Great article:

Exhibit 1 for this argument: Apple. In the better, faster, cheaper era of the engineer, Apple version 1.0 fell to the brink of irrelevance. …  Steve Jobs  (full disclosure: his picture is on my wall of heroes) decided to compete using a different rule set. He pulled Apple out of the era of the engineer and into the era of marketing. Today the iPhone has set the standard for what a cell phone should be. But by the standards of better, faster cheaper, the iPhone is pretty terrible. It doesn't have the fastest processor or the most memory or the highest display resolution. Yet it's the phone I want. Why? Because Apple has developed a core competency of customer understanding.

In the coming decades, success will be defined by the ability to understand the complex problems that customers face, and the ability to solve these problems elegantly.

Someday a kid will say, “When I grow up, I want to be a user experience expert.” When that happens, we all should be proud.