Too Long; Didn't Read
Steve Jobs justified his distain of user studies by claiming that “users don’t know what they want”. This is true, as far as it goes — recent events have demonstrated the dangers of giving users what they think they want at scale in ways that even major media outlets can’t ignore. The second, unstated part of this, however, was more powerful and more dangerous: the idea that Steve Jobs knows what users want. In the case of Jobs, this concretely meant the uncritical adoption of design ideas intended for standalone appliances.