This blog entry had tons of sarcasm prior to posting, but I edited it all out. I’m not a complete monster, you know.
So, I was googling for something today and stumbled upon a 3 weeks old (that is, nobody cares about it anymore) interview with Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.
As a person currently employed in marketing, I certainly know how important it is to focus on good things that your company does when you are spreading PR with a big shovel. It’s more or less OK to make controversial statements, if you can keep the game on, but telling outright lies? No, I don’t think so.
Here is an interesting excerpt:
“The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design,” Silber stops, perhaps to reconsider the boldness of what she is about to say. “If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design, nobody was doing user research. It is actually something we have had great influence on, by calling attention to it and putting our efforts there. I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects. That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area, even if it’s not our code and our design.”
Can you see what’s wrong with it? Let’s chop it up into smaller bits.
The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design
*sigh* She just had to say that, yeah?
If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design
Dear Ms. Silber, I suggest you go five years ago, or even more, and discover Tango project. In 2007 I did an interview with them for GNOME Journal. It is real, and there is proof.
Probably you would also like to find out that Ascender Corp. was comissioned by Redhat to create Liberation fonts and delivered them in early 2007. That was just how many years prior to Ubuntu font family?
nobody was doing user research
How about Sun having done a usability study of GNOME in 2001, several years before Canonical was even conceived?
I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.
That, at least, is true.
That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area,
And this is what it was all about: leadership.
I don’t believe that anyone who’s been with the company since 2004 could possibly not know all of that. So what was that? Canonical claims to have invented design and user research in free software? When did they start acting in the worst traditions of Microsoft et al.?
