, at the start of a revolution you need to make evangelists, not sales. Evangelists are more important. Evangelists legitimize the entire revolution; they don't fight for market share. Evangelists—and they are not shareholders or employees, typically—are people who get it. They see your product or service and, in five minutes, they get it or they never get it. They turn facts into emotions. When you meet a Macintosh evangelist, that person probably knows the clock speed of the chip, probably knows the size of the hard disk, the refresh rate, the pitch of the monitor, all that kind of stuff, but fundamentally they turn those facts into emotions like creativity and productivity and power.

That's what evangelists do. They carry this dream forward for you. They also build a sense of community as opposed to commerce. At the start of a revolution, it is more important to build a community than to suck money out of them at ecommerce. Motley Fool (http://www.fool.com) is one of the greatest examples of building a community.

I'm going to read to you from an ad for a very analog product. The product is made up of nothing more than cotton, leather and rubber. I read it to challenge you, because if they can write an ad that is so evangelistic about cotton, leather and rubber, imagine what you should be able to do with the software and ecommerce and information technology and medical devices and biotech that this room represents. This is the ad:

A woman is often measured by the things she cannot control. She is measured by the way her body curves or doesn't curve, by where she is flat or straight or round. She is measured by 36-24-36 in inches and ages and numbers, by all the outside things that don't ever add up to who she is on the inside. And so if a woman is to be measured, let her be measured by the things she can control, by who she is and who she is trying to become, because as every woman knows, measurements are only statistics, and statistics lie.

That's an ad for two pieces of cotton, leather and rubber called Nike Women's Aerobic Shoes. Because Nike (http://www.nike.com) does not say to women, "You have $100, we have two pieces of cotton, leather and rubber manufactured under somewhat suspect conditions, and, if you give us the $100, we'll give you the two pieces of cotton, leather and rubber." That's not the pitch. It may sound familiar to some of your marketing efforts, but that's not the pitch. The pitch is to make cotton, leather and rubber stand for efficacy and power and independence. That's how you get evangelists for shoes.

6. let a thousand flowers bloom

The sixth thing, and this is stolen from Chairman Mao, is to let a thousand flowers bloom. This means that when you have a revolution, and you see people starting to pervert the uses of your revolution, you should embrace this. Instead of saying, "No, our software is designed for this person to do this, our computer is designed for this person to do this, our ecommerce site is designed for this kind of person to do this," if you see people perverting how they use it, you should welcome that. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Let me give you my illustration. In 1984, I really thought I had it all figured out. Macintosh was going to be a personal productivity computer so we needed personal productivity software which meant, back then, spreadsheet, database, word processor. So, in 1984, which spreadsheet, database and word processor would you need? A spreadsheet called Lotus 123, database called dBase and a word processor called WordPerfect. You Macintosh users will know that, basically, we were 0 for 3 there.

Meanwhile, this flower started blooming. This flower came to Apple Computer in the middle of 1984 for an appointment with the product manager of the Apple Laser Writer. This Apple Laser Writer was the first affordable laser printer at $7,000. Now, this person—an unknown person from an unknown company with an unknown product—showed his product to the Laser Writer product manager. The Laser Writer product manager, for the first time, saw something that justified spending $7,000. The product was PageMaker, the person was Paul Brainerd and the company was Aldus.

Aldus PageMaker created a field of flowers called desktop publishing, and desktop publishing saved Apple Computer. In a rare moment of Apple humility, let me tell you that no one, not Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs or John Scully, had foreseen the market for desktop publishing. We were hellbent for leather—spreadsheet, database, word processor. PageMaker saved Apple Computer. As an aside, if any of you are agnostic or atheists, I urge you to rethink your position on the existence of God because the continued survival of Apple Computer can only be explained by the existence of a benevolent God who once a decade sends a gift down called PageMaker. That is the best proof of God. May I be remembered as a digital C. S. Lewis.

7. eat like a bird, poop like an elephant

Now, the seventh thing you need to do as a revolutionary is to eat like a bird and you need to poop like an elephant. Are you writing this down? I bet you never had a speaker like this, huh?

Okay. For those of you who are biologically inept, let me tell you about eating and pooping. The hummingbird eats 50% of its body weight per day. If you or I had the metabolism of a hummingbird, we would ingest 155,000 calories per day. Some of you may have HTML people who approach this number. Now, an elephant poops 165 pounds per day. You are still wondering, "Well, okay, Guy, what does this have to do with being a revolutionary?" Before I explain that, as an aside, you should know that if someone says to you that you eat like a bird, you have been insulted. If someone says you poop like an elephant, it's not clear whether you have been insulted or complimented, but you are definitely getting your share of fiber.

You will find that I often stray into irrelevant stories. But I am conscious and cognizant of when I do this, which is different from most speakers.

Back on track. Now, eating like a bird. If you want to be a revolutionary, you need to eat information like a bird—155,000 calories per day. It means that you have to attend such things as this conference. It means that you have to be on the Web. It means that you join Internet mailing lists. It means that you join discussion groups and bulletin boards. It means that you get an account at Lexis/Nexis (http://lexis.com) and Knight Ridder (http://www.knight-ridder.com) and answers.com (http://www.answers.com) and every other information source. It means you become your own research librarian or you suck up to a very good research librarian.

Eat information like a bird. Let me give you some tips. First of all, use amateurs. When you really want to get information for an important function, use amateurs, don't use professionals. When the Japanese consumer electronics companies want to know how Americans buy consumer electronics, they do not commission a study by a high-falutin' research marketing company. Instead, they get on a plane, they come to the United States and stand near the checkout line and watch how people buy consumer electronics at CompUSA or The Good Guys or Circuit City because they are going to see nuances that a professional would never pick up.