[mnicole]

> At the beginning stages, great design won't determine the success of the product.

People hear 'design' and just think it is just the prettification of a product and not the actual usability and utter simplification of it. Maybe it's because there are so many designers that focus on gradients and drop-shadows anymore instead of the what and why, but design is imperative to the success of a company. Even though PG's point was that it doesn't matter (if I understood it correctly?), Google's minimalistic homepage compared to other search companies' sites in 1998 (bold colors, links everywhere, multiple functions/offshoots of the site) is part of what made it so popular; it did what it said on the tin and it made sense doing it.