As a programmer, I have a terrible eye for designing interfaces. I can make them *functional* but not pretty or intuitive; although it’s amazingly easy to sit back and say what is wrong with a design if I’m shown it.

The reason why software sucks is that engineers are expected to do everything: see the mess Google made of their video store, as opposed to Apple who pay people to get the interface just right. Security researchers get to sit all day cracking at software, against an engineer who had to get a certain feature coded by the milestone or face the wrath of middle-management.

I don’t understand why a book is needed to make this point, and from your review, it seems like it didn’t even make that point. Taking shots at students is amazingly cheap too. Did you ever get *any* sort of feeling that Platt has any sort of insight at all?