[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.