How Microsoft Collects Customer Data (excerpt)

The nature of Microsoft’s product and industry enable it to collect user feedback in interesting and more effective ways. Windows ships with an opt-in feature that anonymously tracks a user’s mouse clicks and feature use (collectively referred to as telemetry data). This feature is called the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). The data collected by CEIP on each user’s machine is relayed to Microsoft and aggregated in a database which is made available to the developing teams involved in the UI design. As a simple example, such data collected showed that most of the time, when a user right-clicked the desktop, they either wanted to change the screen resolution or somehow customize the look of their desktop. As a result, those two features no longer require digging through menus. Over an installed base of 400 milllion people, that’s a lot of mouse-clicks saved! The CEIP has an incredible advantage over traditional user data collection methods in that it collects unbiased data from real users.