Complainers are not your enemies

Complainers are not your enemies

Exactly. Focus groups and usability studies tell you what you want to know; complaints tell you what you don't want to know, and thus you will get from nowhere else. It takes a certain humility to accept this kind of criticism and it is not easy to do, but you can find examples: Google recognizing the Honeycomb closed-source debacle, or Microsoft accepting the Vista fiasco. They don't say: "complaints are not helping" (or not any more); they have swallowed their pride and tried to correct course.

The equivalent of the Gnome and KDE projects complaining about critics is a child covering their ears and shouting "La-la-la". Not a good impression on critics or on users. I have seen first hand how positively customers react when their criticisms are heard and redressed (as best as the complaints department could); they gave even better scores than those customers which had no complaints to begin with!