A premiere for me:
That’s pretty cool :) I always asked myself what MS will be doing with all the many error reports I already sent them. Do they just pipe them to /dev/null? Collect them in the marketing department to do some data mining on how much more stable product xy is than product yz? Forward them to Bayer so they can send me a free pack of Aspirin in order to fight the headache these bugs are causing? ;)
Well, after all, MS seems to use these reports to actually *fix* the errors (surprised? ;). Or at least some of them ;) And they inform their customers about new patches if available.. nice reward for sending bug reports! :) Like this, the whole thing makes sense. Instant feedback, that’s what customers want nowadays.
I never send them some information but I don’t do it to GPL-products neither. However, I reportet some bugs (i.e. gentoo) but in an other way. While you are able to control your informations you’re sending away if you do it for GPL-products, you can’t do that with MS-products.
However, I’m not going to say that all closed software are often not as good as the other competition participants. First of all, MS is very often backward in implementing new and innovative features