Eastern time means nothing to me. How many hours do I go forward or back? How do I know if you're in daylight savings? What if I'm in saylight savings?
Sensible time for wod wode use is still a problem for casual users.
That's kind of the point. NASDAQ trading hours are 0930 to 1600 eastern. At a former job thats what mattered, although we were not in the eastern zone and had sites spread across 5 or 6 timezones. Live where you want but production hours on the production boxes were 0930-1600 eastern. A large chunk of financial world workers live in eastern standard time. They might live anywhere in the world, but that doesn't matter.
With the almost sole exception of the financial world, the rest of the world wide users stick with UTC.
One example is the ham radio guys scheduling a contact/net on a certain freq and UTC time.
Live "events" like superbowl and the endless self-congratulatory entertainment industry awards. I'll meet you on IRC during the superbowl and we'll comment on the commercials.
To some extent computers and the internet are a tool for making time not so critical. We both need to be available for a phone call, but not for email. To watch the same network TV show we both need to watch about the same time, but we can watch youtube videos anytime. Thats the other oddity of "internet time". If we're going to make obsolete concepts, why not "internet distance" or even worse "internet long distance"
Having lived thru it, it was astroturf at most. It was a marketing gimmick to solve a problem that still doesn't exist.
"Here, try this, its just like things that work perfectly such as UTC or Eastern Time, but way more confusing"