But what if I want a faster horse?

For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong.

IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0.

Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas.

I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.

>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results.

That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started.

Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project).

The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked.

No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.