Spent Friday afternoon in the EICC along with 600+ of my “day job” colleagues for the annual senior management pep-talk – last year’s achievements, this year’s challenges, questions from the floor about why we weren’t paid more – the usual not-terribly-memorable death by corporate PowerPoint.

However, one section did stand out. I’d lay a small bet that five years from now people will still be saying “Do you remember when that HR woman with the scary hair stood up and told us all to be Tiggers and not Eeyores“? It takes some nerve to stand up in front of a big conference hall full of tecchies and use A.A.Milne as your management guru. But, as real management gurus would tell you, if you want to change cultures, talk in stores and draw pictures – IT folk have right brains too.

Maybe this is the clue to why Linux has become so successful. It’s nothing to do with the quality of the code, nothing to do with the number of eyeballs – it’s because people relate to Tux. Never mind the code, just look at the mascot.

If so, it’s time we at OpenOffice.org had another go at acquiring a mascot. There was the debacle over Otto (it appears any hand gesture means something rude somewhere in the world). The French community have developed an attachment to La Mouette, and I’ve seen some cutesy icons from the Japanese team. But as a project we haven’t yet come up with a single mascot to capture the imagination of the cuddly toy makers.

We already produce the world’s leading open-source office suite. Maybe the absence of a cuddly toy is all that’s stopping us achieving world desktop domination. Go to it, OpenOffice.org tiggers!

p.s. before anyone posts a comment about Tigger taking Eeyore from behind in the illustration – remember this is a children’s book from a more innocent age

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org, The day job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.