Salesmanship

I first heard of TabViz from Lukas Mathis. TabViz was born of the Mozilla Labs Tab Design Challenge. The Challenge’s premise was to take an already popular and now ubiquitous idea and make it even better: tabbed browsing. The TabViz idea is to display the inherent parent-child relationship between tabs using a radial visual metaphor. Of course, this approach is best demoed rather than described:

Sadly, the demo in that video is preceded by two and a half minutes of background and exposition. If you’re like me, you found the first two and a half minutes of that video to be excruciatingly boring. In fact, I didn’t even make it through those first two and a half minutes; I almost immediately started to skip ahead to find the actual demo. Let this be a lesson to all: the demo should always come first. That’s salesmanship 101. Let’s face it: in life, selling your idea is often as important (if perhaps not even more important) as having a good idea in the first place. TabViz is an excellent idea and it deserves a better video to sell it.

Let’s learn something from the incomparable salesman Billy Mays. In this informercial about the Kaboom cleaner, the demo starts after only 10 seconds: