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Talk is cheap. If you want to know what people really value, pay attention to what they do, not to what they say.



Caveat: this only works when people can have/do what they really want. Ex. In a world where 99% of people haven't even heard of a smartphone that doesn't use Android or iOS, you can't tell if people value things that neither platform provides.


Fair enough. OTOH huge swathes of the dev community, who DO know about the alternatives, still default to iPhones and Androids all the time.


Desires are expensive. Looking at what people do isn't as great an indicator of what they want to do as you might think it is.


'Desires' taken out of context are also not very meaningful (e.g. "if money were no object.." type speculations). Cost, particularly relative to means, being a prime example of such context.




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