My name isn't Bob (Bob is the dinosaur's name) but I was in charge of Y2K remediation for the legacy system I supported)...
Great! Thanks for posting that. True story:
My wife mentioned to me, circa 1999, that one of her friends who had been a stay-at-home-mom wanted to get back in the work force. But she was concerned because her skills were so outdated - DW said she used to do computer programming on old room-sized machines with something that was a pretty shade of blue, maybe "Cobalt"?
heh-heh, I said she will probably have no trouble finding a job to do Y2K work. DW actually (where was the tape recorder!) told me a week later I was 100% correct!
I recall, from my telco sales days:
Sales Manager: "The engineers have built 'this' - sell it.
Sales Reps: "The customers don't want 'this', they want 'that'.
Sales Manager: "The engineers have built 'this' - sell it.
At my Mega-Corp, marketing was kind of on both sides, getting input from customers to take to engineering, and marketing the product to the customer.
The pendulum swung between being engineering/tech focused ("this is cool tech, build it and they will come"), to being marketing focused ("they want it no thicker than 0.2435" - so build it that size or smaller, I don't know/care that standard components mean a limit of 0.2436" and that last 0.0002 inches will increase the cost by 40% and cut the reliability in half - that's your problem").
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." -- Steve Jobs
Very true, and I've heard that was the case with Iacocca and the Chrysler 'Mini-Van'. Though I do think Apple took it too far, and could have used/listened to some customer feedback (I could go on for hours about the 'Finder').
-ERD50