Exposing New Products - The Microsoft or the Apple Way?

Seeing the amount of media attention apple gets, I couldn’t help but wondering what is it exactly that makes Apple’s launch so exciting.

Is it the reality distortion field usually surrounding big conventions like CES and MacWorld (and TechEd and SAPphire…)? Maybe, but its also there on Microsoft conventions have it too and I didn’t see such a media fest around Vista or the new Office 2007.

I think it has to do with the way to two companies differ when exposing products to the market.

While Microsoft announces relatively early and feeds the market with blogs, dog-food versions, CTPs, beta etc. Apple keeps quite and let everyone speculate about what its doing and maybe feeding some rumors every now and then…

I wonder how these different process affect product development too. I mean in one company everyone see what you’re doing and you’re constantly getting community feed back, which means there’s a lot of noise which makes it a lot harder to manage the project.
On the other side the devs have the quite to do their work without disturbance but they also risk missing the market expectations…

I can’t really pick the one I like better of these approaches… What do you think?