Every year I enjoy writing a post with my predictions for the next year.  It's a nice way to empty the old thoughts from my brains so there's room for new ones.  Plus I leave a trail of blog posts so I can see how my thoughts change from year to year.

In retrospect I've realized that each year tends to have a theme or two, and that the hardest part about making accurate predictions for a given year is identifying the themes that will drive it.

In 2007 the driving themes were social networking and online entertainment.  In 2008 the themes were distributed and mobile communication, with a dash of cloud computing sprinkled on top.

The theme for 2009 is almost absurdly easy to identify:  the economy.  If you thought 2008 was about the economy, just wait for 2009.  You truly ain't seen nothin' yet.  A deflationary black hole is sucking all of the money out of the economy and we haven't even seen the impact yet.

Every time I hear somebody talk about how the market has bottomed and the economy is starting to improve I mentally picture them in this position:

So if we're talking about the economy and you see me chuckle, you know why.

Hope is a great mindset to have and a fantastic slogan for winning Presidential campaigns apparently, but it is not such a great lens to view reality thru when you're trying to make money.

Nova Spivack from Twine wrote an interesting post over at Read/WriteWeb about the future of the desktop which I'd like to comment on.  It really ties in nicely with what I've been thinking about recently around user interfaces, especially since any hardware innovations will necessarily involve an ACTUAL operating system.

I agree 100% with Nova when he says that everything is moving to the cloud.  SmugMug lets me store my high-res photos in my own Amazon S3 store, Jungle Disk lets me back up everything else to the cloud.  Storage is, for me, a monthly utility expense (and last month it only cost me $3.18, so for me this is much cheaper than hard drive space, backup, backup tapes, tracking everything, and worrying).

The Financial Times has an interesting article about how Web 2.0 startups have so far managed to generate a lot of buzz and behavior changes, but thus far very little in the way of actual cash.  This has been a constant wonderment to me for a long time, as it seems that people are looking for cool things and assuming it'll make money somehow down the road.  Like Twitter.

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

Don't get me wrong, I love many of the sites, and several of them I would actually pay money for if they asked.  But others I suspect will either be abandoned completely or scaled way the hell down.  Twitter is cool and all, but it really should be either open source or it should be somebody taking donations to do it.  Eh, I know I'm probably the only who thinks this, but it just doesn't add much value to me--it's more a diversion than anything.  (I'd be interested to hear if anyone out there would actually be willing to pay for Twitter?)  Maybe they could actually charge people to use it now that it has this many users, but I'd bet half their users would leave instantly. 

Advertising is getting to be pointless, it's so in your face on every Web site that people are numb to it.  It's also the lazy way out, where you add so little value to your users that the only way you can conceive to get money out of the interaction is to take advantage of the fact that they won't walk away from you.  It's like a street performer who juggles advertisements or something.

“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.

Agreed.  With the economy screeching to a halt, these companies will need to start making real money, real fast.  The VC money will dry up.  They must either produce real value and get paid for it or take their ball and go home.  It will be interesting to see if the last few years are later seen as one big industry-wide "try before you buy" period.

(Sorry, I found that hilarious.  I don't mean to demean your favorite buzzword ;)  Found via Giles Bowkett, so go yell at him if you're offended :)

The Web is still in its infancy.  It sounds like an absurd claim, except that the person making it is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web in the first place.  I happen to agree with him.

The first incarnation of the Web changed the world, and what we call "Web 2.0" was only an incremental improvement on that.  It made the baby-Web usable for normal people.

I've had the pleasure of speaking with Tim on a few occasions and he is patiently waiting for everyone to get over the love-fest with what they currently know as the Web so we can focus on moving things forward and innovating again.

The end-game here, and what Tim has had in mind from the beginning, amounts to a completely new paradigm in software.  It's about creating an Internet-wide mesh of data which a given software application can use as easily as its own database. 

Fortunately, the Web is hurtling towards adolescence.  SPARQL is the glue that makes this global data mesh usable, and it was just ratified this year.  The Web's voice just cracked.

While advances like service-oriented architecture were steps in the right direction, they were still just an incremental improvement over client-server based architectures.  And as useful as that is, I think an unfortunate side-effect is that an entire generation of programmers was raised with their thinking firmly locked in the old paradigm.  I've tried to evangelize the new paradigm myself, and I can attest that it's like trying to convince people that man can actually fly using airplanes while they turn around and go back to work on pimping out their horse and buggy.

Tim's vision of the Web is the ultimate logical evolution of Web technology.  Fortunately there are some recent developments that indicate that the Web has hit a growth spurt and we may soon see another explosion of innovation based on the Next-Generation Web.

In Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, he describes a certain class of people as “connectors”.  They’re people who know everyone, and thus are capable of spreading information and ideas quickly.  Social networks hint at leveraging these personal connections in digital form, but so far have failed to do much with it.

LinkedIn is the only application I’ve seen that really explores this idea from a social networking perspective.  Your network, the number of people you have access to, grows exponentially with each relationship you add.  And if you connect with one of those "connectors" your network will grow even faster (because you become connected to the people they know).

While it makes for an interesting interface and a fun way to explore social connections, LinkedIn--and all the other social networks I've seen--really don't do much with this connection data.  You can ask your network a question or see who’s hiring in your network, but it’s mostly just for ego gratification.

OpenID and FOAF change all that.  All of a sudden people become ACTUAL connectors, connecting together pools of meaningful, rich data that applications can use. 

Two applications which speak OpenID and FOAF all of a sudden have a common data element, a JOIN in SQL-speak.  It's possible because OpenID turns a person into a URI, which naturally lends itself to be used in FOAF.  FOAF is just a list of people, after all.

This is really cool stuff.  It’s automatic data integration across the Internet, using people as connectors. 

This is reason why Kingsley and a bunch of other people like to call the "Semantic Web" the "Linked Data Web".  Potayto-potato, it's all the same to me.  It’s cool, though.  It lets an application traverse the social graph to do its thing instead of being confined to its own network.  It allows an application on one network to access Person C’s data, on another network, by going from Person A to Person B to Person C, and then to their data.

I thought (still think) this was really cool when I finally understood it, and I don’t think many people have an appreciation for the opportunities this opens up.  Although, with the recent traction OpenID has been getting I think it's only a matter of time.

P.S.  This data integration using humans as connectors won't work via proprietary API's or microformats, by the way, because the enabling technology for this is SPARQL, which requires RDF to work its mojo.  Exposing proprietary API's means that you have to custom duct-tape together the data using middleware.

I admit it… I thought I got the semantic Web before, but I didn’t really.  I really got it just recently.

People have noticed that I haven’t blogged much (well, really not at all) for the past week. That's partly because I’ve been under some pretty tight deadlines at work lately, but also because I’ve also been feverishly working to fully grasp the semantic Web—not an easy task, for me at least.

Now that I’ve emerged on the other side of that process, the semantic Web seems like a pretty uncomplicated concept.  But boy, let me tell you, trying to wrap my brain around it was quite a challenge. I always knew what it was about from a high level—RDF, triples, vocabularies and all of that. I could just never mentally translate those ideas into solutions for the problems I was working on. And it’s interesting, because I can plainly see the vision now and, more importantly, how it fits into real-world problems.  I also see why it has been utterly failing at gaining any kind of traction outside of academia.

My little self-education process started when Kingsley Idehen invited me to a semantic Web get-together at MIT. We had emailed each other a few times before as a result of him finding my blog, and some posts I wrote about a year back about what is now being called data portability and distributed social networks. Since I’m now living in the Boston area, he invited me to MIT to meet in person and to get a sense of what the semantic Web ideas are truly about. The meeting was interesting, but I still came away unimpressed.

I kept in contact with Kingsley, peppering him with rapid-fire questions about semantic Web technology, technical details, and how it applies to my real-world problems, and he patiently answered all of my questions.  Thanks for the tutoring there man, appreciate it ;)  I thought I was pretty forward-thinking for writing about things like data portability and distributed social networks a year or two before they became hot stuff, but I now have to tip my hat to Kingsley and a few select members of the Semantic Web crowd and admit that they had this problem figured out back when I was still in college.

Now that I understand it, I realize that the semantic Web is some very, very cool stuff. It includes many of the ideas that I’ve been writing about for a long time without fully realizing that they were encapsulated by semantic Web ideas. Many of the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while—data portability, being able to use objects distributed across the Web, global object identifiers, distributing software across networks, and using converged online identities—are achievable by the semantic Web, and pretty much all of the details have already been worked out. It was an epiphany for me when I realized this, and I have to say I’m extremely happy about it because I had been thinking that all of this was a new trail that had to be blazed. Turns out, all the heavy lifting has already been done, it’s just never really been used much.

I think the biggest problem the semantic Web is facing is the fact that most of the people who understand it come primarily from academia. Academia, to me, is plagued with a disease that I myself have suffered from my entire life—that is, the urge to build something just because it’s cool technologically, not because it’s useful in the real world. While something I built might impress the hell out of other computer geeks, and I’d be extremely proud of it, other people would look at it with mild interest and then quickly move on to something else, because they couldn’t see the value in it. I’d have to say that I owe a lot to the experience of building Latigent and to my former business partner Chris Crosby for helping me overcome that handicap. Having to build something with resale value in order to pay the bills this month has a way of grounding you in reality.  Having somebody else depending on you to build something of resale value, and remind you of that constantly, helps even more :)   I’d highly recommend every geek who thinks he’s hot stuff work closely with a sales-oriented person for a period of time if you really have a desire to make any money.

Besides suffering from being sold by people who don't really understand the real-world problems that it could fix, the semantic Web is plagued by a layer of jargon and terms that takes a significant investment of time to work through. While I understand that it’s important to clearly define what you’re talking about, people who are pushing the semantic Web are generally not very good at dumbing it down enough so that it’s easily palatable. It took me a good week of pretty focused research and having somebody there to bounce questions off of before I really got it--and I like to think that I'm a pretty technical guy. Now that I get it, I’m sure that there’s a better way to package these concepts so that more people understand how they relate to the problems they’re facing. The straightforward concepts that underlie the idea of the semantic Web are so obfuscated by the terminology and the W3C standards that come up when you google them that the mental barrier to entry is just way too high right now. The fact is, people will not adopt semantic Web ideas until semantic Web ideas are the ones that get returned when they search for a solution to their problem. In order to get to that point a radical change in the way these concepts are sold is needed.  That, and people like Kingsley, Danny Ayers, Tim Berners-Lee and others who are out there tirelessly promoting it as a real-world solution to real-world problems.

Kingsley has started calling the semantic Web the Linked Data Web, which is definitely a good step towards packing the idea in a more attractive way. I would personally prefer something more closely related to living, breathing objects (not literally, but in the sense that they can actually do things besides just being queried for data). I think that the semantic Web crowd is a little too focused on the data output side of things—all of the excitement seems to be around querying data, finding data, building a better Google, etc. That’s cool and all, but it seems to me that the real killer application for these ideas is allowing nodes on the Internet to find and then actually communicate with each other.  That key point almost seems lost in the shuffle to me. What is called the semantic Web today, with a nice healthy injection of service-oriented architecture, is going to be a revolution in computing. That's the bit that excites me—enabling an Internet where any node can communicate and interact with any other node on the network.

I'm looking forward to continuing to learn more about the details that have been painstakingly worked out over the years on the semantic Web, and at some point actually getting an opportunity to put them into practice.  I now have no doubt that the next earth-shattering applications, the revolutions in the way we use computers and the Internet, are going to spring from this movement, and I'm pretty excited about that.  All it needs is a little sex appeal and it'll catch on like wildfire.

One of my predictions for 2008 was that "Privacy and personal data ownership will be a critical issue for Web-based businesses."  Well, that didn't take too long.

Robert Scoble opened a can of worms today by testing a new Plaxo feature that scraped his contact list out of his FaceBook profile and importing it into Plaxo (and by doing so synchronizing his Outlook contact list, a pretty reasonable use of his FaceBook friend list if you ask me).  FaceBook banned him for using an automated script to suck out his contact data, and this has generated a flurry of blog posts debating who actually owns your contact data in a social network.

My kneejerk reaction is "duh".  You, obviously, own your contact list data.  However, there seems to be some controversy over whether FaceBook has a duty to "protect" its users' data from being scraped out by nefarious software.  The people making this argument no doubt also feel that the government needs to protect you from spending your money unwisely by taking it from you and spending it on $900 toilet seats.  This is a dumb argument.  If you establish a relationship with someone online, you are granting them some level of access to you.  The only logical reason for FaceBook NOT to want you to have access to your contact list is because... drumroll please... it makes your data portable.  It frees you to take your business elsewhere, and you can leave FaceBook unless it provides some kind of value proposition.  Poor FaceBook.  Is anyone else getting flashbacks to the MP3/RIAA/DRM controversy here or is it just me?

Anyway, I can now throw my full weight behind that prediction and say with some degree of certainty that 2008 will DEFINITELY be the year where you start to see personal data ownership and distributed social networks.  Efforts like dataportability.org and atmy.Name are going to force the issue whether sites like FaceBook and MySpace like it or not.  It's great to see this debate hit the mainstream, it's about time.  Plus, it helps my prediction success ration :)

Chrismas is over, and it's officially 2008.  Wow, this was really a fast one for me.  Between getting married, selling Latigent to Cisco, moving to Boston, and getting acclimated to life at Cisco, I barely time to stop and breath.  But I had a couple of days to relax and collect my thoughts over Christmas and, as I like to do every year, I've put together a list of my predictions for 2008.  So, without further ado, my predictions for 2008:

1. The recession (that we are already in the beginning stages of if you look at the data instead of listening to the pump monkeys on CNBC) will make 2008 a slow and cautious year.  Budgets will shrink and new projects will be put on standby as the US and world economies slow as a result of the global credit market going into further gridlock.
2. After a horrific year in 2007 the dollar will rebound a bit, making outsourcing a hot ticket item once again (as it gets cheaper).  This will happen because the rest of the world will get hit even harder than we will by the recession.  US companies that are counting on international business to prop up their bottom lines will be severely disappointed as exports become more expensive to foreign customers and international budgets shrink as well.  Many (more) CEO’s will lose their jobs.
3. On the bright side, the Internet’s effect on politics will be one of the biggest stories of the year.  If you thought Howard Dean was an interesting story because of the way he used the Internet to coordinate and attract support, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Ron Paul’s supporters have coordinated themselves to the tune of over $6 million in 24 hours, and this will continue to be an interesting story to watch throughout the presidential race.  The floodgates are open and Old Media is no longer the gatekeeper.
4. Google will attempt to integrate its Orkut social network into its iGoogle/Google Docs businesses.  Last year I predicted that MySpace would become un-cool and Orkut would take its place.  Well, I was right on half of that--in 2007 FaceBook became the new hip online hangout, but Orkut only gained popularity overseas.  Google recently announced that they’re fleshing out the profile aspect of their Google accounts, and it only makes sense to me that they will eventually integrate their Orkut social network with their Google accounts/iGoogle/Google Docs products.
5. Online identity will become a prominent issue, and OpenID will benefit.  Will 2008 be the year when we see the first high-profile online identity theft?  I don’t know, but I know that it will happen sometime soon.  As soon as someone famous loses control of their online identity you will see this become a VERY hot issue.  It may be the first time you see a search engine optimization specialist interviewed on the evening news :)
6. FaceBook will *start* to lose market share to emerging distributed social networks that will be born in 2008.  2007 was the year of FaceBook, primarily because they started opening up their platform and this created a flood of interesting applications.  But there’s only so far a fundamentally closed system can open up before it risks letting outsiders cannibalize its revenue stream.  I think FaceBook has already reached that point, and that opens up the door for more open systems to come in and gain market share.  OpenSocial is a step in the right direction, and the work being done around personal data portability is only going accelerate this shift.
7. Privacy and personal data ownership will be a critical issue for Web-based businesses.  As businesses start hitting the limit of what a strict advertising-based revenue model will allow (see above), they will test the limits of their users’ patience by mining user data and selling that data.  They will push and push until they find the line that they cannot cross.  FaceBook Beacon was just the first example of this phenomenon.  Either businesses will hold their users’ interests above all else, including profit, or they will slowly compromise their users in order to extract more money from them.  If history is any indication—and it usually is—we can expect them to compromise their users’ privacy.  This will bring the first users to distributed social networks.
8. Google will attempt to diversify its revenue streams.  You can already see this beginning with Google’s push into content with its Google Knol product.  Right now Google is a one-trick pony—it makes revenue from advertising.  It wants more, obviously, such as ALL of the advertising revenue on the content side.  In order to justify its insane stock valuation it will need to come up with a ways to collect a LOT more revenue.  The trick here is going to be coming up with new revenue streams that don’t cannibalize and piss off the ecosystem that has developed around it.  If Google starts competing with the content producers, content producers will start loving and promoting somebody else.  Once that happens, Google is no longer the unquestioned King of Search--content producers will start optimizing their sites for more profitable search engines, and the monopoly will start to crumble.
9. Companies with no sustainable long-term revenue streams (ie, companies whose main attraction is becoming commoditized and turned into features on other sites) will be sold while they can still get big money for them (they had better move fast, before belts start tightening).  This includes Twitter and Digg.  Rupert Murdoch may be tempted to add to his collection of terminally ill businesses (see:  MySpace, Wall Street Journal)
10. Mobile applications will become increasingly Web-based, perhaps hooking into OpenSocial-type API’s provided on the client device to offer a more seamless experience.  The iPhone and iPod Touch (one of the predictions I hit on last year) really opened the floodgates here as they’ve shown that Web applications can actually be usable on a mobile device.  WAP, R.I.P.
11. Cloud/grid computing will continue to develop and gain market share.  If Amazon can flesh out its SimpleDB service to be a bit more relational and analytics friendly it could put a serious dent in the small business database server market.  Experience with utility computing will be one of the hottest resume bullet points of 2008 (and every year thereafter).
12. You will see more content producers choosing to bypass distribution channels and take their products directly to the consumers.  I predicted last year that the NFL network would start doing this, and they have.  They’re now showing exclusive games on their network, and also streaming games off of their Web site.  Look for more high-profile consumer entertainment products to follow suit as trailblazers like the NFL Network show that you don’t need an expensive distribution channel to make money.

That’s it for this year--I feel pretty good about these predictions actually coming to fruition in 2008.  Whatever happens, it should be an incredibly interesting year, it feels like we’re on the cusp of some revolutionary new developments in the personal online space in particular.  As long as the recession doesn’t derail everything, that is :)

On the resolution side of things, I started a low-carb diet today to drop the Christmas poundage, I'm picking up last year's resolution to become ambidextrous, and I'm also resolving to blog more frequently.  Until Christmas I was of the impression that 2008 couldn't POSSIBLY be as eventful for me as 2007, until we found out at my wife Jessica is pregnant, so there goes that idea.  But, I'm still shooting for a good success ratio!

I love Amazon’s Web services.  They are game-changing.  EC2 lets you scale the number of servers you’re running infinitely at a moment’s notice, and S3 gives you an infinite amount of storage space.  No systems administrators to pay, no complex infrastructure to maintain, upfront cost to swallow.  Just gobs of cheap scalability. 

I’ve looked into using them before, and the ONE thing that seemed like a glaring hole in their arsenal was the lack of a way to run a database on it.  The problem is that EC2 virtual machines lose all their memory when you reboot them, so you can’t run a database on them.  And there’s no way to use an EC2 instance to store the data, it’s not a filesystem that any database engine recognizes.  So we had this awesome scalable firepower and awesome scalable storage, but no way to really hook them together.

Amazon's new SimpleDB service addresses that.  Now you can run your entire application in the cloud.  This is huge.  It’s not a relational database system, so you can’t do number crunching or analysis on it, but it’s PERFECT for CRUD operations (Create Read Update Delete).  Any transactional application is capable of running on this platform.

Let’s see what this does to an IT budget:

• Eliminates CapEx costs (no servers or datacenters to buy)
• Eliminates systems administrators (no machines to administer)
• Eliminates database administrators (it automatically takes care of storage and indexing for you)
• Eliminates capacity problems (no need to estimate and budget for potential traffic, you just pay for what you use—if your bill is too high you just kick users off)

And, as a result of this, SimpleDB is a startup’s best friend.  This makes bootstrapping a startup a million times cheaper and easier than it was previously—you only have to pay as your user base grows.  Which SHOULD cover your costs, or you probably have a problem with your business model :)

If you’re a system administrator or a DBA, it might be a wise career choice to make yourself familiar with these technologies.  The sheer financial sensibility makes it inevitable that small-to-medium businesses will be interested in running on this platform.  In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if completely new software applications are built on it and sold as traditional premise-based software, but run in the cloud.

Very cool stuff, I can’t wait to play with it.  I read thru the documentation and it looks pretty simple, but I'm currently waiting on Amazon to enable my account.

UPDATE:  It's not all gravy--as with anything, there are challenges and considerations to working with this kind of architecture.  I found a good list outlining the pros and cons here.

BTW Want to know something else that’s game-changing?  Ron Paul raised $6million yesterday—in 24 hours—beating John Kerry’s old record of 5.something (on the day he accepted the nomination)—totally grassroots—with no help from the campaign.  This is a truly incredible, science-fiction type event in politics.

Have you ever heard anyone debate the merits of software sexiness and user-friendliness?  I'd always thought they were virtues on par with showering daily and being nice to your mother, but apparently I was mistaken.  I got a good chuckle out of a debate going on recently about whether enterprise software should be sexy and easy to use or not.  You don't get to poke fun at people arguing for a flat earth or horse-drawn carriages too often, so I just can't resist the urge to join in the fun.

It all started with Bill Gates complaining that bloggers don't write about enterprise software often, instead focusing on consumer software.  Robert Scoble correctly pointed out that enterprise software is generally unsexy and therefore people just aren't that interested in it.  I would add that it's generally not very innovative either.  Innovation tends to flow from consumer software to business software, not vice versa.

So Scoble asks what we can do to make enterprise software sexier.  In response to the question, which any enterprise software company which values self-preservation should be asking itself anyways, ZDNet's Michael Krigsman responds with a sharp "Scoble’s question is irrelevant and meaningless."  We should all be thankful Krigsman is not a school teacher.  Anyway, he goes on to state:

"Robert Scoble misses this point: unlike consumer software, where sex appeal is critical to attracting a commercially-viable audience, enterprise software has a different set of goals."

I'll save you the trouble of reading the post and tell you that his point is that enterprise software is to be stable, above all else, sacrificing the user if need be.  While I can see his point, this doesn't negate the fact that humans actually have to use it, and so if customer satisfaction is a goal (I know it's a HUGE one at Cisco), your software had better be pleasant to use.  And if you actually want to sell MORE software, your software had better have some sex appeal.  This is 2007, Mike--Apple and Web 2.0 are kind of big deals these days.  People like their iPods.  We were laser-focused on the user experience at Latigent, and it's a big reason why we were so successful.

So then Nick Carr, always a good read, chimed in and correctly pointed out that design and functionality are NOT mutually exclusive goals.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.  But Krigman, champion of green-screen and mainframe applications everywhere, is back on the scene to accuse Nick Carr of living in Fantasyland (I'll bet Mike's a hit at parties), saying that priorities, legacy support requirements, product cycle times, and technology limitations prevent enterprise software from being friendly.

And then it gets really funny, as people involved in developing (presumably ugly) enterprise software jump to Mike's defense:

• "it's just a matter of how you look at it, as Vinnie and Anshu say "beauty and sexiness is in the eye of the beholder" and you know what I too am damn proud to be lumped into this one." - Craig Cmehill
• "Yes, consumers get turned on looking at a map overlayed with restaurant locations but my enterprise customers want to see real value." - Anshu Sharma
• "You see, many average joes like Scoble are drawing a long-term assumption, and that is that enterprise software is going to converge with where consumer software is right now and where it is going." - Jevon MacDonald  (Apologies to Jevon, he pointed out that he wasn't actually agreeing with Mike, and after re-reading his post I have to agree.)

I think what we have here is a case of people thinking inside the box.  Wrapped in foam, surrounded by packing peanuts, with no chance of any exposure to the world outside their bubble.  I get the sense that these guys have built enterprise software before, and they didn't get the best feedback on it from end-users, and are a tad defensive.  You see, the key here is:

End-users are also consumers

It all comes down to priorities.  If you make user experience a PRIORITY, and spend some time actually WORKING ON IT, and THINKING ABOUT IT, it will probably turn out OK.  If you let programmers design the interface, it will just make sense to the programmer.  And most programmers are not the most aesthetically-oriented guys.  Being a programmer myself, I learned that a long time ago.  If I just run off and build something that makes sense to me, there is absolutely NO guarantee that it will make sense to anyone else.  In fact it probably won't.  I've learned to live with it.

But fixing that is anything that requires focus groups and design gurus to implement, either.  All you really need is good communication between the people building the system and <gasp> the sales department.  You know, the people who are going to show the product off to the customers who buy it.  They generally have their fingers on the pulse of the people they're selling to, and they're usually not too technically inclined (which is a GOOD thing when you're talking about designing interfaces).  If I scribble a mockup of a screen on a whiteboard and their eyes glaze over, I know that I'd better rethink that screen or be prepared to A) document it well B) train people on it and C) hear complaints about it for years.  It's probably easier just to erase it and try something else.  Better yet, get some key customers involved.  That way you'll know that you have at least ONE customer happy with the end result.

It's amazing to see how much effort some people will go to in order to defend something that obviously can't be defended.  A little internal communication would go a long way in preventing these types of situations.