Mass-market HCI is hard, actually

The HCI/UX problems, however, seem like a more fundamental tension, not a market failure. Consider the description that the article gave the interface:

> it's just a single window with some text and four buttons.

I've worked on software in a similar situation, where I got feedback from non-technical users and they really liked it because of how self-explanatory it was and how frustrated they were with all the competitors and their complex, clunky interfaces. At least, that's how it was for our first customer.

Then we tried to onboard customer #2, and they liked what they saw, but absolutely needed a feature we didn't already have, and, more importantly, they needed to enforce that their employees were actually using it, so we needed to add a check. Customer #1 could not accept this, so the whole feature needed to be configurable.

Ten customers later, and you wind up in one of two places:

1. Hell of combinatorics: your program is 50% conditional on its settings, and your test suite is either woefully incomplete or enormous. LWN has an article on configuring Linux kernel builds that illustrates this problem.

2. An aggressively limited scope that leaves the product as a compromise that leaves everyone equally annoyed.