I'm proud of the team I worked on, but have ambivalence for the company.
I was on IE 1.0 thru 5.0 (roughly '95-'99). It was a great team and in many, but not all ways, I think we made a great product. What happened on IE 6.0 was a tragedy. I wasn't there, but neither was most of the team that worked on IE5.
The only bright spot of that tragedy is it helped open the door for Firefox, which I love and have used for years.
The specific rant was aimed mostly at desktop. There's lots of energy to move i-phonish UI to the desktop, but it will mostly fail there for ergonomic reasons.
Sci-fi movies are horrible predictors of future, especially when it comes to UI. Fun and inspiring which is good, but using it as something to copy is ridiculous.
The 3rd world argument is a good one. If people can skip past our desktops they dodge the dominant design issues. But then it also has to be cheap. Cell phones are a great story - cell phones are the first phones much of the world has ever had. Cell towers are cheaper than landlines.
> jorsh wrote:
> I'm paying attention to the applications,
> not the OS windows.
He's totally right, You rarely need a paradigm shift to achieve whatever it is you imagine the effect of your work to be. That was my point at the end.