Jeremy Friesen, who is hosting this month’s Emacs Carnival, has his own offering for the Elevator Pitch. As I said before [1, 2] the elevator pitch is particularly difficult because you have to make a persuasive case for Emacs in the time it takes for an elevator ride.
Randy Ridenour and Álvaro Ramírez met that challenge by providing a single simple statement and a list of ways of using Emacs for surprising tasks, respectively. Friesen begins by listing a number of reasons that you might want to try Emacs and then starts asking questions of putative computer users about their current software.
The TL;DR of Friesen’s pitch is that while Emacs may look retro it’s really good at helping you tell your computer what to do. There is, he says, no need to try to do everything from the beginning. Better to just start with writing or reading documents and move on from there.
As with Ramirez’s post, Friesen injects a bit of humor regarding the absurdity of haranguing people in a elevator about something they’ve probably never heard of and certainly don’t care about. But the point of the exercise is to force you distill your reasons for being an Emacs user to their essence.