[dschuetz]

There's this anecdote (which might have been made up entirely to make a point):

Restaurant management wanted to compare different soup offerings by counting orders from each soup to determine which ones were more popular. They have selected the most popular two offerings, the rest were scrapped in order to safe money on ingredients. Soon after, not only did the order numbers of those two soup offerings drop, the total number of soup orders dropped. How come? Well, maybe nobody has asked the customers if the offered soup was tasty at all. A quick survey revealed that customers make the popular choice, find out it's crap, and then do not ever order soup again in that restaurant, or in rarer cases give the other one a shot. It turned out, the most popular offer was basically cheap crap nobody wanted to eat, and when there's nothing else, they keep ordering the same, or never visit that restaurant again.

Telemetry does not tell anything about user preferences. Who ever is selling you that idea, does not either.