John Welch has a pretty nice summation of some thoughts shared by others. Forgiving the irony here it seems there’s some thoughts going round about the stupidity of crowds as opposed to the wisdom of crowds.
One of these stupid crowds is, of course, the geek community. They’re the ones filling your feeds with rants about how the AppleTV is a failure, how Apple is killing innovation with the iPhone. Stop, for a moment, and think. Who are these people? Are they overwhelming numbers of the great unwashed or are they a vocal minority mouthing off on a medium which is, for the most part, their personal domain?
Geek shouldn’t really be your market. There’s just not enough of them really. Sure, there’s some cognoscenti in other fields as well – PR, marketing, cooking, photography, skateboarding – but there’s a huge market out there of nobodies, anybodies and somebodies.
Crap like Techmeme and Digg exacerbate this to where most of the volume is from a crowd of geeks and technophiles, all convinced that they are the true force in making great products.
This is why Apple makes products the way they do. And, coincidentally, why Linux and Windows are not the same as Mac OS X. Apple designs for the average person. They’ll silently appreciate the subtleties perhaps without even consciously noticing them. In comparison, Windows designs things to be “good enough” which means they can be pretty bad but taking advantage of the fact that people will put up with just about any crap on a computer because “computers are smart and people are stupid”. Linux. Well, they’re copying Windows.
The theory of stupid crowds comes from when you have a group who become introspective in their outlook. Crowds which are heterogeneous will thrive because of their diversity. The various independently acting individuals provide the “wisdom” of the crowd. Over time the group dynamic changes and opinions become aligned, people join cliques and you’ll see charismatic leaders appearing. These changes will eventually start to oust the independent thinkers and soon selective breeding has made the group cull off the revolutionaries within their numbers and now everyone is settled into the same beta-wave brain pattern. Because there’s no-one there to stir it up, the crowd ha actually become stupid. It’s a herd now.
Nice one, John.