I've built and supported software with 80k end users and did that effectively single-handedly.

I'm sure a large corp can do the same if it sacrifices a bit of bottom line...

This sounds great in theory - harder to do in practice. Often what ends up happening is the only people who will share their time with you are the ones who want something specifically changed for them. Thus my point, it's effective, but it's not a silver bullet.

> I've built and supported software with 80k end users and did that effectively single-handedly.

And plenty of businesses have used Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc. combined with the aforementioned technique.

TL;DR - The two strategies are not mutually exclusive.

And therein lies the root of "telemetry" — the SV bubble's lack of interest, lack of effort, and fear of interfacing with the wetware.

Telemetry is easy. Talking to people is hard. Too bad.

Sure, but lots of things are hard. That doesn't mean we should all be happy about software phoning home without the consent of the user.

The user spent an hour fiddling with settings. Is that because they love the new settings toolbox? Or is it because they were very frustrated with it and couldn't find what they were looking for?

For example, I have an XBox One controller. It used to pair fine via Bluetool. It still pairs fine with my Mac. Other stuff still pairs fine with my PC. But it just won't work after a Windows update.

What is telemetry going to tell them that they don't already know from the forum? Maybe the scope, but it's fuzzy. Some users might give up after one or two tries. Some users might be using the "Add hardware" box several times in a row for different reasons. Telemetry isn't a magic insights thing. It's difficult to get right, and to draw the right conclusions.

One thing's for sure, telemetry's cheaper than QA-ing updates properly.

You could argue that telemetry should then only exist in your beta channel or testing builds, and some developers do that. It's silly to argue everything can be caught by your QA team, that is simply not true for online services. In the past projects I've worked on have had long-standing bugs that took weeks of ongoing effort between both our paid QA staff and customers to finally identify reproduction steps, at which point we were able to examine telemetry for those reproductions and fix the problem.

"This is happening for 100% of users with the B2C3D4 controller and is likely a driver bug, but has happened only twice on the C3D5 device, both for the same user - likely a hardware failure"