I believe this is quite true. I also believe that the loudest members of the community (or work, family, politics etc) are the ones you should never, ever liste

I believe this is quite true. I also believe that the loudest members of the community (or work, family, politics etc) are the ones you should never, ever listen to. The loudest people tend to get the attention, but I firmly believe you should not indulge them and create a broken system where the loudest, most obnoxious people start calling the shots. This is particularly why I like Ubuntu these days. It seems they have a vision and are sticking to it. Most current Ubuntu users are going to be quite happy, but there will be a few very vocal community members who are essentially caught in a "who moved my cheese" scenario and they will be quite loud. Unity is turning out to be the best DE in all of Linux and they are doing something different, bold and it is clear there is a unified vision there. Had they listened to the community, they would still be doing GNOME2 for the next 10 years and the status quo would remain...no movement, no growth, no real innovation. Another community that seems to get it right, as much as I am not a fan of the whole community, is Rails. DHH made some tough calls (Coffescript and not going to HAML and Rspec) and there were quite a few people who hated those decisions, but DHH either had a vision or made a random call (hard to tell in his case) and stuck with it. Seems to be working out for them. And, lastly, Apple. I really, really dislike Apple these days. I think they are going Evil pretty quickly. BUT, they stick to their guns when everyone else tells them they should be doing something different. Let other people build mac hardware? Open up iPhone/iPad development off Macs? Flash on the iPhone/iPad? App store taking 30% from in app purchases? Overall, I think the message is this: Have a vision, understand what you are doing and execute to your vision. You might be right, you might be wrong, but you can't please everyone so know what you are trying to do and do it. Hot or cold but not lukewarm.