By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

So the wait is over and the iPhone does in fact live up to the hype. Calling is easy, text is easy, email is easy, my contacts and my music are up to date, my photos are beautiful, and the interface is outstanding. And for their part in getting it right, Apple will benefit richly. That's the good news.

But in these first heady days of post-iPhone euphoria, we owe it to ourselves to take a step back and ask the following:

Are Apple the only people on the planet who can design a product?

It seems quite clear that, at this point, the question shouldn't be how Apple manage to keep getting it so right, but how everyone else manages to keep getting it so wrong.

We know that getting it right means understanding our users. We know that getting it right means really thinking about user experience. We know that getting it right means focusing on the use cases that really, really matter.

And yet it's 2007 and our failure to distance ourselves from the complete and utter disregard, ca. 1957, for users and the experience of users is astonishing. User disregard has always been, and continues to be, the natural posture of both hardware and electronics engineering. It is hardware and electronics engineering, remember, that have made it a cryptic chore to so much as set the clock on your DVR. But software engineering?

We're supposed to know better. Alan Cooper made the point famously in The Inmates are Running the Asylum -- engineers neither know nor care what users want and so somebody had better step up to bat for the product experience, or else. That was in 1999. And at more than 200 pages you'd think that the we would've got it.

But no.

Why else would Microsoft have put the "XP" for "user experience" in WindowsXP if not in some hopeless effort to install in the product name what was missing in the box?

And why else would Nokia have published an entire book hyping their own mobile usability efforts if not to convince everyone -- themselves included -- that staring at 40 characters on a grey screen was a perfectly valid user experience, if only we were clever about it.

Well 40 characters on a grey screen wasn't what anybody wanted; it was what we settled for. 40 characters on a grey screen was an unsavory compromise brought on by, you guessed it, the same hardware and electronics engineers that still don't care what it feels like to use their stuff.

And 80 characters on a color screen with buttons that made thin cover of steering us to for-pay corporate download pits wasn't the answer either.

What we wanted was, first off, a screen. A big, beautiful screen that plays to our sense of dignity as adults and makes us feel like we're reading words on a page. And what we wanted next was for a phone that doesn't get itself into some inscrutable state when we receive a call, or choose to end one. And if weather and stocks and maps and browsing and mail and music can fit, then, sure, that would be fine too ... but only if it works.

And so I'll ask again: are Apple the only people on the planet that can design a product? Is every other company on the planet so beholden to either a failed tradition of hardware and electronics engineering or failed efforts at corporate branding that they can no longer see us, or our experiences, at all?

If this does, in fact, turn out to be the case, then companies everywhere can take solace in at least this -- with only one dependable example of product design available in the culture at the moment, there should be plenty of space for at least one other truly creative and forward-thinking team to shine ... if only they can get it right.

By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

Web 2.0 was worth it this year. Tons of talks and a tremendous number of booths on the floor. Plenty of new ideas.

Huge shout-out to Kelly Goto of gotomedia. Kelly kicked off the design track Sunday morning with "The 2.0 Iterative App". Topics included web / desktop mimicry, microformats, cuteness look-and-feel, user profiling (and its descendents), context profiling (and its descendents), the hybrid designer, focus groups (and how not to have them), and so on.

Perhaps most interesting of all are Kelly's thoughts on the coming of "placelessness" and what it means for the construction (or reconstruction) of the site / place / page metaphor we've built up in the commercial Web. There's a whole lot of thinking to be done here and I'm hoping that the discussion will broaden even further by next year's expo.

Kelly's got a phenomenal tack on all the core and emerging usability concepts and if anybody's out there looking for an inspiration for your usability or design teams, you might start by checking out Kelly's site (or even her book, which is something of a classic at this point). The real core of "The 2.0 Iterative App" covers the process integration of usability workflows and agile PM. So it might also be worth the time to download the slide set if you've got a PM or designers looking for ways to better the process.