[openbeos] Re: Website: what is it exactly?


On Aug 18, 2006, at 1:18 PM, Jonas Sundström wrote:

"Waldemar Kornewald" <wkornew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
 ...

Personally, I dislike this vision of a "boring" company
where jokes are disallowed and everybody must
wear suits when coding and use formal language


Agreed!

Part of the Be, Inc. (RIP) phenomenon and following are
the colorful people involved, from the quotable JLG, to
the cottonsquares' monkey faces, Dominic 'dbg' Giampaolo
on the photocopier, Scot Hacker(!), Dianne Hackborn(!),
and all the others that are gone but not forgotten.
(And Eugenia. Are you reding this? :-)

Haiku's got flavor too. We should not suppress that.

Professional visual identity, yes.
Boring, soulless content, no.

On the R5 CD, IIRC, there's the image of the dog in the chair
of the VP(?) and the videos of the computers being pushed
off the roof of Be headq.  (A hint to Apple after Be's port from
PPC to x86?) The leds of the BeBox are useful sometimes,
but they're not exactly essential. They're fun though.
Even the venerable BeBook has got humour in it,

We can't compete with the spreadsheets of Redmond,
or the pod power of the fruit company, or the K.O.:s of Sony,
but we can append to the early culture of home computing,
friendly hacking, copy parties, sharing/helping, demo-scene
culture, geekport-ish hardware hacks, ... Think gerilla.
Qualities that once propelled Linux, I think.

Perhaps we have other strengths that I'm not seeing?

How do we attract users of MacOS?
(G3 support pulled soon? Are they going to Linux?)

How do we attract users of Windows?
(XP to Vista migration. Old Win98 users.)

How do we attract users of Linux?
(Haiku is easier, smaller and just as free.)

I know everyone's busy, except perhaps me, but we need
to come up with that killer application again. (Which doesn't
necessarily have to be an "application" at all. The iPod isn't.)

/Jonas Sundström.            www.kirilla.com




I don't mean boring. I mean polished. There is a difference. We need to have "style" and create an image. The image can be attractive and playful, but it shouldn't be a bunch of people just kinda "winging it". The image we create should be polished and yes, fun + happy. But, we need to be able to appeal people that aren't on the same plane of computer knowledge or interest.

-Austin

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