Tech geeks think like tech geeks, which is why they're often wrong about consumer trends.

The past few days the tech community has been abuzz about the Windows 8 tablet, which was demo'd Tuesday at the BUILD conference. The Atlantic Wire - always pushing the bar on eye-catching headlines - declared, "Windows 8 Is Better Than the iPad."

Wait, what?

Other tech sites were similarly adulatory. Gizmodo declared, "It's Fantastic," though advised readers not to sell their iPads, yet. BGR's headline read, "Sorry Apple, Windows 8 ushers in the post-post-PC era," while arstechnica.com described Windows 8 as the first "true tablet platform that provides first-class support for touch-based tablet systems."

For the non-techie, all of this praise appears to be reserved for two features. The first is a "tile" system of apps that sits and scrolls on the screen and replaces the venerable Windows "start" button. OK, but not exactly earth-shattering.

The second feature is the tablet's increased functionality. The tablet can run simultaneous apps side by side on the screen, including full-fledged versions of powerful, enterprise software like Photoshop.

That feature sounds like an improvement, but all the resulting buzz misses a key point: the iPad is successful because of a vastly superior user experience. What about that? None of the tech press have addressed what, in reality, might actually unseat the iPad. Instead, we hear about functions and features which excite a few reporters - but not so much the apple-besotted throngs of consumers worldwide.

This mistake - projecting techie tastes onto all of mankind - is classic. BGR's headline about the "post, post-PC era" is likely no more than a repeat of countless prior pronouncements of change which never quite panned out as predicted. The tech community has been prophesying the death of the PC for some time now, for example. And yet the PC is still "king of the world," as Mashable puts it.

A controversial Wired article from last year about the supposed decline of the Web browser even referenced a similar Wired story from over a decade ago. That article predicted the demise of browsers, too. When will they learn?

Let this perennial wrongness be a lesson to user experience designers everywhere. It's easy to get caught up thinking that everyone else thinks like you do. But today, and probably well into the future, the best user experience coding is done with the certain knowledge that the opposite is in fact true.