It's hard to become extremely successful (I'm talking Google/Facebook scale) if you don't have access to your users. It's much easier to build a consumer product that provides an experience 10 times better than what's on the market, than building a technology that is 10 times better than what's on the market. And even when you do come up with something like that, unless you actually capture your own customer (which brings us back to "having access to your users"), others will end up copying you or commoditize you.