Steve Yegge’s post about Google’s platform strategy has been making the rounds lately, and buried in it is something very interesting:

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page.

Steve Jobs was also an infamous customer experience manager, involved with all Apple products to an intense level of detail.  He has his name on over 300 Apple patents.

It think it’s interesting, and not a coincidence at all, that Apple and Amazon are two of the most powerful companies in the Internet ecosystem.  In the end, it’s all about the user experience.

It helps when the “CEO” is also the “CUXO”, but it’s not the only way to do it.  But it’s hard when there’s not one person that owns the UX, with the authority, vision, drive, charter, energy, charisma, and respect to lead it, throughout the organization.  Committees don’t work.