[mrxd]

One way to say that with less speculating about motives is that entrepreneurial designers do exist, but they go into art, not business.

Another point I'd make is about disruptive business models. According to Clay Christensen, it's about creating a product that's cheaper and offers a better value than incumbents. In many cases, competitors are providing too much performance, and disruptive businesses offer less performance for much less money. The designer mentality tends to see problems as ugliness, and solutions as beauty, but this doesn't fit into the disruptive innovation model. To a designer, disruptive innovation looks like taking something beautiful and replacing it with an ugly knockoff–the opposite of what they want to do!

This isn't really exclusive to designers. Lots of programmers are the same way, they love elegance and beauty in their code and hate dirty hacks and kludges.

[rwhitman]

Thats a really good point. Its a hard lesson for any type of craftsman to understand that beauty doesn't always translate to a successful business