Comment by ryandrake

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.