Most large corporations including Google, Apple, Intel, etc. have an entire department of designers and social scientists (mainly anthropologists) who do ethnog

Most large corporations including Google, Apple, Intel, etc. have an entire department of designers and social scientists (mainly anthropologists) who do ethnographic studies, user studies, etc. in order to understand their customers, new markets, etc. It's really only the startup world that puts less emphasis on user research, but that's in large part because it's resource intensive to do so and many companies have shown that they were able to succeed without it. As startups grow larger and the market more saturated, they must shift from "scratch your own itch" to "user-centered" in order to grow and stay competitive. Alas, because the startup scene is overwhelmingly centered in the Bay Area and is dominated by white upper-middle-class American men, white-upper-middle-class American male itches get scratched first.