Choose your bleeding edge

Are early adopters usually interested in only one new technology, or generally forward looking and open to innovation?
I encountered multiple startups that seem to assume the former. As a company you want to make your product available for a large number of potential users. But who are your potential users? Sometimes you have to choose one or more platforms where you make your product available. This decision is especially important for startups with limited resources. It might be a difficult choice. Either exclusively opt for an established platform with a large user base. Or add support for an emerging contender with fewer users. Now I would argue those fewer users are more likely to try your new product. This is because if you already use bleeding edge technology in one field, you are more likely to experiment with innovative new ideas in other areas as well. But this is only my humble opinion. Of course there are more potential users on the legacy platforms. But how many of them are there because they were told so, and would never venture into something new on their own?
Let me list a couple of examples I ran into:

• Ubuntu phone is still a relatively new operating system for smart phones. Canonical canceled their efforts on it last week. I’ll keep using it because it is still the best option if you value your freedom. But there are a few things about it that I really don’t understand. For somebody to choose ubuntu phone, one has to be dissatisfied with the existing, well established alternatives. Probably you don’t like the paternalism on the iOS platform, and the privacy intrusions on Android. So why does UP ship with no real email app installed, but only a gmail web app? This is not giving them what they are used to, but trying to force them into the very thing they are trying to escape. Why would they ship with google as the only option to synchronize PIM data from the settings screen? And why would they still after 2 years only add OwnCloud to the GUI? Is it really so hard for Canonical to imagine that people store their contacts and appointments on a standard CalDAV store using their own Ubuntu server product? Don’t get me wrong on that. It is great to be open to competing platforms. But to penalize your own users is clearly not the solution.
• Tesla make awesome cars. They are at the forefront of innovation for electric vehicles. And they are pushing the boundaries of autonomic driving for consumers. Yet they still only accept ancient forms of payments for their products and services. Out of all the stories of cars bought with Bitcoin, Tesla is mentioned most often by a big margin. Yet all those stories are with resellers and/or used cars. They also have no public plans to include a modern BTC wallet into the car software for paying electricity, parking or roads. Since the car runs on Linux and Qt, it should be relatively easy to integrate a light wallet like electrum. In addition, their remote control app is available only for Android and iOS.
• There are many options to pay for the electricity when charging an electric car. None of them is convenient. One should assume that companies that are innovative enough to provide services to modern cars involving some form of value transfer should be open to the latest (eight year old) advances in payments technology. Yet I am not aware of a single charging station that is in production where I could pay with Bitcoin for the charge. Instead there is a company that develops a blockchain based solution that introduces even more friction rather than to remove it. They offer their proprietary app for (you guessed it) Android and iOS. You have to buy their tokens beforehand and you can only pay them with credit card or paypal.
• Steemit is a social platform that rewards users for writing and curating. They want to differentiate themselves from the giant centralized networks. With their ties to blockchain, they seek to please a decentralized crowd. But you cannot sign up if you don’t have neither a facebook nor a twitter account. That’s like a horse is required to acquire a car.

Turns out if you want to make use of innovative new technology on multiple orthogonal fronts, you can have a really hard time.
I really don’t get it why technology seems to advance in any given directory in isolation. It is like saying you can either have a color TV or stereo sound, but not both. Things converge eventually, because you can have AC in your car and not just at home. But why aren’t they bundled at an early stage?
The largest group of people does not necessarily contain the largest number of people to potentially experiment with new products. They might have left the old world already. Sure you want to have them all as customers at last, but the early adopters might help you to get there. And the early adopters have slightly different requirements than the eventual end users.