Comment Re:Clippy Key (Score 1) 130
Coincidentally, I just finished reading Apple (out of historical curiosity - I was about 15 when it was written in 1997) and the "the engineers who make all the decisions" was one of the real problems that Apple had after Jobs was ousted. It works for startups, but it absolutely does not work for a company with a larger product line who needs to make strategic decisions and investments, or who has unpleasant baggage to deal with. Engineers tend to like shiny new problems to solve and not every product is a brand new Macintosh computer.
But you're not wrong either about sales driving decisions being a problem (for similar reasons). A favorite phrase I got from Raymond Chen (long-time Microsoft developer, ironically) is "Somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature":
I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”
“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card.