Several months ago I bought the book Small is the new Big by Seth Godin. The book is a collection of his best blog posts which you can read also read on his blog and got it’s title because of this post. I really became a big fan of his blog and books. On his blog Seth every day has new insights on how you need to market products and services. His post are fun to read and thought provoking. I definitely recommend subscribing to his blog.
Some of the concepts Seth is promoting are the following:
A product needs to be a purple cow. When you are driving and see black and white cows you won’t notice them. However if you all of sudden see a purple one you might stop because a purple cow is remarkable. When a product is remarkable it is worth talking about and it spreads. One of his earliest books The Purple Cow describes this.
Seth has the opinion that advertisement on TV and in newspapers don’t work anymore. Basically because there are many more choices we need to make and much more advertising than there used to be and we have less time that’s why we ignore most advertising. So instead of spending loads of money on advertising he advises to spend the money on making a remarkable product. However being remarkable is seen as risky by many (big) companies. So most companies choose to make average products and advertise them. However average products do not get noticed and talked about.
The Purple Cow of GNOME
After reading The Purple Cow it got me thinking what the Purple Cow of GNOME is? It certainly is a nice desktop environment (at least that is my opinion), but is it remarkable when you compare it to MacOS, Windows 7 or KDE? If GNOME is remarkable what is it then what is the remarkable thing? Is that something that spreads? How can we make GNOME more remarkable?
Finally two nice videos of talks of Seth Godin
Click here if you can’t see above videos
None of them (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Windows, OSX, etc…) are remarkable, really. They are all basically the same boring thing, with a few small differences between them. If any is to truly be remarkable, a major paradigm shift is required. The interaction models on all of them are the same as they have been for the last 30 years.
The mobile and entertainment markets are blowing them out of the water, and they don’t even know it.
> None of them (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Windows, OSX, etc…) are remarkable, really. [..]
> The mobile and entertainment markets are blowing them out of the water, and they don’t
> even know it.
You are kidding, right?
KDE is really strong especially in the (new) mobile and entertainment market. I’m a GNOME user and I really love GNOME but I’m also looking what happens around myself.
KDE-PIM goes really strong mobile: http://dot.kde.org/2010/06/10/kde-pim-goes-mobile
Where is GNOME-PIM? MeeGo is a really strong Qt/KDE platform Nokia invest in document viewer based on KOffice, a lot of KDE programs get ported (run already on mobile platforms), etc. Plasma allows really easily to create Desktop, Netbook, Entertainment, Mobile,… GUIs
In my eyes they are really strong.
As for GNOME I agree with Amos Hendrix. If this will be enough for the future? We will see. But I hope GNOME3 will give us many new opportunities.
I think OS X is remarkable, and our main advantage is we have a built-in app store. That is to say, the main advantage of gnome based platforms ..isn’t exactly gnome. But what good is a built-in app store if the rest of the UI sucks? So in that sense gnome is remarkable just by being there and being generally awesome.
As much as I’d talk about a purple cow, I wouldn’t eat one.
What is so remarkable about OS X?
The truth is, GNOME is very remarkable.
But what makes it remarkable — it’s openness — does not make it a better product for the actual use that it is built for.
I think openness is a point that only counts when you are a programmer, because it enables you to change and contribute to the desktop. A normal computer user needs something else remarkable to go and use GNOME
A purple cow would get your attention, but it would be extremely annoying after a while. Different for the sake of different never works out. Think Vista.
What makes GNOME “different” is that it’s simple and it works. Yes it’s boring, but it does the job with no fuss. That’s why long time GNOME critic Linus Torvalds switch to GNOME from KDE 4. KDE 4 is certainly more exciting…but it gets in the way more since it’s more configurable in places only ricers care about, it gets in the way more.
Remarkable is also worth talking about and people spreading that idea. So remarkable should not get annoying after a while. The Google search engine was a purple cow. Compared to yahoo it was an extremely clean design it maybe had 3 links on the page while yahoo had 100 links
I think the OS/DE as a tool, Heidegger [1] says that you usually notice a tool only when it doesn’t work; people shouldn’t even care about what OS/DE they’re running. Apple’s motto is “it just works” for a reason.
Do people talk about their fridge? No, because it usually just works; people talk more about their computer because it usually doesn’t work the way it should.
What kind of people talk about their computers?
I forgot the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Present-at-Hand