I wanna be an alpha geek

One of the biggest surprises I had working in a development job is how little we know about what our customers actually want. Maybe the marketing folks do or some higher ups, but we, the guys doing the coding, have no idea. Often times we just do what we think is cool or what some planner in the room decides the customer wants. Andy Kessler, in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, suggests companies open up their code and let industrious home users come up with new product features on their own. (Thank you Slashdot for the link.)