7 ms·

You can achieve 99% of that by using your own product and talking to your customers, and everybody managed to do just that and to make useful products long bef

You can achieve 99% of that by using your own product and talking to your customers, and everybody managed to do just that and to make useful products long before telemetry became ubiquitous.

eestrada 4y ago
I would argue that using your own product and talking to your customers is the only way to make good and useful products. Telemetry may have a good use case (although I struggle to find one), but it isn't a substitute for dogfooding and direct customer interaction.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  The true use case here is to get you used to the idea of telemetry in your tool chain, then move the goal post further down the road. In a few years, it'll be encouraged to put telemetry in your library ("Why?" "We've already had it in the tool chain this isn't any different!") then eventually, have every application sending telemetry data to Google's servers. If you think this is ridiculous, remember they built Chrome with telemetry embedded .. why? Not for improving services. To build better targeted advertising. Remember Android OS? Yes. But there's still push back and the primary group of people resisting this at large are developers and the more technically inclined.
alkonaut 4y ago
People don’t know how many cache misses they had, or what IO exceptions and retries led to their poor experience. They know they had a poor experience. No one will afford to make interviews on the scale of making good statistics. Knowing when I can sunset support for a specific OS or hardware (e.g screen resolution) would require a huge amount of expensive surveying. The telemetry that tells me 20% of my users use 4K screens now literally costs single digit dollars per month. It costs the same as one or a handful of “talking to users”. More importantly, you don’t need to waste precious time when talking to users with asking them what driver version or screen resolution they have. Because of course users are spoken to. Telemetry isn’t instead of talking to users. It’s so that a) you can focus your user conversion on human focused things and b) so that you cover a wider group than you could ever afford talking to. It’s better to be up front with the fact that software does anonymous telemetry and prudent that it actually is good (anonymous, and not using excessive resources).

You can achieve 99% of that by using your own product and talking to your customers, and everybody managed to do just that and to make useful products long before telemetry became ubiquitous.

eestrada 4y ago

I would argue that using your own product and talking to your customers is the only way to make good and useful products. Telemetry may have a good use case (although I struggle to find one), but it isn't a substitute for dogfooding and direct customer interaction.

deafpolygon 4y ago
The true use case here is to get you used to the idea of telemetry in your tool chain, then move the goal post further down the road. In a few years, it'll be encouraged to put telemetry in your library ("Why?" "We've already had it in the tool chain this isn't any different!") then eventually, have every application sending telemetry data to Google's servers. If you think this is ridiculous, remember they built Chrome with telemetry embedded .. why? Not for improving services. To build better targeted advertising. Remember Android OS? Yes. But there's still push back and the primary group of people resisting this at large are developers and the more technically inclined.

alkonaut 4y ago

People don’t know how many cache misses they had, or what IO exceptions and retries led to their poor experience. They know they had a poor experience. No one will afford to make interviews on the scale of making good statistics. Knowing when I can sunset support for a specific OS or hardware (e.g screen resolution) would require a huge amount of expensive surveying. The telemetry that tells me 20% of my users use 4K screens now literally costs single digit dollars per month. It costs the same as one or a handful of “talking to users”. More importantly, you don’t need to waste precious time when talking to users with asking them what driver version or screen resolution they have. Because of course users are spoken to. Telemetry isn’t instead of talking to users. It’s so that a) you can focus your user conversion on human focused things and b) so that you cover a wider group than you could ever afford talking to. It’s better to be up front with the fact that software does anonymous telemetry and prudent that it actually is good (anonymous, and not using excessive resources).