> There are much better approaches now, which are critical to dramatically improving the user experience with SMC, and also growing the developer base.
I seriously urge William to, at the very least, survey developers before making this conclusion. I would expect something like "we spoke to 500 developers and at least 60% of them would use the application if it had a more robust dev stack". I find it amazing that extremely analytical and rational people (including myself!) tend to make generalized conclusions without informed data.
It can be easy to justify uninformed decisions with vision. Did Steve Jobs ask people what they want? How about Henry Ford, who supposedly said that "they'd just ask for faster horses"?
I don't love data myself either. It feels better to be right by divine vision, although it sure doesn't happen that often.
Having data is fine, but even the richest dataset is wide open to misinterpretation. This is even more true when the data is a snapshot of a compression of human opinion and feelings.
The interpretation of information collected from a survey such as '60% of developers I asked say..', even assuming it's statistically valid and reasonably accurate (which is not trivial to achieve), still involves a lot of assumption, intuition, and frankly guesswork about the real problems and facts of the situation.
It might provide slightly more of a hint towards the facts than just blindly following a strategy based on vision alone, and there are many success stories of data-driven approaches that vastly outperform the predictions of human 'experts', but implicitly trusting that this will always be the case is probably unwise.
I'm for data-driven decision making in general, just saying that it's never a magic bullet and is often not even an advantage (could indeed be the opposite) if done naively.
> There are much better approaches now, which are critical to dramatically improving the user experience with SMC, and also growing the developer base.
I seriously urge William to, at the very least, survey developers before making this conclusion. I would expect something like "we spoke to 500 developers and at least 60% of them would use the application if it had a more robust dev stack". I find it amazing that extremely analytical and rational people (including myself!) tend to make generalized conclusions without informed data.