[KuraFire]

"If Jonathan Ives submitted a design for Google Instant, and his design was better than the "obvious solutions", then it would test well. If a better solution tests badly then, by definition of the word "test", you're not testing it properly."

Innovative products rarely test well, overall. If you test it to a group of visionaries who are comfortable thinking outside the box, then yes, it'll test well. But if you test with a group of regular / casual computer users, non-techies and the like, many innovative or important design decisions may not test well.

Take, for example, USB. The technology came out and was sparsely added to new computers, but always in addition to COM and Parallel ports. Apple saw that USB was the future, so they made the iMac which—gasp!—only contained USB ports. No COM, no Parallel, just USB.

You think that decision would have tested well with users?

"I can't use my existing printer?! That's stupid!"

Except… it was this very decision that made USB successful in the market, because it forced all peripheral manufacturers to make USB devices if they wanted to sell to Mac customers (a large enough market to be worthwhile for virtually all of them).

And so, USB succeeded in the market. But it wouldn't have if Apple had used Google's test-driven approach, because that decision would have tested quite poorly.

[tyen]

Hang on, Apple also did the same with firewire and it died even though it was a technically better solution. Its error was it was expensive to manufacture a firewire device as it needed a hardware layer on the device side. USB didn't, so USB devices were cheaper and they won the war once USB 2 came out and the speed difference was negligible.

So not all Apple decisions work, like PC's over Macs. Apple lost that war as the open standard won.

And then sometimes it is the better design, like iPods and iPhones over their competition that wins.

My point is I'm not sure your argument holds in general, sometimes its this, sometimes its the other thing that works.