Software distribution processes

I'm reading an article from the Harvard Business Review entitled "Turn Customer Input into Innovation" (Anthony W. Ulwick, HBR 2002) - it's in my Marketing course notes - where he addresses the question of turning customer requests into products that will be successful in the market. His thesis is that many companies go about the customer information gathering experience wrongly, often charging customers themselves with the jobs of senior engineers by delegating the requirements process to them instead of keeping product innovation in-house. He advocates an "outcomes" approach (as opposed to a solutions based approach) to the customer data gathering process - getting the customers to talk honestly about the outcomes they want to achieve in their day-to-day jobs.

He mentions software in this article: "Software companies, for example, operate sophisticated user laboratories and employ keystroke-tracking technology in an effort to build incremental improvements into their products. Yet most users avail of less than 10% of the software's overall capability - and grumble when they feel forced to pay for upgrades". How true. I wonder if further research is available to underscore this?