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Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

It would be wonderful if such stories were more prevalent and lauded in the overall industry: at the ens of the day, it's not about specific tech but about how we end up affecting concrete lives. Human-computer interaction as a research field is all about this; seeing the others' perspective. Sadly it's seems to be largely seen as niche activity by the wider community.

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I'd argue it's the most important goal of all consumer software. It needs to be respectful of the player. To do that you need to really, actually care about where they are in their lives and what you can do to meet them. We had an expression internally: "surprise and delight". On a more personal level I've always loved Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking, with withered technology".

That might be a good approach for games and other apps with a certain level of redundancy and competition. But the other approach is having a vital product with high vendor lock-in factor, then eliminating the competition and consequentially forcing down the throats of customers whatever is promising more profit (browsers, "big" ERP, ...).

That's just so sad to read. Yes, I'm aware there are alternatives to respecting users. You use apps that dgaf every day. I'm saying it's important to care, not just for yourself and your career and market share, but because there's a human who's living their life and you can make it a but better with a bit of effort. Besides the lack of empathy and respect for humans in your answer, there is also just a sadness in giving up trying to aspire to do better and just do a bunch of cheap tricks to win.

Wow, I was certainly not embracing that other approach, just observing that it exists and that it is popular for corps in some areas of the industry.

Personally, I am highly user oriented, but there are constraints on what I can do for them, in my area.

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