Quote from: tonygal on July 25, 2011, 05:37:53 PM

And we all know what happened next. Betamax entusiasts were left talking to themselves about the great benefits of their tehnology.

Here is another comparison. Linux users swear up and down about how great of an operating system it is. Mac users too. But what kind of market share do they get?

The issue being, we're dealing with highly technical products (Linux, Bitcoins, Video recording technology). Rather than in the product itself, some blame lies in the developers.

Developers of those technologies are usually very skilled in their own area of work, some perhaps nearing genius rather than being 'ordinary workers' but the communities are generally (note: not always) socially inept. You could compare them to a collective mind of autists or aspergers.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is known to continuously bring up this issue on the Linux mailing list because he gets annoyed by completely introverted and shut-in people who pay zero attention and regularly ignore the common usability of the code they write, rather only focusing on the 'function' which even an experienced programmer might have a hard time understanding.

The more user-friendly and social you make your technical product the more users and revenue it's going to attract. That's a simple fact and you can see it in every success story. Companies like Apple and Microsoft go to painstaking lengths to make their technical products as accessible to the typical non-geek as possible.

At the other end of the spectrum you have geeks who are good at programming and make phenomenal products but are irritated by the incompetence of the end user (typical Joe or Jane average), completely unable to grasp the fact 99.99% of the population has no idea what the hell they are trying to explain in highly technical terms.

People don't want command line interfaces. People don't care about kernels or which type of cryptography provides the highest security. People don't want to go through 5 hoops just to buy something online.
This mystical "people" is the average person on the streets. He or she wants something that will improve their lives or entertain them with the least possible effort.