| > I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of. Having seen this type of thing play out in several industries including other open source projects, it would have been more like follow the competition I would say. Users sometimes get listened to. Often times that's only to retroactively justify decisions that already got made. What gets attention is competition. Incumbents are watched like hawks by everyone for obvious reasons. And the incumbents themselves are paranoid of newcomers or new ideas. I worked in software at a company that developed CPUs. "Intel is doing this" or "Intel is adding that instruction" was the quickest and easiest way to get the attention of CPU designers. Not "our customers want this" or "that instruction will speed up this software our customers run". Those things would be considered, but you would have to do a lot of work, modelling, and justification before they'd look at it. There's actually good reasons for this. Intel having done something, you could assume they had already done that justification work. Them deploying it meant customers would become familiar with it and accept using it (or even expect to be able to use it). So it's not necessarily stupid or lazy to put a lot of weight on what competition is doing, it can be very efficient. You can get into these death spirals of the blind leading the blind when everybody starts fixating on something if you're not careful, though. I'd say this is what happened with everybody trying to shoehorn smartphone UIs into the desktop back then. |