[carlmr]

Steve Jobs' biography is also a good starting point. He describes how Xerox had a lot of interesting patens and ideas around graphical user interfaces (before they were cool), but they didn't manage to make it a nice user experience. The idea was there, the execution not. Which is often a problem with researchers and their poor software engineering skills. They create amazing things that don't work.

[5555624]

I was thinking about this after I posted my comment. I think it's not that they, as you say, "create amazing things that don't work"; it's that what they create "works" good enough for them. They solve a problem and it works for them; but, they don't think about how others will use it and whether it works for them. In the recent LibreOffice thread, the Microsoft ribbon menu is mentioned -- I thought the old menu was fine; but, their user testing found people liked the ribbon.