We've all seen the demos of BlackBerry 10 on dev alpha hardware. It looks good, no question. But I'm worried. The marketing has to be strong. And as a student of marketing, I've come to adopt the view that everything is marketing. This is a concept that was explained beautifully in the book "Rework", by the founders of 37 Signals.
If you adopt the view that everything is marketing, then the the look of the home screen of a new mobile OS seems pretty darn important. It's the first thing people will see when they look at the screen. It's the most likely photo to show up in a blog post, newspaper story or TV commercial.
So need I really say this? If the home screen icons look like crap, people will think your device and OS is crap. These assumptions happen unconsciously and nearly instantaneously. A product designer who thinks like a marketer will prevent this from happening.
Enter BlackBerry 10.