This is very insightful.<p>The startup I'm working on now is in the project management space, which I think is an unsolved and hard problem. And it's definitely something people want. When I started working on it I thought that it would be pretty easy, but I found that when I asked 10 project managers they all wanted subtly different software.<p>Everybody wanted good project management software, but unfortunately everyone I talked to also had differing opinions on what this would include. The hardest part was getting the details right, not from a coding perspective which is pretty simple, but from an interface and usability perspective. Nobody sees the code anyway.<p>Solving a problem in detail, and doing it in a way that people want is really really hard. Often much harder than coding it.
I tend to feel cheated out of my time when I come to the end of a post like this one, because it seems to focus on the wrong thing. Here's what my issue is:<p>"What do people want?" is a very broad and imprecise question, and on that level, it is very easy to answer. I've been alive for a little more than a quarter of a century, and I can easily tell you what I want.<p>1) I want it to be easier to maintain and improve my health.
2) I want my relationships - friendships, business partnerships, romances - to require less effort to maintain and grow.
3) I want it to be easier to acquire and retain new knowledge and learn new skills.<p>I am willing to bet that at their core, everyone has an approximation of at least those desires, and then some. However, the things that I've outlined are just the difficulties of "the human condition", if you will. Breaking down those problems into their more detailed subproblems is difficult, but it seems that solving those is infinitely more difficult, and pushes them off into the realm of science fiction. These are important, hard problems where a working technical solution would make the inventors orders of magnitude more money than solving some pain point that some company in some niche market has.
I strongly support the part about opening up and not keeping your ideas to yourself.<p>I'll eventually write a post on this, but if you remember Mark Cuban's "open source funding" from a few days ago, there are similarities. I have a good idea for a product and I posted it on Mark's blog. And the idea got written about in 70 newspapers and magazines within 48 hours.<p>Is anyone copying my idea because it's public? I don't think so.
Here is an idea: make a whatdoyouwant.com<p>Every business/government/person should have such a mechanism(e.g. WebSite,Voting, Congress...) to understand what people want.
They don't want the perfect Pepsi, they want the perfect Pepsence.<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...</a><p>Seriously, the big name brand companies have done a ton of research on this already - we should learn from them for once.
"You can't expect people to tell what they want straightforwardly if you ask them, since people often don't know what they want at the surface of their consciousness, or cannot articulate it."<p>People do tell you what they want, it's just that normally companies have already formed to supply those needs.
On the similar note: I consider Apple at the top of innovation pyramid because they create something with (almost) no predecessors, yet they make something that 'everyone' wants! To me, that's true innovation!