I personally agree with the notion of hardware engineers being out of touch with the people who use their devices. Working for a rather large electronics company as a games programmer, you just have to look at the poor design of the machine we develop for. Things that games programmers have been asking for years are just glossed over in the drive for higher and higher polygon counts
On the OS side of things however, I agree with the hardware designers but I point the finger at the end users of these machines (stick with me while I digress). I don't want to carry a mobile phone, an MP3/CD player and a PDA with me where ever I go, I want one single device that can do all these tasks and more... BUT... I don't want an operating system that has tried to embody every single useless internet idea and protocol in the 500 DLLs that I'm forced to store on the darn thing! I also don't want to have to try the millions of different combinations of codecs and drivers and DLL versions to get a particular configuration working to watch a particular internet movie... If people want the flexibility and diversity of the internet which many say they do, then they are going to have to put up with incompatibilities between software components but the moment they receive a warning that an audio file can't be played or a video has the wrong codec or they need to download a newer version of a browser plugin, they get all upset about it... When will it end!!!
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I personally agree with the notion of hardware engineers being out of touch with the people who use their devices. Working for a rather large electronics company as a games programmer, you just have to look at the poor design of the machine we develop for. Things that games programmers have been asking for years are just glossed over in the drive for higher and higher polygon counts On the OS side of things however, I agree with the hardware designers but I point the finger at the end users of these machines (stick with me while I digress). I don't want to carry a mobile phone, an MP3/CD player and a PDA with me where ever I go, I want one single device that can do all these tasks and more... BUT... I don't want an operating system that has tried to embody every single useless internet idea and protocol in the 500 DLLs that I'm forced to store on the darn thing! I also don't want to have to try the millions of different combinations of codecs and drivers and DLL versions to get a particular configuration working to watch a particular internet movie... If people want the flexibility and diversity of the internet which many say they do, then they are going to have to put up with incompatibilities between software components but the moment they receive a warning that an audio file can't be played or a video has the wrong codec or they need to download a newer version of a browser plugin, they get all upset about it... When will it end!!!