“It is a tragedy that something as powerful and wonderful as personal computing should be in the hands of a rapacious businessman like Bill Gates rather than a creative individual. Gates has sold the world the idea that he’s a geek and he’s not. I don’t think he’s written a line of creative code in his life. This is a man who, in the early ‘90s, said he saw no future in the Internet. Gates is an absolutely rapacious, brilliant businessman and like all of them since Rockefeller he has anti-competitive instincts and fundamentally terrible taste. If you have a monopoly of personal computing, as he has, then it is unforgivable to design something so… bad. So badly designed, shoddy at every level, the icons and the interface are achingly inadequate, It’s without thought, without care, without love, without passion, without emotion, and that is unforgivable.

The genius of Jonathan Ive, who designed the iMac and the iPod and all the other things that people love so much, is that he understands there’s nothing wrong with having an emotional view on these things you use every day. Beauty is not an added extra, it’s fundamental.”

Stephen Fry in Word, October 2005.