Bruce Sterling and Dave Winer disagree on the appropriate respect users deserve in software decisions.

Bruce:

It just amazes me how often people who know absolutely nothing about code want to tell software people their business. "Why don't they just," that's the standard phraseology. "Why don't they just" code-up something-or-other. Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the living shit out of those people.

That's like people whose fingers are covered with diamonds complaining about the easy lives of diamond miners.

—Bruce Sterling, "A Contrarian View of Open Source" [via Joi Ito]

Dave:

Only when you concentrate geeks in one place can you have the illusion that they're at the center of the universe. They need to believe this for some reason, even though it's not going to make the mortgage payments or put the kids through college, or even create new formats and protocols. For all that you need users -- customers, with money, who will pay for the fun (and you must include them in the fun). "

—Dave Winer, "It's not just about geeks anymore"

I'm with Dave here. As technologists, we're not like diamond miners. We actually have good lives. What we need is a good standard to meet, in order to make software that really serves the planet instead of merely moving things around. Diamonds are, more or less, diamonds. Software can be shaped in any number of ways which have a real impact on its users' quality of life. But the division of labor, and the perverse mindset of any working programmer, is such that programmers usually don't know how people are using their software, or how it could be better.