> because complaints are actionable
plenty of actionable complaints are just wild goose chases to nowhere.
Sure. A complaint of “why did you give us t-shirts?” isn’t very actionable aside from perhaps being more verbose as to why. But something like “Why are you guys starting an e-mail service? Most of us just want a good search engine with perhaps a simple LLM attached to it for base things like summarization” is definitely actionable.
I would like a Gmail competitor with solid email search, so that wouldn't be a strange side show for me, if anything they'd be copying Google's evolution in possibly a pro-user way that might be game changing in similar ways Gmail was game changing when it came out.
That doesn’t mean a business needs to acquiesce to every little demand. But “just listen to the money” is a horrible path for product improvement.