I’m always reluctant to link to anything Scoble writes, but I almost completely agree with what he’s written in this case, and have been thinking the same thing lately.

In response to a quote from Google saying, “We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people:”

The thing is, innovations usually come about when it doesn’t seem like anyone is interested. Let’s go back to 2006 when Twitter was first released. I remember showing it to other people. They thought it was the lamest thing they’d ever seen. See, no one was sitting around and saying “I have a problem, I need a way to blog but I want to be limited to only 140 characters.”

For UX folk, it’s one of the big disconnects between user research and the product design process. If everyone could name exactly what they needed, someone would already have gone and made it. Great products solve problems that people never knew they had.