"The second [very important trend] is that for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been written about how the cloud, accessible web frameworks, etc. have dramatically lowered the cost of getting a startup to market, and that’s certainly true, but it also means that since everyone is on EC2 and Ruby on Rails, technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps. What does is design. UI/UX design. Social design. Business model design as well (Groupon and Gilt Groupe, the two tremendous e-commerce success of the past two years, are in Chicago and New York respectively). To be sure, technology is and always will be very important. I don’t want to go back to the startup where the MBA bosses around engineers. And some of the best designers will be engineers (like David Karp, or Mark Zuckerberg). But you can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design."
Excellent article on the importance of design vs features, using Tumblr and Posterous as examples. By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on PEG on Tech
