> For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.

Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off