I came across this article from Rick Segal, which comments

"Somebody in marketing got it exactly right, get the beta out there and somebody put some code in the way. That shouldn't happen."

Rick is a VC not a pure techie, although I see he has a lot of tech toys, and seems knowledgable but I thought I'd play devils advocate. Now I should no better not to get embroiled in tit-for-tat, but in the last two jobs that I had in which I didn't wear the developer hat...

Usually these sort of comments come from the marketing department,

• Oh but we need to keep in touch with our customers
• Whats the point in asking the question if you don't get an answer
• we can always sell the data on

and my personal favourite

• I want to send an email to all our customers tonight

I personally HATE responding to any marketing ploy whether software constricted or not. If I want to buy something I will explore the market and purchase what I think is the best product.

• I don't want your latest offer,
• I don't want your business partners (i.e. some company who you sold my details to) products
• I will drop out of any process that asks me too much information

If you want to uniquely identify me use a Guid.

I spent a couple of months working on a beta registration process that uses a Hardware fingerprint to look up your machine and get a unique guid. This is then used in all my beta products. I can send weekly reports using this service which say things like

• Ran 5 times this week for a total of 20 hours
• Added 3 new categories
• read 20% of data

I know more about my customers usage of my product than anyone, but if I want to contact them all I can do is tag their Guid with a question . Next time they run the application (online) they get asked, I offer them the chance to email me. I still don't know where they live or when they next expect to buy a new car/refrigerator/tv.

Right now I work for a company that has the (for me) perfect answer, customer contact is not the responsibility of the software, we have a client support team to handle that. If Rick still has a problem with how something is coded, maybe the he writes spec (assuming one is provided) needs to be written better next time.