Quote:
Originally Posted by wakaba
Again - services for legacy users are terminated all the time in tech.
Google terminated the free service Google reader. Loyal Google reader users made a huge fuss.
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Totally different situation. I was a regular user of Google Reader and wasn't happy when they discontinued it, but I simply wasn't entitled to have my Reader account maintained because they had never claimed they would maintain them forever.
In fastmail's case, they did claim it would be a lifetime account, and I paid for that (more than one, in fact).
I can't think of a single case of a well-known company selling a service, promising it would be supported for a specific period of time (whether that's the customer's lifetime or any other period), and then unilaterally withdrawing the service from the customers who bought it before that time period was up (for any reason other than the company going out of business). And this is true even though virtually every company has terms of service that would make it technically legal for them do so if they chose. Can anyone else think of an example of this?
Probably the reason for this is that most companies realize it's not only immoral but also bad business to renege on promises to their customers. After all, most people wouldn't feel comfortable paying a company for a service knowing that in the past the company sometimes chose not to deliver the service it sold.