Personas are a great tool. IMO - By the time you arrived these had transformed into bad shorthand. (I say this having been in Devdiv through those years.)

Elvis is not a persona - it is an inside baseball argument to management. It suffered a form of Goodhart’s law … it is a useful tool so people phrase their arguments in that form to win a biz fight and then the tool degrades.

Alan Cooper, who created VB advocated personas. When used well they are great.

The most important insight is your own PoV may be flawed. The way a scientist provides value via software is different than how a firmware developer provides value.

https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672316...

> Poor design. Seriously. Simplicity is really really hard. Much harder than throwing a ton of settings, toggles, and switches at a user.

I think this is the key reason why "The Inmates are Running the Asylum."

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

We programmers are much more immune to complexity than the average person. It's like when I was buying a flute at Seattle Folklife. There was this one maker who was a virtuosic player with amazing walking stick flutes. I couldn't get a sound out of any of them. The maker could, because he was an expert with a very strong embouchure, but it was just impossible for me.

I ended up buying a flute from a different maker, who wasn't such an expert player. I could make a good sound on his flute from the get-go.

Buying on specs over usability is not rational decision making from the point of view of most users.

http://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/06723164...

Highly skilled techies are largely immune to usability problems, so buying on specs may be rational for us.

"... Look at his areas of expertise. Netscape. Ning. Loudcloud. Don't see any TV or movie industry experience. Do you? ..."

But Andreessen is just smart enough to know that "computer + foo = computer".

I found this neat heuristic in Alan Coopers "inmates running the asylum" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/06723164... It means digital media processed by computers are right up his (and other computer/digital natives) alley.