But nowadays even that may be automated, forcing you to poke numbers from the telephone keypad into an unfamiliar system that offers even less feedback about your settings than that infernal clock. Alan Cooper owns a clock that's even more of a horror, in part because it doubles as a CD player. A veteran programmer, Cooper developed what became Microsoft's Visual Basic but has long since turned his gaze to the realm of product design. That sort of rigidity makes programmers' lives easier. That attitude makes programmers the wrong people to be entrusted with designing products for the rest of humanity.
Programmers like to make things difficult.
They like controlling every last feature. Design becomes a matter of rouge and lipstick on the corpse. Cooper advocates a development process modeled after the movie business, where the product is planned out in minute detail before an inch of film is shot. Of course, that design phase takes time, and everybody knows that in the computer business being first to market is key. But maybe everybody's wrong.