[lkrubner]

This article seems ahistorical. It suffers from a lack of awareness regarding how far back some of these trends go. The inaccurate emphasis here is on something unheard of and new:

"Technical founders have already become prerequisites in the world of tech startups. Now get ready for the designer founder. The combination of this new duo is going to change the world of tech forever."

But this trend is not new for startups. 37 Signals has been preaching this for a long time now. I can not easily find the original blog post that I'm thinking of, but there is this:

"At 37signals, designers lead the teams. Each development team is made of up three people – two programmers and one designer. The designer also manages the project. In addition to designing the screens/elements, you’ll keep the team focused and make calls about what’s important."

http://37signals.com/svn/design?n=25

But I recall quotes on the 37 Signals blog from as early as 2004 where they were essentially saying the same thing. Since they first began talking about Basecamp, they have talked about this style of development. This is not new.

[anigbrowl]

Back in the 90s I switched from Yahoo to Google because of the clean uncluttered look as much as the quality of the search results. And while UI guidelines have always been enforced fairly rigidly on Apple's platform, the quality and consistency of icons, toolbars, etc. on windows applications have always been a good proxy for the reliability and utility of the underlying code. ANSI or command-line software has a strong design element; Norton Utilities, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were winners in their respective markets because they had robust visual grammars, and even a batch file or shell script needs some design to the extent that it's user-facing.

Recently I've been using a terminal to some ancient AS/400 database to look up property records at my local city hall, and it's an excellent reminder of how even the simplest task can become completely user-hostile if design is overlooked.

[adambyrtek]

As early as 2004? Twenty years before that Wozniak and Jobs created an archetypal duo of technical and design co-founders.

[herval]

the fact that a specific company did it in the past doesn't make it a trend back then... plus, trends are not necessarily "new things"