Comment by permo-w
10 months ago
>"These people are members of a community who care about where they live... So what I hear is people caring very loudly at me." -- Leslie Knope
that's a very healthy and - I feel - correct attitude towards this kind of criticism. I love when wisdom comes from stupid places.
Its quite a well-known wisdom. I think someone in one of Nintendo or Sony's studios has said it too, in the form of: a complaint is worth twice a compliment.
Satisfied customers will tell you they think your stuff is great, but dissatisfied customers will be able to hone in on exactly where the problem is.
You can even extend this to personal life: if someone tells you your shabby car doesn't fit with the nice suits you wear, you can either take it as a personal attack and get irritated, or take it as feedback and wash your car, spruce up the upholstery and replace the missing wheel cap. In effect they helped you take note of something.
One does not "hone in" on anything. To hone a thing is to make it sharper or more acute by removing parts of it with an abrasive. The word you are looking for is "home", as in a homing missile, etc.
Yes, this is a criticism. Hopefully it's twice as effective as being nice. 8)
Multiple dictionaries recognize the usage of "hone in" to mean "sharpening" your focus on something rather than "home in" which is to move towards something.
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I went down a slight rabbit hole for this: apparently both are correct, although "hone in" doesn't seem to have a ground source and has gotten institutionalized in our lexicon over time.
By the way, I don't mind the nit at all! English is not my first language and I slip up occasionally, so refreshers are welcome :-)
You knew what they meant, which is clear if you’re able to correct the use of language accurately. This isn’t a criticism per se, but an acknowledgment that language evolves and part of the way it does that is acceptance that “incorrect” usage, once common enough, is seldom reversed.
You may not hone in on anything, but people who are better at English do.
This would be doubly ironic if you're a native English speaker. Are you?
"All happy customers are alike; each unhappy customer is unhappy in its own way" - Tolstoy.
this isn't true, of course, but it sounds good
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> dissatisfied customers will be able to hone in on exactly where the problem is
This sounds like a truism, when it isn't. The client may know something is wrong, but good luck at them identifying it. Some times, the client will convince themselves that something is wrong when it isn't. There were people complaining about lag in WoW, they responded by cutting the latency number in half... except that it wasn't cut in half, it was just measured as time to server rather than roundtrip. The complains died out immediately and they were hailed as "very savvy developers that listen to their customers".