DonLindsay
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Musical designers: UI guru moves from Apple to Microsoft to RIM
For all its flaws, we can understand why someone who can say they had anything to do with designing the iPhone's user experience would be a hot commodity among manufacturers and platform firms, but RIM? mocoNews is reporting that Don Lindsay, who spent the last five years at Microsoft working in the Live Labs and Vista teams, has made the jump to Waterloo to lead up the user experience team. Prior to Microsoft, he lead the OS X user experience group, which the Ottawa Citizen reports created the user experience for the iPhone; that's all well and good, but how much influence could he really have had in the mobile space if he left Cupertino way back in 2004? Either way, perhaps the most interesting thing about the hire is that RIM just underwent a major renovation of its brand image around the time of the Bold and Storm releases -- and BlackBerry users tend to love the way their devices generally operate (Storm notably excepted), so any jarring change to the experience risks alienating huge swaths of the base. Then again, RIM has made no secret of its aspirations to push ever deeper into the consumer space -- a place where Apple shines -- and again, RIM's touch paradigm needs some serious tweaking, so maybe this guy is going to leave the Bolds and Niagaras of the world to the pros and attack the multimedia-hungry masses with an entirely different angle.
