[wooky]

I started writing this before seeing other comments but I guess I'll finish it - Design is much more of a case-by-case issue than you seem to be making it, and in many cases it's definitely just as important as the engineering.

Going with your icing on the cake analogy, design isn't just the icing, but arguably the plate and utensil you're given to eat the cake. You could bake a top-notch cake, but if you're given a piece of paper and a hair curler as utensils, you'll have quite the shitter of a cake-eating experience.

What I mean/what I'm sure you've heard before/what design school students pay $160k in tuition to learn is that the purpose of design isn't its artistic aspects of making something pretty, it's meant more to facilitate the process of using a product.

And not to be an ass, but I'd say all three of your examples are shit, design was a huge driving factor in each of their success. Google's one bar/one button was a stark contrast to Yahoo trying to corral the entire internet onto their homepage. Facebook's design/UI might look shit in retrospect, but that uniform layout was definitely the primary reason for the mass migration from MySpace's load time hell of profiles littered with clipart and whiny post-punk/emo set to autoplay. Microsoft has made some of the ugliest shit known to mankind, but its core product is literally named after its design, giving users "Windows" so they can spend less time fucking everything up in DOS.

In regards to your edit, though, I definitely agree. So much of the design process can end up being determined at the engineer or executive level to the point where evaluating the design team to gauge a company's health is just identifying the turd polishers. And "design team morale" is such a god damn stupid and difficult thing to evaluate since it might be the result of any number of misleading or erroneous factors ranging from the soda machine running out of Pepsi to the team itself being a tight-knit group of lazy incompetents who interview well.