[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, creating problems in people for which you conveniently sell solutions is the job of marketing.

As for building a solution to "a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have", I'll agree that this may not be a good thing for a startup to do - but when I see how basic research is being defunded and drowned in red tape, and people saying that startups are the new, distributed R&D departments, I feel the middle has fallen out. When startups do a greedy gradient descent, and academia struggles doing science, who's going to work on solving problems that require solutions one or two steps beyond what the intended audience can understand? FLOSS community? What about outside software?

[OakNinja]

I should clarify that I see nothing wrong in solving a problem people don’t realize they have, and to be fair, this is what startups often do. However, many/most developers see marketing and sales as something unnecessary, eg. “How hard can it be”. And they realize that it’s pretty damn hard when it’s already too late.