Yet I constantly see people ruing how so many things are clunky and unusable because they're "designed by engineers."

Really, it doesn't matter if a designer, engineer, middle manager or janitor design something. What matters is the design. "Artistes" are responsible for millions of crap works that can barely sell at a garage sale or flea markets for every work worthy of being hung in a museum. The best user interface designers I've worked with have always been tweeners who fall between engineer and designer... and "artiste" universally never applies.

What is going on right now is silly - we're designing user interfaces based on users being inexperienced and stupid, which is now an edge case. Reality is that computers have been in common use for 25 years. That means the vast majority of users have at least 3-5 years of computer use experience. Today's users are smarter, are comfortable with mobile, desktop/laptop and all kinds of other user interfaces (i.e. ATMs, car dashboards, DVD Players, video games, etc). We should be taking advantage of this instead of designing for the 5% of users who are really confused.

The whole "dumb it down" movement is based on anecdotal evidence and reminds me of website redesigns that use a focus group instead of the last three years worth of web analytics and customer complaints. The result usually is a 10-20% drop in sales followed by rolling back to the old gui with round buttons instead of square or vice-versa.

Microsoft has sold 200 million licenses of word. Of that number, many were part of license programs that expire. For example, my company had a license that would renew each year, and would apply to only the current version of the Microsoft products. Another factor in the number of sales: old versions of office cannot open docx format files. A final factor is that many companies (and individuals) replace their PCs every 3-5 years and portions of old versions of Office typically don't work on newer MS operating systems. For example, Outlook 2000 would not work on Windows Vista.

All of the above issues are economic issues and tend to be more important to large scale buyers than largely cosmetic features like replacing a menu and tool bar with a ribbon. I'm glad you personally like the ribbon. Someone has to.

Bs. Companies are having problems finding developers right now. Can't help if you are a FORTRAN or COBOL developer, but if you are a Python, PHP or Ruby developer life is good.

Just an observation: the reason it is so hard for people to find work is that they often are not wiling to move. The more specialized your knowledge is, the more valuable you are... but the more scarce positions are for you.

And these web developers think non-WebKit browsers are weird and icky for not implementing the _exact_ same behavior with their own prefix.

There should be no expectation that any non webkit browser support -webkit-* properties. That said, the -webkit-* or -moz-* properties are nowhere near as bad as IE lockin and are very different. You know you are using a browser specific feature... if it becomes a standard later, the expectation is that you end up having to revise your web site or application to implement the standard property. This really does beat the heck out of having to go without the feature and deal with broken HTML and CSS as the former #1 browser expected.

And such sites are very common, especially amongst mobile-targeted sites.
What do you expect on Mobile targeted sites? Last I looked Webkit based browsers ship with iPhone and Android, and Windows Mobile is less relevant than some proprietary feature phone operating systems. For developers, right now there is Webkit and really no much else of note to support. It really is a tragedy that this is the case. Personally, I'd love to see some competition because it makes every browser better.

Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software.

For the most part, this is spot on. The exception is probably, as usual, games.

The -webkit stuff is nothing to be shocked by. It's just a step towards eventually becoming part of the css standard. There are tons of -moz properties as well. Take -border-radius, which is now part of the standard. Before it was part of the standard it was -webkit-border-radius and -moz-border-radius. So, the whole -webkit thing is just a step on the trail to standardization.

When you see a company stuck on XP, there is simply not a good reason for it anymore. Most often, being stuck on XP or IE6 means the company IT department is not able to keep up with change and are doing things like it is 1997. They are using a software installation model that is based on physically inserting CDs to perform upgrades and often are unable to cope with distributing a security patch in a timely manner.

It is high time that CEOs realize if their people are using IE6 or WinXP, that the CIO and CTO should be sacked. Sorry, but there is no excuse for keeping your company stuck in the 1990s. Also, if you develop web apps, the right move is always to discontinue support for IE6. If you are feeding the monster, you are part of the problem.

A degree is only as good as the person holding it has made it.

That is how California and New York tried to force Amazon to collect sales tax and it had devastating results for those states as in the affiliates went out of business or moved. Claiming independent contractors are a nexus is legally dubious, but expensive for the contractor to fight. In Indiana they have a big building with their name on it, so the situation is very, very different.

Please stop confusing the GUI for the OS. Thank you.

Most of the platforms with APis are running on open source and their developers are contributing code back. Nothing to see here.

Loaded cost for an employee is typically 18% of salary + $320/month for real estate overhead. So a $90 K employee ends up costing about $120,000 with benefits.

Apparently, you are not aware how easy it is to get started with Amazon's app store. It's easy enough that everyone I know with an Android device has done it.

It is dangerous to assume facts not in evidence. First, Android devices exist at all levels of the smartphone marketplace. Some are cheap (either inexpensive or poorly constructed). Some are very expensive. The best part is that inexpensive phones are critical in unlocking the global mass market. Second, Android users run the gamut from the prepaid phone user to people on unlimited everthing on every carrier available. Even the prepaid market is surprising when you study it. There are a lot of wealthy people who think paying $150 for a phone and $50 for unlimited everything with no possibility of the monthly bill going over $50 is smart business... mainly because it is. Since you clearly aren't an Android user (you said they were cheap and piracy was rampant without knowing how difficult it actually is to pirate software), then you probably have never had the pleasure of getting an app for $.10 because one app store had a sale and the other had a price match policy.