"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not."
I would like to know as well. I agree it's not "sexy" or "wow" but it communicates what it's meant to. This is like any graph my college professors made - they did their job.
The fonts are all off. Looks as though antialiasing is turned off, and the kerning is all wonky. It's also inconsistent -- look at the spacing between the top of the boxes and the headers.
https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611