“Multi-threaded Foundations of the BeBox” sounds more marketable than a reference to BeOS directly. Is the BeBox name protected any differently than the OS that ran on it?
When I told my techie friend about Haiku being an “open-source spinoff of BeOS from back in the 90’s”, he responded: “Hmmmm, I’ve never heard about that one.”
But when I asked: “Do you remember the BeBox? That was its operating system!” His response was: “Oh! Heck, yeah! Every techie around back then has heard of the BeBox!”
Also, marketing campaigns need a refresh every now and then, anyway. 12 years is long enough. Getting the brand-recognition where it needs to be might help gain the spotlight where it’s needed.
It may be too late to to fix the steering wheel of the Titanic too, but can we at least standardize on some brand that people recognize? This thread was spawned in the “marketing” category for a reason!
The quotes around the phrase on the first line of my previous post are the proposed marketing blurb for Haiku.
It’s not our brand. Nobody I know personally has heard of BeOS or even the BeBox, and since Haiku does not and maybe never will run on the BeBox it seems a bit wierd to try and market it over that.
For reference this is what the website actually sais:
Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.
I don’t think “Inspired by the OS that ran on the BeBox” would improve that sentence really. it’s plenty good already. If you want to make this more concise simply remove the “inspired by the BeOS” part.
Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing, it is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.
Wether known or unknown by other people, it is still a somewhat irportant hart of Haiku’s identity, and that’s why it was kept there even though we stopped saying Haiku is a PeOS replacement/reimplementation (it is much more than that, but BeOS inspiration is still an important part of it).
On the other hand, I’m not sure we have that much relation to the Be Box. People who liked its specific features likely have found other places to go (arduinos and raspberry pis have replaced the geekport for example)
I think most of the old-time BeOS users still carry it in our , only a handfull of people were able to actually buy a BeBox on the other hand, so please keep the “inspired by the BeOS” reference.
EDIT: I “think” only a handfull of people did own a BeBox.
I don’t want to throw more oil into the fire but the »Inspired by the BeOS« is just fine, isn’t it? This is the historic background story and everyone without knowledge of BeOS, BeBox or Jean-Louis himself can enjoy Haiku, too.
Back in the day, I made my own ‘BeBox’ of sorts based on the hardware list released by the guru inside of Be. What the heck was the name of that? Ming’s hardware list? Anyway, it was a Tyan Tiger 1832DL with two PIII 800 Slot 1 CPU’s. Needless to say, it was stupid fast with BeOS. No blinkenlights but I didn’t care, it could run anything I threw at it.
If there were to be changes related to branding, I think the “blue leaf” should be replaced by the same yellow leaf that appears on the hard disk icon. And that’s not just a whim of mine, it’s uniformity and consistency. And the “leaves that look like feathers” that appears on the loading screen, could be redrawn to look like real feathers, that could be used to our advantage with a phrase like “Haiku is lighter than a feather” or something similar.
And making the boot disk and the deskbar leaf menu seems like a bad idea. They are different things, so they have different icons.
Also, the leaves have already been modified to look less than feathers. Do you suggest going back to the old logo initially designed by Stuart McCoy? (see What do You Know About the Haiku Logo? | Haiku Project for a side by side comparison).
, only a handfull of people were able to actually buy a BeBox on the other hand, so please keep the “inspired by the BeOS” reference.