One does not prevent the other. Companies do talk to their customers but data talks far better and reveals insights that customers themselves don't have.
There's wrong ways to use telemetry, but overall they are positive, especially in large apps where gaining insights on tiny percentages of your userbase is both important and impractical. That does mean Windows, Android, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
It's the same in game dev. You might see through telemetry that 80 percent of your churn is right after one specific quest. Without telemetry, this might not be something you notice, because churn rarely ever talks and when they do they're not accurate.
> ... data talks far better and reveals insights that customers themselves don't have.
I can see how that would be the case for games. They're special purpose one-offs, and aren't tools for getting a job done.
For business applications though, the concept of "data talking far better" than actually talking to customers seems very wrong headed to me.
It's very common for business application users to follow processes that are effectively workarounds for missing or broken functionality in their tool set.
When they're able to communicate with the vendor and describe what they're actually needing to do, the tools can be changed to achieve the desired result properly.
I've never heard of telemetry being able to address "how the tool should be working" rather than sending a stream of data showing what a user did. Maybe good for support issues, but pretty useless for product planning and addressing actual user needs.
There's wrong ways to use telemetry, but overall they are positive, especially in large apps where gaining insights on tiny percentages of your userbase is both important and impractical. That does mean Windows, Android, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
It's the same in game dev. You might see through telemetry that 80 percent of your churn is right after one specific quest. Without telemetry, this might not be something you notice, because churn rarely ever talks and when they do they're not accurate.