> As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineers could call the shots with their own frameworks/apps
That’s a bug not a feature. Engineering led companies rarely ship good consumer products. What happened to Apple before there was a product guy at the top is a prime example.
Another recent example is Google. Google has the best technology in the industry but can’t ship and sustain a good product to save its life.
When your customers are nerds like you, I think engineers do fine.
I should qualify it somewhat though — I mean I was, for a spell, working on the ColorSync framework. So the "customer" was also an engineer using our API.
At the same time, when I worked on Preview initially I added features that I wanted and I think it dovetailed what users wanted. I am also a user I rationalized.
Further, many of the old timers like myself, were hung up on Tog and his Human Interface Guidelines. We would argue over lunch the Right way to handle UI for a specific feature, etc.
Jobs comes along and with Design at his side, and they decide that the address field in Safari should also be a progress bar (that appears to select the text as it loads?). Some poor engineer was told then to implement that. (I hated what I came to call one-off UI.)
That’s a bug not a feature. Engineering led companies rarely ship good consumer products. What happened to Apple before there was a product guy at the top is a prime example.
Another recent example is Google. Google has the best technology in the industry but can’t ship and sustain a good product to save its life.