Also, as for "faster horses", per this article "We have no evidence that Ford ever said those words."
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fa...
"You can't ask people what they want because they haven't seen it yet."
(or something along those lines)
I still wouldn't...
For anything else, you will never be a leader in the market with that attitude. The reason why it seems to work early on on a company is that you are resting on the laurels of the original vision of the software. That will get washed away in a sea of tweaks to existing features by the community.
Customer feedback is an important consideration, but should not be the only. Believe it or not, product management is a valuable skill.
The problem, then, is being able to sort between this and not only (a) keep the active community members on-side and (b) find a way to flesh out those hidden requirements from less-engaged people.
Of course the other issue is when community requests are not necessarily profitable for the company that provides them.
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/?tab=bugs http://meta.stackoverflow.com/?tab=requests
I find that the community appreciates being involved in these decisions, and often (but not always†) has good ideas of what you should be prioritizing and what issues are true pain points.
† http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-comm...