

Think Like a Designer - novon
http://opencal.com/blog/think-like-a-designer/

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devmonk
Apple may have won on design, but what the author fails to mention is that
despite all of this, Google is doing pretty darn well.

The missing ingredient on Apple's side that is allowing Google to excel is the
lack of openness in attempt to control and micromanage the experience. While
truly good design requires a great degree of control, people like freedom.

If you travel around the world, one thing you will notice more often than not
is that cities and towns are often poorly planned. This is annoying to many of
us, and we respect the cities and towns with the well planned grid layout of
roads, where the roads are numbered in order, etc. So, if a more well-
controlled and better designed city or town is better, why are there more
cities and towns that are more loosely planned? Freedom. Things that grow
organically, grow more.

This is why Apple failed against the IBM clones and Windows in the late 80s
through the 90s. Apple had the chance to allow Mac clones, but didn't since
they would compete with Macs, and they'd lose control.

~~~
jamesteow
I would think that there are more cities that are poorly planned not because
of a concerted effort to allow it to grow organically, but because it's
difficult to plan the expansion of entire cities, especially in the cases of
those that are many centuries old.

For example, compare the streets around Wall Street (where New Amsterdam was
largely first settled) with 'newer' areas North of it where it becomes
slightly less tight and more gridded.

