[geraldwhen]

This doesn’t scale. If your app reaches any level of success, you don’t get one email per night, you get 100. When my app was small I responded individually, but after I hit a threshold I had to use a template response for feature requests just to stay productive.

[jka]

It can scale, and I'd wager that it will. There is -- or should in future be -- a far larger number of software developers than the number of components that are required to compose the functionality that everyone needs and desires, at high quality and with ever-reducing negative externalities.

That's a good thing: it'll provide more time for review, apprenticeship, mentoring and mastery of individual technical areas, and for mobility and communication between communities.

That's not to say there can't also be pure-enjoyment and hobby software projects; but those won't have the same support demands (or expectations).

Small (or solo) teams maintaining systems with massive inbound demand, significant risk during changes, and limited ability to receive community feedback feels like the less-scalable approach, to me.

That said I'm willing to concede that both approaches appear to work under different circumstances (and may be able to learn from each other).

[busymom0]

You have a fair point but I disagree. However I also recognize that I can only be proven right or wrong when I am in those shoes at some very large scale. For now, I do get about 5-10 emails a day for all my apps combined and it’s been easily manageable.

However, the article we are talking about here is about Microsoft, a trillion dollar company treating some basic user feedback with zero value.

Amazon, another trillion dollar company has been outstanding to me whenever I reach out to their customer support chat (I have done that many times over the years). I get to chat to a human within a minute and they help me either resolve the issue or tell me why they can’t resolve the issue. If Amazon can do it, then there’s no reason why Microsoft can’t do it for basic user feedback.

Also are you really being productive if you are sending template response? A robot could do that.