Challenges of Design

There is only one true designer in the world today and that is Steve Jobs. I have never met him and missed him at the Las Vegas electronics show. It just gets too crowded and then he has so many idol-worshipping fans at these shows that it gets a little hard to get a commonsense perspective. But I've read his speeches as well as some books about him that are critical and no so critical. One of those books is iCon, an unauthorized biography. This book was actually initially rolled out at Apple stores. But as soon as Steve Jobs read that book, he had all the copies pulled out of Apple stores and thrown into dumpsters. I guess someone must have picked up one such hardbound copy, which I bought from Amazon.com for two dollars. Steve Jobs fretted for hours about each screw on iPod. Finally, he decided that iPod won't have a screw, since screws looked ugly. This meant that people won't be able to open the iPod and replace batteries. So be it. As a result programmers had to work another six-months to figure out how to conserve battery and make it last longer. Steve Jobs is all about form and flow. So does he give up on functions? Yes, he does. He tightly guards his hardware and software. He decides and limits functionality. He is a revolutionary, who sacrifices the scope of his inventions at the altar of form and flow.

Computer revolution was created not by Apple but by a mistake by IBM, when they decided to buy an operating system for their IBM-PC from Bill Gates for $50K without seeking full ownership and distribution rights on the operating system. This was such a small deal that IBM's lawyers decided to ignore it. As is well known this is what caused emergence of IBM clones using Microsoft operating system and revolutionized the industry.

Microsoft continues to have much wider acceptance. Apple continues to lag behind the functionality offered by PCs, whether using Microsoft OS or using Linux, partly due to cussedness of Steve Jobs. This cussedness comes as a package with his extraordinary strengths in design. His weakness only enhances his strengths and Steve does not give a damn to his weakness. Now the question is did Steve Jobs borrow for building what he is unwilling to share? I'm afraid that the answer again may be in affirmative. Steve's NeXT was based on Carnegie-Mellon's object-oriented Unix kernel. In fact, it is NeXT that powers Apple computers these days.

Most of these issues are well known in the industry but Steve Jobs is still the king of design. The likes of Sony, Ford and Toyota with their deep pockets continue to come out with ugly electronics and cars. Clearly, money doesn't a designer make.

Who started this race for the design of the ugliest car? Was it Pontiac Aztek? Toyota joined it with Prius and FJ Cruiser. Ford did not want to be left behind and they decided to release Flex. Why should Nissan be left behind in this race for ugly cars? So they released Cube. All of them have their own excuses. Toyota wanted to make a fuel-efficient car, Ford wanted to have a specious retro vehicle for families and Nissan wanted to create more space for less money.

Here are some stock pictures of these cars. Compare these to the design of iPod and think about the trade-offs that the designers refused to make. Car industry needs a Steve Jobs.