[apwashere]

> For example, in my entire carrer in this industry, I can honestly say without any exaggeration that I have never met a single person who was obsessed about proving P != NP.

Fair point - an example related to inventing new datastructures would probably have been slightly more realistic ;-)

I certainly agree with your point about "the challenge of the collective user" from a PM perspective. I've worked on quite a few teams where this "collective user" was more of a product of the marketing or PM team's imagination than actually representative of real users, though - and even if you cannot please all users all of the time, in my experience the more of those users are real, the more motivated you are to try to please as many of them as you can.

Overall, very glad to hear there are lots of parts of the industry that are doing a lot better than I have experienced!

Regards

ap