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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

The article makes a lot of hay about how they reach out to "the community" to get their feedback on product ideas... an idea which comes straight out of the world of Agile and, in principle, seems like a nice idea.

But imagine what would've happened if Apple took that approach with the first generation iPhone. How many people would've insisted they needed physical keys, or a stylus?

The reality is, sometimes the user doesn't actually know what they need, and that's where a great product visionary can step in and do something truly innovative.

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I partially agree - something like the the iPhone would likely still have worked in a crowd developed background as the people there seem to be into the latest tech and searching for improvements. And the iPhone had nice things like a full qwerty keyboard instead of T9 for typing and similar.

Yes the average users usually don't know what they want but enthusiasts are easier to convince and are more willing to take risks and innovate.

Yes the average users usually don't know what they want but enthusiasts are easier to convince and are more willing to take risks and innovate.

Enthusiasts are exactly the wrong people you want to talk to if you're looking to build a mass market consumer device. Enthusiasts want keyboards, for example (see the other reply to my original comment), whereas the mass market seems very happy without them (likely because they're far more likely to consume content than originate it in large quantities).

Now, in this case, maybe a device for enthusiasts is exactly what they're trying to build. But if that's true, I'm not sure why they care about a device that's "budget-priced".

Well see what happened to Apple now?? Are you happy now

Yeah, agreed. I hate slate phones. I actually like having a real keyboard, though swipe is ok as a stop-gap. The slate would only work if voice recognition was flawless and sub vocal (so that people don't hear me on the train, for example)

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