Engineering Driven vs. Community Driven (was Re: Ugliness)

[hank williams]

> Your argument is similar to suggesting Nike has superior
> engineering because they have the coolest shoes.
>

uhh... yes. The coolest shoes come from doing real *engineering*. Unless by
cool you just mean pretty colors. An *incredible* amount of engineering goes
into the creation of nike shoes. An **INCREDIBLE** amount.


> No doubt there is some engineering at Nike wrt shoes but it aint that
> special in the grand scheme of things.
>
 It's about selling a minimal product with high margins, like Apple.
>
>
Hmm... this is just wrong. Nike (nor apple) wins because they designed the
cheapest to manufacture product. In fact most of the time this is not true.


>
> If we take as a simplistic metric the number of inferences and resulting
> complexity produced from work at the company required to go from the drawing
> board to the product release, then the engineering that goes into an iPhone
> is not really any more then most of the McWindows phones out there.
>

First of all I said Apple not iPhone. But to focus on the iphone for a sec,
because Apple controls the software and the hardware of all of its products,
even with the iPhone this statement is demonstrably false since McWindows
phone manufacturers OEM their software and so do far less than half the work
apple has to do. And certainly, at this point, apple has the most appealing
software stack in the phone market. To suggest that there is no difference
between the iphone software and the crash prone clunky windows mobile is to
not have used either.


> A lot of design and art and marketing considerations mostly, but that is
> not really engineering,
>

design *is* engineering, particularly as it relates to software and
mechanical engineering. You cannot separate them. And by design I do not
mean art work. It means how you make things work. Again your comments
reflect not having actually worked on this stuff. Engineering good designs
is hard. Its not about art, it is about execution. To suggest otherwise is
really to reveal a lack of understanding of the process.



-- 
blog: whydoeseverythingsuck.com
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