The question of "what people want" is fascinating. Like forever, some of the smartest people around admitted that they did not know. They created the entire fi

The question of "what people want" is fascinating. Like forever, some of the smartest people around admitted that they did not know. They created the entire field of market research. Today I think that is dead. In the past decade we moved to an entirely different model of force-fed consumerism, which is driven, as you say, entirely by the supply side. Oddly the near communist era uniformity we see goes against our stated beliefs in data-driven, targeted markets. A whole other layer is how we increasingly project our own desires onto others and assume they must be crazy not to want the exact same thing as ourselves. Where does that come from? Here on HN I get tired of hearing these very strident, cock-sure remarks about "what people want is...". Let's just admit we don't have much idea about what other people want. There's nowt as queer as folk. And some of the most interesting markets may in fact be marginal. Smaller markets do not mean unprofitable ones.