What does Microsoft do with all the reports it gets from consumers?

OnTheCoast: What does Microsoft do with all the reports it gets from consumers?
Every time a program crashes or doesn’t respond, a dialog box comes up in order to report it to Microsoft. What does Microsoft do with these reports?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Longhorn Traveller
puts them in the trash it seems :/

Answer by LoverOfWine
Naturally they won’t have time to examine them all. I expect there is some trend analysis going on to see if there are common threads of problems that they should investigate. It can also be used to identify weak points in the system that need to be reviewed.

At minimum they are used as a trigger to tell you there is a fix to the problem.