Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration).
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
I would argue there is a difference between "being opinionated about how to implement a use-case" + "being opinionated about focusing on a small set of use-cases" and "forcing new use-cases on the user".
The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
> What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless) data and feedback without a vision for what the product is. They become so obsessed about whether they could [implement this feature/expand to more markets/get more big clients/earn more revenue] according to X data ("because SCIENCE!") that they never stop to think whether they should.
IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products: by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down attempts from other departments that would degrade the product, even if that means passing up short term gains that look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.
Default opt in to all changes could be Amazon’s self interested and opinionated position.
The comment above can also be an opinionated response as well.
Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less likely to leave, especially influential power users.
> I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
I feel like, supporting them or not with their store, it was always a no-brainer to not purchase smart, cloud connected doorbells and wire-tape speakers and litter my house with them.
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
Can someone explain why there’s so much outrage against Amazon Sidewalk when it’s doing a similar thing to Apple’s Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal praise?
I wouldn't like if I would specifically keep my Samsung Smart TV offline because Samsung themselves advice not to talk about sensitive things in front of the telly [0], and then finding out that it did go online, via my neighbor's helpful Alexa... No thank you.
1) A big thing is trust - people trust Apple to keep their data secure much more than they trust Amazon, especially when you contrast both company's main business model.
2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.
3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.
Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.
I'll grant that the outrage against Sidewalk does seem to be worse, but there are at least some of us who dislike both. I have Find My turned off on my iPhone.
What grates me is that I can't turn it off by saying "Alexa, turnoff sidewalk". They make you go into the app and dig for it. IMHO, you should be able to access all of the settings via voice.
It enables Amazon devices to transparently connect to amazon with near zero user configuration as long as the device is within range of an authorized AP or another sidewalk device owned by anyone. This makes Amazon devices to "just work" in more places and most users will love it because they don't know and/or don't care about the privacy and network security implications.
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
"Why this HN comment is correct on design", "Why said revered HN comment is incorrect on design", "HN comment creates cult"
Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
>This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.
Right, in a way I think this opening tweet just undercuts the entire argument. It's a simplistic description of a problem, which the body of the article returns with a simplistic sort of solution.
The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.
In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.
Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.
In every functional department, there is some amount of this - UX folks want to update the design language, advertising needs a fresh campaign for the new version, devs want to move to some new framework, and/or rewrite etc. Everyone thinks their actions are well justified - except for the user who rarely benefits :)
Well I would argue the monolithic look on apps is a to some degree a byproduct of testing. It makes sense that most apps' buttons, layouts, design patterns look the same and are considered "easiest" to use by A/B testing standards. You don't have to learn anything new to use those designs.
I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy/paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don't notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an external source, the formatting is completely wrong.
I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
I almost never want paste to preserve any formatting, because I've almost never seen it work perfectly. If I need to reformat it anyway, I'd rather not have to clean up its messes first.
BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.
this. the sheer volume of times i have to paste text into a notepad or a URL bar or just any space that will lose the formatting, just to re-copy/paste it into some (usually MS) product that wants to preserve it is way higher than it should be.
I suspect that a more nuanced approach could suit general users the best. Retain boldness, italics and underlining, change to fit target colour and font.
Boldness, italics and underlining actually denote meaning, whereas font and colour are generally just aesthetic
In real Desktop Publishing software, text (content) and its style (layout) are separate — the text usually comes in from an external source (e.g. a file on an SMB share; a document in a CMS) and can be updated independently of the layout.
The linked text format is usually Rich Text (RTF). This allows a lot of things, but the Desktop Publishing tools only interpret the tags for bold, italics, underline, and a few other things (strikeout, subscript, etc.) All other styling in the linked text, they throw away.
This is precisely because, as you say, those specific styles actually denote meaning. They're something the writer adds. No other styling is used from the linked text, because none of the other styling is the writer's job.
All other styling is instead applied to the block(s) within the layout where the text gets embedded into. It's the layout designer that gets to decide the font, size, spacing, etc. for the text. Those attributes aren't stored with the text; they're stored with the layout.
To me, this makes far more sense as a workflow, even if you're a single author. I constantly wish that "word processors" had restructured and absorbed ideas from Desktop Publishing software when it came about. Instead, we got the garbled hybrid: you can have "document styles" like Title, Heading, Body, List Item, etc.; but they are essentially markup, moving around with the text (rather than there being any concept of an "section of the document" that gets styled, that text can be moved into/out of, and where the styles of that section will apply to the text only while it remains inside that section, such that moving text out of that area doesn't copy the styles of the section, only the styles of the text.)
In my case, I almost always want paste to override most formatting — if I copy something from a website, I want it to match my formatting.
What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained.
A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
Not only that, but I think the "average user" probably has lesser taste than the tweeter. They see a blue font on the text they are copying from some random web page, they expect a blue font when they paste it. This would be especially important to the average user if they are copying a lot of text with bullets and headers.
So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
So if you make paste match the formatting of the destination not the source, both you and the tweeter are happy. Make a funky shortcut to override this if you want but this should be the default.
* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.
I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.
I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.
Is there an option in Word to change the default paste? I think that's what many of these opinions boil down to, and while I imagine there's hundreds of opinions on even the smallest thing I suspect many of these large pain points could be solved relatively easily if those in charge had a vision like the article is suggesting.
I agree, I often copy and paste to a basic no-formatting text editor and back just to clear formatting, eg before pasting to an email or whatever. I rarely want formatting retained when pasting to/from emails. Same when copying from a website, as someone else here mentioned.
>I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting.
Perhaps you should consider asking the user what they want by just giving them options. No need to prematurely break your software. (which is what most good software does now.)
I use copy/paste in powerpoint explicitly with the intent to copy over the formatting of the original to the destination deck. Easiest way to add a theme to an existing deck.
> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user.
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
In the context of this article, "average user" and "power user" does not have much meaning. Take the copy-paste example. One group of users is going to find paste-with-formatting more practical while another group of users is going to find paste-without-formatting more useful. The distinction has more to do with the task at hand than the ability of the user. Consider someone working withing a document or within a set of documents for a project. Losing formatting means they will have to go back to recreate it. Now consider someone pulling information from various sources. Maintaining formatting means a loss of consistency in the destination, so it is less desirable.
As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).
Anecdotal and a complete digression from your point - I consider myself a poweruser of excel/word/etc and I loathe the online variants in O365. There's quite a few features missing in both that require me to use the offline variant that are both supported in GSuite. Table of Contents generator in Word is probably the biggest one I hate that is missing, and the clipboard nonsense isn't great either, but last time I used it in gsuite it wasn't a problem.
Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s
Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
GSuite (and probably O365) are probably actually pretty good examples of opinionated vs. the all the options offline MS Office.
Personally, myself and people I work with mostly like GSuite. We're probably generally described as heavy users but not power users, i.e. we don't need the features that only a few percent of people do. I actually find GSuite much more streamlined for my uses and collaborative editing is such a win. I do create fairly long docs sometimes but they're not complicated docs.
Do you have any examples of what is superior in O365? As my other reply states I've found it to be the opposite - GSuite supports _more_ than MS does online.
If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus).
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing.
If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing third party providers of it and making their own. Not to fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities.
That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.
They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
I'll be honest, because most people who work for municipalities and other governments are not the best and brightest, and they will ask for a lot of stuff "because that's how we do it on paper" or other similar reasons, without much critical thinking.
Opinionated products are killer products when lots of people realize they share your opinion.
Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.
Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.
The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
It probably matters how this opinion is formed. Often it’s formed first by your own pain, and if you start talk to people and do user research you might discover that you’re on to something.
>> Opinionated products are better than flexible products.
But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.
There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
This is there the Proctor & Gamble branding approach to products begins to make sense. In development, there is one code base, but multiple configurations of build. In the market the company has a "product line" of software, each opinionated towards a different work flow. Similar to being multi-lingual, this is multi-opinionazation to address different process styles.
Dear chat clients, I never want any formatting on any pasted text, ever. Thank you. (That is destination theme matching indeed.)
And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.
Readit News
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless) data and feedback without a vision for what the product is. They become so obsessed about whether they could [implement this feature/expand to more markets/get more big clients/earn more revenue] according to X data ("because SCIENCE!") that they never stop to think whether they should.
IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products: by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down attempts from other departments that would degrade the product, even if that means passing up short term gains that look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.
The comment above can also be an opinionated response as well.
Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less likely to leave, especially influential power users.
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31296188
2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.
3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.
Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.
- For a product that was already owned and did not need it until now
- Activated by default, as optional opt-out instead of opt-in
Deleted Comment
That wasn't my impression. I saw plenty of criticism on HN.
The vast majority of people already have internet at home and phone plans.
Also, what's in it for Amazon? How does it profit from something like this?
Comcast does the same thing but with standard Wifi with their routers, with some hidden SSIDs you can't opt out of (Xfinity Home etc.)
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
https://www.macworld.com/article/347243/how-to-opt-out-of-th...
Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.
The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.
In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.
Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.
I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.
Boldness, italics and underlining actually denote meaning, whereas font and colour are generally just aesthetic
The linked text format is usually Rich Text (RTF). This allows a lot of things, but the Desktop Publishing tools only interpret the tags for bold, italics, underline, and a few other things (strikeout, subscript, etc.) All other styling in the linked text, they throw away.
This is precisely because, as you say, those specific styles actually denote meaning. They're something the writer adds. No other styling is used from the linked text, because none of the other styling is the writer's job.
All other styling is instead applied to the block(s) within the layout where the text gets embedded into. It's the layout designer that gets to decide the font, size, spacing, etc. for the text. Those attributes aren't stored with the text; they're stored with the layout.
To me, this makes far more sense as a workflow, even if you're a single author. I constantly wish that "word processors" had restructured and absorbed ideas from Desktop Publishing software when it came about. Instead, we got the garbled hybrid: you can have "document styles" like Title, Heading, Body, List Item, etc.; but they are essentially markup, moving around with the text (rather than there being any concept of an "section of the document" that gets styled, that text can be moved into/out of, and where the styles of that section will apply to the text only while it remains inside that section, such that moving text out of that area doesn't copy the styles of the section, only the styles of the text.)
What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained.
A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.
I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.
I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.
Perhaps you should consider asking the user what they want by just giving them options. No need to prematurely break your software. (which is what most good software does now.)
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).
Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion.
But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.
Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
Personally, myself and people I work with mostly like GSuite. We're probably generally described as heavy users but not power users, i.e. we don't need the features that only a few percent of people do. I actually find GSuite much more streamlined for my uses and collaborative editing is such a win. I do create fairly long docs sometimes but they're not complicated docs.
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.
They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.
Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.
The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.
There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.
Other than this, I agree with the premise.