Look, just because you might have had a crappy music player and some junky tablet before someone else doesn't mean you had any idea how to engage your users on the platforms. If we turned back time and you got a redo, it would end up the same way because they wouldn't "just work" for people, and therefore people wouldn't buy them.

I suspect Apple's dismissal of vertical touch screen usage has to do with muscle fatigue. Try holding your arms out in front of you without resting your hands on anything for 5-10 minutes, and I think you'll see what he's getting at. People want to love Minority Report-style interfaces, but the truth is that there are reasons for not using them. Is it a well-founded argument against vertical screens? I guess we'll see!

And to add to my previous comment, I wish GlassDoor would redo their study after factoring in cost of living. Then we'd see who's *really* paying their engineers.

128k? That doesn't seem like much once you factor in cost of living for the locations these companies reside in.

The problem with the entire article is that it tries to hand-wave over the real issue: user experience. The article basically suggests, "If we put lipstick on a pig, the pig will look much better." This kind of thought process is exactly why there is so much shitty software in the real world... suddenly, everyone is a designer, everyone knows how to do information architecture, interaction design, and visual design. Wikipedia has a problem, agreed, but it is not just a "superficial" one. If Wikipedia was designed with a different kind of end-user in mind (average Joe vs. geeks), it really could enable folks to contribute on a larger scale. However, there's a lot more involved in improving user experience than just making it look nicer.