The Americans with Disabilities Act, which can be used to sue developers of inaccessible websites, has made it clear that in some cases serving the majority can be a bad thing.
Less severely, there's an awful lot of long tail business productivity served by obscure software features that is very difficult to satisfy with modern hyper-engagement-optimized tools.
I'm pretty sure there are false dichotomies going on here.
Software products may be developed for a mass audience or they may be developed for a narrow niche.
In either case, making the product accessible to people with disabilities is something developers should try to do.
And in every case, having data on user behaviour, software performance, bugs, crashes, etc, will enable the developer to do a better job of catering to their users' needs.
Have I missed something about how these objectives must be mutually exclusive?
> I'm sorry but "less effectively" and "greater expense" is just your opinion
No need to be sorry, it is pretty obvious that it is my opinion, since I made no attempt to support the statement, that is all it could be. That said, it would have been more polite to ask me why I believe what I wrote rather than being dismissive.
> "less effectively" ... "greater expense"
I feel that in order for me to provide satisfactory support of my claim to you, we'll have to first agree upon a strict definition of these terms. You're right to call them out in quotes as my use of them was intended to be qualitative and informal. How about more "effective" development being development that is more focused on serving the needs of its users & the goals of its developers, and "expense" include direct monetary cost, manpower, and any other resources whose use incurs an opportunity cost?
> There is NO telemetry in Linux (the kernel) and many other great software.
1. As I mentioned above, my comment was informal. It was not intended to make a strong claim about all software, without exception.
2. Unless a majority of pre-internet software was developed as effectively and cheaply as Linux and the other software you were thinking of, it is possible that my claim is still correct in the general case.
3. Software used primarily by those who actively contribute to it (such as Linux during its early development) has a very different communication dynamic from other software.
4. Linux is not representative of software developed pre-internet, considering the project was first announced by Linus in the comp.os.minix newsgroup in 1992[1]
* To be clear, any additional claims I have made above are _also_ my opinion.
