Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
The astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world---and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, it is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder---and rebirth---of man's spirit.
Steven Johnson: Emergence.
The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software.
Scott A. Shane: Finding Fertile Ground
Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures
Antony Flew: How to Think Straight
An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
Murray N. Rothbard: Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Scholars Edition)
William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma
John von Neumann, game theory, and the puzzle of the bomb.
Michael A. Cusumano: The Business of Software.
Makes for in-depth, very informative tech start-up reading about the software industry.
David Deutsch: The Fabric of Reality
A startingly integrated, rational and optimistic world view that combines four strands: quantum physics and the theories of knowledge, computation and evolution.
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead
The story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a woman who struggles to defeat him.
I just revisited their site and, browsing a screenshots section, encountered a typical example of what I'd like to call the GUI fallacy. Click the screenshot on the right for an example of what I mean. Somebody has obviously taken great care to give their application a "modern, fresh user interface". Maybe some manager demanded it as a "must-have" in "our competitive market", who knows. One can well imagine how a former version of the product may have looked typically gray and cluttered with information overload. Especially in the business market, you often have manager selling to managers, depending on those managers sometimes with decisions that annoy and demotivate the producers (developers) or the end users (some secretary?) or worse, both.
So now we have a "fresh, modern interface", that box is ticked, maybe they looked to iTunes or something for inspiration, done. But will it be any more pleasant to use? From the looks of it, I doubt it. (I will grant that judging a book from its covers is a risky business, but let me stress this: the customers, or rather, those who will have to use the system, do care; it highly influences their evaluation of a product as Ian Landsman so aptly pointed out.)
So merely judging from the screenshot, it seems to me that the graphics are all shiny, but the the program must be a pain to use. User interface without usability, that's what I call the GUI fallacy. "Just modernize the looks a bit, and we're done."
Who designs such interfaces? Who wants to work with that? People will work with that, no doubt: they have to, once they bought the product. But it is just a matter of time for a more attractive opportunity to materialize just right when they are ready to switch. That kind of GUI really makes it easy for its users to switch (ignoring the general hesitation of most to switch, especially when the financial stakes are high, which is probably the reason why badly designed applications are still so widespread).
But don't count on it.