Disagree. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford. Customer is mostly right. Not always. Use your best judgement as a business owner. Innovate where necessary and stick to customer feedback where you think it makes sense.

I think there's a pretty big distinction between the customer lacking the imagination to see a better solution until it is presented to them, and being denied a choice while being in full possession of the facts.

Yeah, and this isn’t even an equivalent situation.

A more comparable situation is if Ford had requested his supplier send him a certain type of screw but the supplier sent him a completely different type of screw because it was “better”. It may be better. But it may also be absolutely the wrong thing to build Ford cars out of because they weren’t designed to use it.

And that’s what Canonical often seems to forget. Ubuntu isn’t just a product. It’s also infrastructure, and an individual (although critical) part in many other products and systems.

And AFAICT Ubuntu as a product is far less popular, and pays far less of the bill than Ubuntu as infrastructure, which is why their actions are doubly incomprehensible.

The auto update certainly falls in the former you mean? These (older, less tech savvy) people clearly lack the imagination. That's why auto update has to be mandatory. This is again for consumer facing OS and not for the server infra.

Also Henry Ford: "The customer thinks they want some color other than black, but fuck what those idiots want."

I look out my window today and I see many colorful cars. It's better this way. Fuck control freaks.

Unfortunately this is an attitude I do not agree with. Especially having worked in the service sector, far too many people use this as an excuse to be rude and unreasonable.

I believe in mutual respect

The other customers, impacted when one customer is out of date and their machine turns into part of a massive DDoS Botnet, are also customers. Say that with me. It's a distributed problem that you can't fix or meaningfully reason about just by imagining each user on their own in a vacuum.