When I was 12 years old, I spent my free time over the course of several weeks creating, with pencil and paper, parodies of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post. I drew the pictures, wrote the copy, and invented pseudonyms for myself to put in the masthead. After 30 years these early examples of my writing no longer exist, but they were, to the best of my recollection, hilarious.
This anecdote illustrates three points.
What makes something parodiable? Many attributes can be parodied: style, voice, appearance, attitude. Perhaps the one requirement is the recurrence of some constellation of attributes sufficiently cohesive as to be recognized. It's not possible to parody something that only happens once, but it's also not possible to parody something that merely recurs without generating a sense of recognition. A magazine is a package of published material that comes in the mail regularly; so are the offerings of a book club. But a magazine can be parodied and the offerings of a book club can't, because this stream of books by different authors doesn't have any recurrent aspect worthy of parody. (Some book clubs tell you about upcoming selections in a publication that has some features of a magazine; I'm not talking about that, or about a distinctive style in the company's promotional materials.)
This parodiable quality is also what made a 12-year old so fascinated by magazines. As a child, I accounted for my fascination by saying that magazines had personalities. This is an anthropomorphism that I haven't grown out of in 30 years, but while I still think that at least some magazines do have something that is well described as a personality, I no longer think that personality is the trait that makes a magazine parodiable or worthy of a 12-year old's fascination. That trait, I believe, is integrity.
The sense in which I'm using the word integrity has to do with parts fitting into a meaningful whole, systems following internal logic the premises of which are graspable from the outside, people and companies and products being true to their natures. Integrity is what makes people and magazines parodiable, it's what makes magazines work, and it's one of the things that distinguishes successful products, product lines, and companies.
The Macintosh is a product with integrity. Once you understand the desktop metaphor, you don't need any help in using the Mac. When you come up against something you haven't seen before, you feel confident that your intuition, based on your understanding of the metaphor, will tell you what to do, and the Mac usually doesn't disappoint that expectation.
Apple is not an example of a company with integrity; the continual reorganizations and the current push to produce low-margin, high-volume machines make it hard to know the company. I am certainly not suggesting that low-cost Macs are a bad idea, but I wouldn't want to be working at Apple these days.
Integrity is not just name recognition, although it encompasses that (Exxon has name recognition).
Integrity is not just consistency. Any system can be described consistently. London drivers drive on the left side of the street and San Franciscans on the right, but one consistent rule applies to driving in both cities: Drive on the legal side of the street. This even covers the tricky one-way street situations in one consistent rule that always keeps you on the right side of the street and the law. "Legal," however, is a reference to a technical manual that none carries with them while driving, while "right" and "left" are references to the driver's own body.
Integrity in a product lets the designer just throw out a few points with the assurance that the user will connect the dots. If you do it right, you don't have to do as much, because the user will bring a lot to the meeting. Interapplication communication is very nice, but it's worth remembering that the most powerful piece of software in existence lies on the other side of the screen, waiting to work with your application.
1. My writing improves with age and forgetfulness.
2. I had a thing for magazines at an early age.
3. Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post, three magazines that served basically the same market, were sufficiently distinctive that they could be parodied by a 12-year old. This point is important, I think.