I found another webpage from 1987 that took "North Star" with the same concept. https://reprieve.org/uk/our-history/

> This mission is our North Star when it comes to taking on new cases and moving into new areas of work. We continue to fight for justice and save lives,

Another one from 1978: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/j-thomas-fyans/prophet-north-...

Anyway, I do agree with Raymond (if he did think so) that business slogans are annoying.

I also thought "blue skies", but that's more open-ended, just a (nice?) space

(this makes me think of cybernetics vs systems theory, and the "relational turn" with society, but that's enough half-baked thoughts)

((which made me think of https://www.halfbakery.com but this is tangential to the point))

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- Innovate Office instead of copying competitors. Teams and Loop largely mirror Slack and Notion. Focus on real innovation, especially in long-stagnant products like Word and PowerPoint.

- Stop coercive UX in Windows. Don’t nag users to switch to Edge, Bing, sign in with a Microsoft account, or adopt Copilot.

- Make search foundational everywhere. Searching in Outlook or Teams should be as fast as searching Hacker News.

- Move beyond Flat UI. Flat design is unintuitive and unattractive. Interfaces like NeXTSTEP from decades ago remain more usable, not to mention prettier.

- Retire SQL Server in favor of PostgreSQL compatibility. Provide a first-class SQL Server compatibility layer on Postgres rather than maintaining a separate database.

- Fix display scaling on Surface laptops. 100% and 200% should be the only supported modes. Fractional scaling causes visible artifacts and should not exist on premium hardware.