I recently was at the Microsoft R&D Campus at Hyderabad (India) and me and a UX designer interning at Microsoft were having a discussion with Kevin D'Souza, an evangelist for Live. The event of the day was Expression, and so was the topic we were discussing. This was just an informal discussion before the event. I was invited as an outside expert (imagine that!) and they wanted to know my opinion about Expression and UX and everything.
Suddenly the topic of designers and developers came up. I told Kevin that, in my opinion Microsoft will need to do some work to warm up to the designer community. Not because of competing technologies or anything - but because designers are a whole freakin' new species for MS to handle. Developers - despite their independent egos - know how to work together. Designers can be a bit cranky that way. And that's just ONE example of the whole deal. Kevin's interested to know more, so I give him an example - one I live with every day and night:
I tell him that when you tell a dev that you want an app that does this and this and this and talk to a web service at your extranet, he (and maybe his team) will find some paper or a whiteboard, throw around some ideas and decide which objects or libraries to create to get the job done. (I know its an over simplification, just bear with me)
Now, you tell the DESIGNER that you want an app that does this and this and this and talk to a web service at your extranet, he (quite possibly without a team) will find some paper or fire up Photoshop or even Visual Studio or ExprID itself and start designing the UI first and THEN think of the code.
As soon as I say this, the Microsoft intern goes "That's how you do it". And he wasn't being sarcastic or clever. He was honestly saying that.
Point made.