Scott Rosenberg, "The Microsoft resistance," Salon.com Technology, 29 Nov 2001

For all its talk of innovation, Microsoft is rarely in the forefront of the new developments in computing that really take off -- whether it's the graphical user interface, the Web, Palm devices or trading music files. To be fair to Gates and company, they are probably more innovative than most companies their size. But companies as big as Microsoft is today never start software revolutions; at best they co-opt them.

Stewart Alsop, "My New Favorite Toy," Fortune.com, 10 Dec 2001

The iPod is not the first small digital music player with a hard disk....All have similar technical features to the iPod, except that they just aren't good enough. They are too big to fit into a shirt pocket. Their software is hard to use. Their batteries don't last long.

...I had it working and playing my music in about ten minutes. ...now I've got a significant portion of the music that I know and love stored on my Macintosh--and on my iPod. My music, where I want it, when I want it. Problem solved.

Robert D. Hof, "The People's Company," BusinessWeek Online, 3 Dec 2001

By using the Net to tap into the talent and imagination of its customers, eBay has multiplied the brainpower of its executives by millions. Imagine a retailer trying to do this: It would have to interview every single person leaving every store, post a list of what each thought of the shopping experience, then ask them to write up a merchandising plan and call suppliers to arrange deliveries--and oh, by the way, could they keep an eye out for shoplifters? That's what eBay's customers voluntarily do each day. Says Whitman: "It is far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system."

Charles Haddad, "A Much Cleaner Office for OS X," Business Week Online, 21 Nov 2001

You can make Word, the bloated grandfather of all Microsoft applications, look as clean, simple, and inviting as OS 9's SimpleText or OS X's TextEdit applications. Now that's progress.

Claire Tristram, "The Next Computer Interface," Technology Review, Dec 2001

The desktop metaphor puts the onus on our brains to juggle this expanding collection of files, folders and lists. Yet "our neurons do not fire faster, our memory doesn't increase in capacity and we do not learn to think faster as time progresses," notes Bill Buxton, chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront, a leading maker of graphic-design tools. Buxton argues that without better tools to exploit the immense processing power of today's computers, that power is not much good to us.

Thomas Hine, "Looking Alive," The Atlantic, Nov 2001

It's almost impossible to separate the engineering features that make the Fastskin work from its "design"—those qualities of form, texture, and color that make a thing memorable and meaningful. The Fastskin comes close to the ideal that form should follow function. However, most of the time function needs a little help. It falls to designers to make people feel comfortable with technology. Throughout the twentieth century they generally did so by dramatizing an object's benefits—speed, power, and efficiency, for instance—while hiding the things that made the object work. They took the early automobile, for example, in which each functional part was visible, and fashioned a steel shell that hid the machinery and gave the car a personality. In so doing they turned a contraption into a convenience.

Sometimes function has little to do with it. There was no practical reason for a 1930s refrigerator to be streamlined, but its new profile turned the erstwhile icebox into an embodiment of modernity and progress. The objects in which form follows not function but fantasy are often the most revealing ones.

Scott Rosenberg, "Inside Salon Premium," Web Techniques, Dec 2001

After six years on the Web we've learned to base our plans on the way users actually behave, not how we wish they would.

David Fore, "Whole lotta thwarting going on," Cooper Interaction Design Newsletter, Nov 2001

A system that disregards people will itself be disregarded by people.

Scott Kirsner, "Making Better Toys and Jumbo Jets by Sharing the Rough Draft," The New York Times, 5 Nov 2001

...making changes to three-dimensional objects and beaming them to colleagues around the world has become as easy as altering a sentence in a shared word-processing document.

Charles Fishman, "Design - Freeman Thomas," FastCompany, Dec 1999

"So I'm driving over here today in the Prowler, and I pass a car. There's a man driving, a kid in the front passenger seat, and two more kids in the back. They see the Prowler, and they grin and give me a thumbs-up," says Thomas. "And I give them a thumbs-up back. You only get one life; this life is not a rehearsal. So chances are, you want to have fun. You still want to act like a child. That spirit is a frame of mind, not an age. And the automobile gives you a chance to have an adventure every day. Say you drive 20 minutes to work every day. Your commute could be totally pragmatic, but it doesn't have to be. Having a really nice car is like wearing a really nice suit. It's like a role you play -- a role you get to play. Who doesn't want a thumbs-up experience?"
...
Thomas is always sketching cars. He has a simple, rough, freehand style, using whatever ballpoint pen is around. He uses lots of lines and cross-hatching -- capturing the mood and the shape, rather than the details. Sketching helps him think, helps him experiment, helps him explain.
....
In that world, Thomas has evolved a role that serves both his artistic and his bureaucratic needs. "I'm a storyteller," he says. "I think of a designer as a processor of information -- like a scriptwriter or a novelist." Thomas sees himself as a kind of cultural filter and architect: Listen carefully to what's going on out in the world, consider history and context, and create a vehicle that matches the zeitgeist. The Microbus is an artifact of its era; so is the minivan.

Thomas believes absolutely that every vehicle needs a story. "What's the plot?" he asks of the Prowler, before answering his own question. Being able to communicate that story to consumers is one thing. But being able to articulate it to people inside the company is perhaps more important, if your designs are going to survive, and if they are going to transcend "committee-ization."

"It's important to be able to communicate, not just to designers but also to nondesign people," Thomas says. "If people don't have a vision, you have to be able to walk them through what you're talking about. You have to be able to connect equally with an engineer, with someone from marketing, and with someone from the fabrication shop. The question is, How do you get people to work together? Most companies have 'committee design.' That's not what I like. I like 'consensus design.' In a committee, people don't speak up. They don't say what they think. Nothing is allowed to come out. Consensus design means that you all express yourselves, and your ideas, and at the end of the day, you all agree to do something. You might initially be against an idea, but if someone walks you through the thought process, you might then be able to say, 'I see what you're talking about.' "

Andy Raskin, "Are You Geek Enough?," Business 2.0, Dec 2001

Jeff Katz, CEO of Orbitz, the online travel agency, says learning to listen is how he made the leap from engineer to executive. With a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA, Katz concedes that he needed to improve his listening skills to make it to the top. "It's something I've had to cultivate," he says. "I've worked hard at listening to customers and to people doing the work."

Rachel Konrad and Sandeep Junnarkar, "Rival browsers benefiting from MSN gaffe," CNET.com Tech News, 1 Nov 2001

Berners-Lee sounded a more critical note. "Control over a person's desktop and their browser is control over their whole Net-mediated perception of the world out there," he wrote. "It is very powerful."