Is this really a commonly held belief? I've never encountered anyone expressing this opinion.
Good engineering is good user experience.
An app can be beautifully engineered by have an awful UX. The inverse is less likely to be true (because bugs and obvious flaws like long delays and unresponsive UIs can quickly degrade UX), but still possible.
I sincerely hope that Microsoft can turn the ship. They've got lots of really smart people and a lot of cool ideas.
Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t...
we can both play this game all day.
user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you must compromise between a system which is well-engineered and one that behaves in accordance with user expectation.
this is why OS X doesn't have full ASLR and DEP, because it can cause applications to start crashing at random because they were poorly written in a way that used to be invisible.
this is why UAC on Windows Vista is a terrible experience, because even trusted applications need to prompt the user to make sure they approve of them executing on an administrator token.
this is why our operating systems still have to reboot while applying security updates, because long-running services and the kernel have to be replaced and there's no good way to do it seamlessly yet.
UAC is, in principle, not at odds with equating good user experience with good engineering. It’s all about tradeoffs.
Right. There are ways to do it, but not any /good/ ones. Good here meaning "while still letting the software execute efficiently and without a ton of added complexity"
why does the UAC need to gray/black out all the display?
It's such a mess, especially when you have more than one monitor. Is there a technical reason or is it just UX?
And I disagree that you will always need to compromise between good engineering and good UX, for example you can certainly have ASLR and DEP with the same UX OS X currently has, they don't add any burden on the user.
Of course sometimes you need to compromise, but it's not everytime.
I know a fair few people at Microsoft, and elsewhere, and I've never seen evidence that the engineering talent distribution at Apple is really all that different from the talent distribution anywhere else. There are superstars and dolts in the expected proportions.
that said, Steve Jobs seems (at least from external appearances) to have far more thorough top-down control over the company's engineering efforts than Steve Ballmer does; the highest I ever see engineering efforts come down from is our division director.
I compare that to Apple, which seems to have a top-down vision, from which all project behaviours and priorities descend. Lion's adding support for auto-save? You'd better believe that implementing auto-save support into iWork is a top priority, regardless of what the iWork PM thinks about it. That said, Apple seems to rarely hire people who don't share the same vision, and with that comes a certain uniformity of direction that tends to reduce inter-project scuffles.
Also, I get the sense that if (for example) the project manager for iWork was causing unnecessary friction with other teams instead of working with them towards a common goal, he'd be replaced with someone else who's more of a team player.