There Are No Design Leaders in the PC World is an interesting and thoughtful article, written by someone who can’t be suspected of being an Apple/Mac zealot.
It features snippets of interviews with Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs who talks about the role and importance of design, usability, and about the kind of people who work on Apple’s products, and who wouldn’t or couldn’t dream of unleashing products that were merely adequate on the paying public.
He laments that there are few, if any, examples of this attitude on the PC/Windows side of the fence.
But as the dozens and dozens of comments on this article illustrate, the obvious truth of the matter is that at best, most people don’t care about design, good or bad. At worst, they don’t like it. They resent it. Basically, to be crass, they think it’s « gay ».
This is true in the computer world, and in most other domains, be it in consumer electronics, cars, furniture, or clothing.
They don’t understand that design isn’t only how something looks, it’s how it works.
This attitude is much more pronounced in the US than it is in France (but we’re all gay in France anyway, right?). Then again, most everyday objects in the US, like cars and coffee-makers, look to me like they were carved in a slab of rock the day before.
