More from the article on the Mac BU that I started reading yesterday and finished this morning.

When McDonough ["Mac Business Unit's director of marketing and business development"] visits Apple, for example, many of the initial questions about a product are about the user experience -- how it looks and feels, why a certain color was chosen, or how a given button works. At Microsoft, conversations tend to start with the underlying technology, or what kinds of protocols were used.

Thought that was right interesting. Seems like it'd be hard to code that way -- making the GUI first, or at least with it as the first priority -- or, rather, it seems like both companies should have different parts of the team whose job it is to do one or the other, and have all their resepective energies focused on doing their part right. Which I bet is the way the programmers *are* thinking.

Which means is that what we have here is a reflection of the business fellows' priorities -- management's goals. I suppose that shows in the final product, fairly obviously (eg, it's much easier to set up a firewall via the OS in OS X than WinXP). And it helps explain why the coders on the Apple Java dev list, a place where by definition you'd expect the concentration to be on faceless apps, has such a heavy emphasis on user interface guidelines. That's the Apple culture, and for some reason it's trickled down quite a ways.

Interesting that the REALbasic mailing list, in my experience, hasn't been so interface centric, though what REALbasic does best is make GUIs quickly and easily! REALbasic isn't made, ported, or used by Apple, and the culture apparently hasn't had any medium for trickling.