Re: Made of Easy -> Made of Inspiration

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 04:10, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> +1
>
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>
> wrote:
>         Made to Inspire?

I really like this as a tag line. Can I just check though: can we give
an account of why it will inspire? We should be able to give a decent
answer if we're asked, and we should probably explain our tag line in
our press materials.

Is it inspiring because it's beautiful? Elegant? Simple?

I brought this up in one of our side conversations at the Marketing Hackfest in Oct. 2009 but, basically, we're trying to make computers "not suck." I was reminded of this this last week when I saw the famous computer interface designer Matias Duarte say the same thing in an interview on Engadget (WRT to WebOS and Android 3.0.)

While I'm a fan of sardonic marketing, I don't think we can use "not suck"-itude as a marketing tag line. ;-)

So there's a couple of more, eh, optimistic ways of looking how it might inspire. It's elegant and beautiful, sure. It's also well-researched and thoughtfully designed. It has a strong user interface design narrative from core group of respected designers. (jimmac, mccan) It's architected for the present and the future. (Shell team has been carefully thinking about what GPU features not to use to keep that magic "5 year" window in line but also planning the UI with touch compatibility even though the hardware and software stack for touch on Linux isn't really ideal yet.) It has a strong, articulated roadmap, or vision. (I had hoped that Owen would post the "where are we going" blog posts by now but I understand that he has many demands made on him.)