14 DAY TRIAL // Believe it or not, but Microsoft is about to get serious this time as far as the way it handles consumer feedback is concerned. The company says that the consumer is now the core of its business, so getting closer to users and talking to them about new products, services, and technologies is a priority right now.
This is what Terry Myerson, the new head of the Windows operating systems division, recently said in an interview with ZDNet, explaining that receiving feedback from their customers and improving the products based on their opinions is critical for the company’s long-term strategy.
“We want to get feedback from our customers on our work. That feedback will make it better. We don't believe that we have all the perfect ideas inside the team. We want to be out there with our work to get feedback from our customers and iterate with them,” Myerson explained.
“Getting the customer feedback and listening to the customers’ needs to be at the core of how we deliver really high quality products. We are listening to feedback and responding to feedback.”
Although Microsoft wants to involve consumers as much as possible in product testing, the company says that telemetry data is still playing a key role in developing products.
But getting help from customers is at least as critical, Myerson pointed out, as Microsoft is continuously working to expand its product lineup, so it now develops solutions for a wider range of devices.
“I do think that telemetry data is part of the feedback cycle. Getting the quantitative feedback of how people use your products is part of the feedback cycle. It's just different. But we do want to iterate and develop these high quality solutions with the customers,” he pointed out.
The new CEO, Satya Nadella, has said pretty much the same thing on several occasions, adding that the opinion of users across the world could significantly influence the way a product could look like when it hits the market.
This made many believe that Microsoft is stepping back right now and fixing some of the mistakes it made in the past by reintroducing some of the features that customers have been asking for, including the Start button and the Start menu. Myerson however says this isn’t the case and explains that bringing back these features is only part of Microsoft’s strategy to tweak the operating system in order for it to work better on a wide array of devices.