[heifetz]

Here's an experiment. Take all the forum members on macrumors and crowd source a new phone by taking all of their ideas. See what kind of mutant non-functioning phone results from a democratic process. One of the reason why Apple and Google's phones and OSs are successful is because there are visionaries (Ives, Jobs, Rubin) at the top coming up with new ideas, instead of taking a poll and purely going with consumer feedback.

[kkowalczyk]

That's not what Xiaomi does.

They do have designers and program managers whose job is to decide which submitted ideas should be implemented and which should be discarded (and I'm sure a majority is discarded).

In fact, listening to your users (as compared to just doing things you think are good) is the basic idea of Lean Startup and other agile methodologies.

You're not supposed to put users in a driver's seat but you are supposed to listen to their feedback.

Apple's weakness is that they don't listen to users (or at least I don't know of a channel where my feedback would be likely to catch Apple's PM attention). I understand the challenge of trying to listen to users at Apple's scale and they're extraordinarily successful regardless, but it doesn't mean that you can't get meaningful feedback and meaningful ideas from your user base. Xiaomi is a proof that it's possible.

[toomuchtodo]

Benevolent Dictator > Design By Committe

[gbog]

This is a false truth a see too often. Many products, human creations, are the result of the accretion of many contributors over time. Think cities, the bible, food recipes, most long form narratives from middle ages, etc.

So, no, your equation is not true, neither is the reverse.