Visual Studio Magazine has an interview with Alan Cooper. An excellent read, Alan talks about the differences between engineers vs. craftsmen, the role of software architects, XP vs. RUP, and his opinions of the .NET platform. Highly quotable:

• The role of architects: "Architects synthesize people, purpose, and technology. If you just take people and technology, you have art—entertainment. If you just take technology and purpose, it's engineering. And people and purpose without technology is psychology."
• On complexity & components: "Software construction has often resembled digging the Panama Canal with a teaspoon. You can make the walls of the canal perfectly straight, but it takes forever."
• How .NET provides portability: "... by providing cleavage planes. It's like cutting a diamond. You can't just cut one; you search for the natural cleavage planes in the diamond's crystalline structure. Likewise, you have to find the cleavage planes in the software and break it in two. Those cleavage planes, of course, are APIs and the CLR."
• On competition: "A Microsoft API such as the CLR allows an opening for other language vendors, as does offering Web services through XML. It means the days of getting all your services from one vendor—or even a single app—are numbered."

[Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

I haven't read the interview completely but I do have a problem with the last quote especially. Why do smart people keep saying XML & WS will save us from vendors? Some people say XML is human readable text that's parsable by so many tools, etc, etc. It's trivial to put binary content in XML. Some say XMLs platform independent. XML as text is still text and text data are platform dependent. As for WS, isn't the existence and necessity of WS-I enough proof that interoperability doesn't exist?