This article sums up my feelings on Microsoft and Apple so well ... give it a read.

To expand on this, I had dinner with Borst tonight after the Chapel Hill Blogger's Meetup where we talked about software development. There is a great site called, "Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?" which describes a general problem in management (and software development).

The problem is this:

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint". It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say "There! *I* did that." It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.

Apple is effectively of the mindset that they know best, where as Microsoft is of the mindset that their customers know best. There are benefits to both (I don't feel like writing a full-fledged post on this yet), and it's fascinating to talk endlessly about the pros and cons of both systems.

Working at the startup, I've seen this issue come up firsthand. My bosses are very details-oriented people (which is fantastic), but I've seen us go back and forth on certain things where I really think both are right (especially for UI stuff) ... sometimes I wonder why so much time was spent just detailing this one topic, when there are bigger problems which would benefit from that type of feedback from everybody.

This topic has been touched on a few times, most notably by 37signals in their forget feature requests. Personally, I've found that if you explicitly ask for problems or feaure requests, most oftentimes they are (a) too specific to one user group or (b) already implemented or in the process of being implemented.

I guess what I'm trying to say is lately I've been shifting away from the MS method and more towards the Apple method - it takes so much work for me as a sole developer to take into account everybody's requests.

So if you're talking to me and you get the sense that I think I know best for people, I apologize. It's not that I *do* know better, but that I'm in a position to implement certain changes that I feel is for the benefit of the masses, and I find that trying to appeal to everybody is tiring and counterproductive to what I'm doing.