Comments on: Canonical's Shuttleworth: We'll Have New CEO In 2010

By: aikiwolfie

aikiwolfie — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:51:27 +0000

Changes at the top of a business always brings uncertainty. So this does make me kind of nervous about which direction Ubuntu and Canonical will take next. On the other hand Mark Shuttleworth is taking a firm grip of product design as well as schmusing potential business partners. Which just might be a good thing.

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:16:22 +0000

Ah.. but is Shuttleworth the right person to be doing usability design work? Is he trained as a usability designer? What’s his track record when it comes to designing interfaces himself?
Look at this for a reference of Shuttleworth’s track record at design decision making:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8752

“The other time Mark was overruled by the community involved the Nautilus file manager program. When you clicked on a folder in Nautilus, a new window would pop up on the screen. People complained about how the screens would become full of windows. Mark thought it would be a great idea that when one window opened the previous window would close. This feature, at Mark’s insistence, was shipped but caused an even greater number of complaints, as users wanted to know why the Nautilus window seemed to dance all over the screen.”

Now that Mark is taking a firmer role in usability design.. does the future hold a string of repeats of spatial nautilus hack that he insisted on…or will the internal Canonical design team have the spine to tell Mark no when his ideas are problematic? Just because Mark is interested in design doesn’t make him good at it. I’m interested in baseball and ice sculpting.. I’m not good at it.

-jef

By: Norlick

Norlick — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:55:15 +0000

I’m optimistic regarding the CEO change — Ubuntu is getting very ambitious and the move to someone with large-scale project experience is intelligent in that light.

Also just on the sexism thing — that was total stupidity on that girl’s behalf. She was basically pissed off because he said “Guy” and “Guys” in the casual, colloquial sense… Which is not sexist, and it seemed to me his actual gender comment wasn’t intended to be sexist either.