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The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program
by peterb 15y ago
The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program manager's rule, and a PM is neither a technologist nor a designer. They represent "the user". As a result Microsoft is great at feature-rich products that solve many problems. At Apple, they focus on the human side of technology. They try to make things easier to use. They focus on design details and strive for minimalism while still being feature rich. At Microsoft a PM could never remove an on/off button from an MP3 player.
Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.
- brown9-2 15y agoDon't designers represent "the user" also? Maybe a closer analogy would have the program managers representing "the business".
- schrototo 15y agoI think the difference is that designers have a vision of what the users really want, as opposed to what they say (or even think) they want. Whereas the PMs (in that example) are more the focus-group types.
- marklabedz 15y agoTo (mis)quote Henry Ford: "If had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse." The iPhone, iPod, and especially the iPad represented a near-total re-conceptualization of the product in that space.
- peterb 15y agoDesign is more than that. It is what users really want, but it is also how they feel when they use it, how it works, how it looks, etc. PMs are great at getting projects done. They herd cats. But very few have studied design, industrial design, art history, architecture, literature, etc. Jonathan Ive studied industrial design. Steven Sinofsky studied computer science.
- contextfree 15y agoI'm not sure if there's any particular significance to this, but the current head of PM for Windows is Jensen Harris and his degree was in music composition.