Comment by reaperducer
8 hours ago
I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?
Because they're too shy, lazy, or socially awkward to actually ask their users questions.
They cover up this anxiety and laziness by saying that it costs too much, or it doesn't "scale." Both of these are false.
My company requires me to actually speak to the people who use the web sites I build; usually about every ten to twelve months. The company pays for my time, travel, and other expenses.
The company does this because it cares about the product. It has to, because it is beholden to the customers for its financial position, not to anonymous stock market trading bots a continent away.
Respectfully I think your argument defeats itself. If you can only speak to your users once every 10-12 months it means your process doesn't scale by definition. Good analytics (not useless vanity metrics) should allow you to spot a problem days after it was launched not wait 3 quarters for a user to air their grievances.
Microsoft has a horde of developers that fit the entire breadth of gh usage. They could fix issues prior to a release if they wished to without opt-out client side telemetry.
You're describing a different problem.
Bug fixing absolutely gets taken care of immediately, and our customers are very active in telling us about them through these strange new feedback mechanisms known as "e-mail" and "a telephone."
But we don't spy on people to fix bugs.
Nothing that the big tech "telemetry" is doing is about bug fixes. In the article we're all talking about the spying that Microsoft proposes isn't to fix bugs. Re-read what it wrote. It's all for things that may not appear for weeks, months, or years.
And to think that a trillion-dollar company like Microsoft can't figure out how, or doesn't have the money available to scale real customer feedback is just sticking your head in the sand and making excuses.
Microsoft doesn't need people to apologize for its failure.
Ah yes, all the spyware on Windows 11 really helped Microsoft scale up development and make it the best Windows version ever.
Now, let's replicate this with GitHub. What can go wrong?