Gruber on the Uncanny Valley vis Chrome OS

The whole piece is, as usual, smart. But this is a side­line quotable moment from Gruber’s piece on Chrome this morning:

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a prob­lem sim­i­lar to the uncanny val­ley. By estab­lish­ing a con­cep­tual frame­work that mim­icks Win­dows, they can never really be that much dif­fer­ent than Win­dows, and if they’re not that much dif­fer­ent, they can never be that much bet­ter. If you want to make some­thing a lot bet­ter, you’ve got to make some­thing a lot different.

Read the rest here.