cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1210182
Building relationships with customers through support didn’t turn out as hoped
A previous company used telemetry only when there was a pattern they couldn’t figure out. In this case it was a failure in a Microsoft subsystem that users had no reason to even be aware of
It also happens because error reporting in applications is garbage in general
Agreed. As a software dev, a huge portion of my job has been fixing exception handling and adding centralized error handling to figure out what bugs my users are experiencing. Many devs I worked with seemed to only care about the happy path.
Telemetry is fine, it’s the abuse of it that is the problem.
If a project is clear about it, takes the minimum necessary data, and anonymizes it, make a clear and reasonable retention policy, then I am all for it.
very reasonable take. I work in games and some companies just use telemetry to keep activity logs sorted into neat buckets for the purpose of debugging, or recognizing patterns that lead to issues. Other’s will use it excessively, with a heavy focus on marketing and store fronts and use that to shovel more product to a consooomer (which I hate).
It’s a very useful tool though for debugging when used properly.
Yeah, when I play tested games game when I was younger it was a part of it. I’m fine with telemetry if it’s only used for testing, fixing issues, game balance, ect. When it’s used for selling stuff or tracking me across the Internet or irl is where I have an issue.
Wholeheartedly agree with OP.
When people think of telemetry, they think of Microsoft, or Google, or Apple. But pretty much every single player in software out there uses telemetry one way or another, and they don’t use it for ad tracking because there are already better and more specialised tools for that.
Bug reports coming from non technical people are worthless. Sometimes, they might trigger some further investigation, and that’s it, because they don’t have enough detail to be useful. Telemetry is the only realistic way of debugging these issues.
I get why they want telemetry a lot of the time. Of course it’s helpful. But often times you can’t trust them with that sort of information. I don’t have any problem sending a 1-time log to a trustworthy organization but how many of those are there? And that’s a big ask for a normie.
Also Windows sends a ton of telemetry and its still shit.
Yeah. Ever tried to search a windows problem code. Best case its a red herring.
“Could be a hardware or software issue. It may go away after a restart”
Lot of fucking help there. Thanks.
I mean yeah, to some extent you’re right.
But it is also due to telemetrics being helpful in diagnosing issues before users even report them, measuring their business effects, or even doing A/B tests to see how a new feature may affect the user experience.
Problem is that companies realised this info can also be used for other purposes - such as, datamining the users - to create another lucrative revenue source…
A/B testing without consent is unethical. This doesn’t fly in any scientific fields, yet the technology industry doesn’t think twice about experimenting on users without consent.
What a load of bollocks.
Nobody owes you anything, especially if it’s a free service. And A/B testing is pretty much the only way to get reliable results on how a feature may shape user experience.
Or would you rather companies just delivered features without any care how it affects users?
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to consider A/B testing under the same umbrella as subjecting somebody to a scientific study. A/B testing can be selling different products in different stores or trying different pricing strategies. There are certainly shady things you can do with A/B testing, like trying out dark patterns, but require consumers give consent for any kind of market experimentation?
Telemetry exists to aid enshittification. Widely hated update that has loads of people complaining online but causes no change in usage? Keep it. Update causes dip in usage? Post generic “we hear your concerns” statement, backpedal slightly and try again in 6 months. Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users? Get rid of it.
Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users?
I mean, there is a pretty strong argument that if 95% of users don’t use a function, then it is not actually beloved and just more of a niche thing that the vast majority don’t care about.
The core design philology of windows is cobbling together thousands of niche use case features and set ups that have accumulated from their all their previous versions. That’s why it’s so janky.
Move it out of core and into an optional extention.
Of course if the code base respected user’s software freedom then others can maintain in your place.
Yeah sure I’m not arguing it should be culled, just that calling a feature untouched by the vast majority of users beloved is incorrect.
That 5% is 5% of the users who don’t turn the telemetry off.
And if use of that feature is strongly correlated with the type of person who also turns off telemetry…
– Frost
That would just make it 5% of a vast majority, nearing 100%, so still only a small amount of users.
I get what you’re saying, but when something is only used by the small demographic that is “power users”, it is not a beloved feature of the userbase as a whole.
That 5% is 5% of the users who don’t turn the telemetry off.
So 5% of 99%. Still niche.
I dunno, it feels weird to have somebody act like the messages people send to support are supposed to result in good PR or some kind of benefit for them.
It isn’t a PR outlet. It’s definitely not a community run beta testing/bug report line. It’s meant to be a point of contact for people who are likely already upset. The hope is that they come out the other end less upset, not happy they had a problem that support could fix. There is no winning, you aim to break even.
Feels kinda like complaining that IT isn’t giving you tangible returns. They aren’t meant to. They exist to put out your fires and prevent more.
Bottom line for me is, I don’t trust you. I don’t care what you claim telemetry is for, I assume that you are like any other business and want to make as much money as is possible, and that’s all the data will be used for. Selling it to whoever is interested. Dynamic pricing. Etc.
Sorry, but that’s the world we live in.
I think he is saying that he thought providing good support will be appreciated by users but it’s not. People complain about not being able to reach support and companies using chatbots for everything and he thought that the though offering quality support will be seen as something positive by customers. Turns out it’s not. You can just as well let bots handle it because people will stay unhappy no matter what service you provide.
The headline was invented by OP. The author is not really justifying telemetry. He’s just saying good support is worth less than he thought.
I think it is mainly happening because companies don’t want to pay for user research/studies and would rather try and make assumptions about how their software is used based on aggregate data collection.
Honestly the approach of telemetry for support makes sense. It’s why for my Fedora system I have telemetry enabled to a decently high level that I would be alarmed at with windows.
Part of the reason is that it’s so easy to enable/disable that I’m comfortable with more since I know how much I am sharing versus needing to “guess” how much is still open. Another is just that I have respect for software that respects me, so I’m more likely to send something back to help the dev.
The biggest tell for me in different areas is if data collection is presented as an opt in - even if it’s a screen you have to see and answer before use - then to me it’s a choice that I might want to make. If it’s there by default, it’s Spyware until proven otherwise, because I wasn’t told and the process foe removing requires prior knowledge.
Most software companies I dealt with didn’t provide enough support for the helpfulness of customers/users to make a significant difference to the support they provided, and that includes Microsoft in the context of an ‘enterprise’ support agreement. The few companies that did provide significant support never once, across decades of experience, identified that they had used or were helped by telemetry collection.
The telemetry collection may help them with product development, impact assessment and license enforcement. I never worked at one of those large vendors that does significant telemetry collection. Only the impact assessment might be considered relevant to support, though typically on a time frame irrelevant to any single support call.
Its a bit of both.
Absolutely, for sure, a decent amount of telemetry is for simply making decisions about what people actually use.
“Should we improve (thing), or drop it and stop supporting it?”
Well, lets just track how many people actually use it first for a bit and then decide.
Youd be surprised how often users beg for features and then stop using them after 1 week lol.
But sometimes a random feature you thought no one uses much turns out to be actually quite popular.
This same goes for optimizing. Your highest traffic parts of your website are there you wanna focus the most on stuff being optimized to save money and improve user experience.
Do a tonne of companies track stuff just to sell it as data for training AI?
Yeah, they do. And its gross.
But there is a huge amount of telemetry thats just developers wanting to genuinely improve the user experience, catch bugs, etc.
Completely disagree.
The only two reasons for telemetry are selling your data, or outsourcing QA.
How do you know?
I cannot think of a single bug report coming from a non technical person that would be useful to debug an issue. The most they do is get you to know about a potential problem in the system, which most of the time boils down to user error. Telemetry is pretty much the only way to find the root cause, other than a lab reproducing the customer’s environment 1:1, which is both unrealistic and would still require telemetry to be remotely possible.
I believe that’s what they’re saying, that if released software has any bugs that users encounter, and the developers want to know about them to fix them, they’re “outsourcing QA” to the users.
So yeah, good luck creating software and updates with literally no issues :P
QA happens before release. Of course that doesn’t prevent some bugs from slipping through, but instead of waiting for the user to break stuff, I broke it on purpose, working in QA.
I seriously don’t trust any telemetry. Maybe my “paranoia” or whatever makes me heavily biased.
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing, they want to know what updates broke.
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing
Maybe, but 834 of their business partners are very interested in what I’m doing, and how much they should bid for Copilot ad slots on my computer.
Funny that they log ssh logins to any server you connect to, and send it back to the mother ship. They litterly have no need for username and IP of server.
That’s why the increase in gathered telemetry correlates with a decrease in updates that break things.
And also an increase in updates that add things that people want and use! Like the new Copilot™ For Office 365™ Environments With Microsoft Teams™ Integration (new) & knuckles
They do give a shit about what the collective is doing, which is ironic, because the people that want things to change are the people that stop Microsoft from seeing what they are doing. When the power user opts out of letting Microsoft see how they use Windows, it pushes Windows user base more towards the center, as Microsoft sees it. So, when a feature is lost, a user can’t claim that the feature was load bearing because their use-case is self-muted. Of course, you can always just switch to Linux and hope whatever feature you want has enough support from the community to maintain status in the kernel, but that’s just trading one engineer for the other.
With Linux, in the worst case, you can probably find a dev who’s willing to take your money to maintain a feature. Might not even be that much money, depending. Windows? Not a chance.
Then why are they making so mich revenue through search ads? Brother stop being so naive.
