OSX's amazing resize! 1642
Let me give you some examples. There are people who actually work with the UI groups, doing studies on how function work and don't work, how easily learned they are, and how to optimize them for users. There are people who know how to manage code and coding. There are people who know the difficulties of networking. There are people who know managing business networks and application interoperability in a cross-platform environment. And there are people who deal with teaching, training, and evaluating software for users.
Thank god I'm not using any applications written by yourself then. Commercial applications by definition are written for the buyers of the product. A sure path to...
All of that gives many people a kind of expertise (though obviously not even or uniformly meaningful) that is relevant.
The key isn't only that there are a lot of ways to examine the industry, but that there are a lot of people talking to each other and validating or invalidating those comments. An example might be George Ou over at ZDNet -- who seems to have a good connection to Microsoft, but whose atbreastude about everything else is so skewed he spends half his time trying to support why he made the first statements.