“We’ve committed ourselves to the following when designing the new image: from the outside, even when you only see a very small part of the university, you’ll have to feel where this university stands for and how special it is. But, it should also be tangible at the campus. At this university, special and fascinating things happen. However, you’ll have to be at the campus, within the buildings, within the programme, before you discover this. If you want to reach your target group with this, you’ll lose at least 35%, because those people won’t ever come that far. Our job was to make that fascinating stuff tangible for the outside world. (…)

Furthermore, this new style has more color. It’s important for the culture of the university to prevent from everyone presenting itself in a straitjacket. The wide collection of shape creates unity in variety. We’re all University of Twente, but we don’t have to present ourselves in a boring uniformity. There’s much more variety and dynamic and that’s important for the university.

The beautiful thing of this new house style is that’s complete different. It isn’t a logo at the top of all your letters (…), we’ve disrecarded all rules, there’s a wide range of shape. The most amazing thing is, when you see it: its University of Twente. The simple logo is a beautiful counterpart for all those shapes.”

Yes, posters and other promotional material will work with the new style. However, everything else will dramatically fail. There should have been put more work in the logo and less in the rest of the promotional material, if it’s a cost issue. I prefer a professional, uniform and clear image above something that can only be justified by terms like ‘unity in variety’. It doesn’t say anything.

“University of Twente. Period.”

However, there’s one big problem with this system which I didn’t think of earlier (as I didn’t have many experience with this subject): what if the go-between becomes bankrupt?

However, if that was the case, I still would use Windows. Yes, I know, it’s wrong, but it’s just… the easiest way.

Furthermore, your regional settings should only be used as your format for date, currency etc. and not for your default language. As far as I’m concerned, only system language should determine your program language, but maybe that isn’t accurate enough either. So, a classic drop-down box should be still in place.

Above all, nVidia’s control center, even when you’ve downloaded ‘English-only’, will be in Dutch. Strange, isn’t it?

The thing is – the world of OS’s isn’t necessarily as much in need of competition as it is in need of standardisation. Three completely different OS’s with different file formats and different communication protocols would be a very bad thing, but this is something the industry realised ages ago. Which is why you can send an email from you Windows machine to your Mac, and forward it to your Linux PC. And why you can view this page, whether you’re on any one of the above or even on a mobile device like the iPhone.

Standardisation is going in the right direction these days, but it could be a lot better. For example; people’s tendency to deny the fact that anything ever made could compete with MS Office isn’t helping. With just a bit of effort and good will, we could all switch to a more open office standard and implement it on any system we like.

But despite the obvious problems, there are a few “alternative” OS’s out there, and actual flesh-and-bone people that prefer to use one of those rather than to follow the crowd.

You can still select The Netherlands as your location, but that is, of course, something completely different then a “region”.

Also, why do you have Dutch as the default “language for non-Unicode programs”? I thought you changed this to English after the horror of Spore in Dutch (”maatjes!” ).

Congrats with your diploma for grammar school too !