Quote:
Originally Posted by jhollington
The problem is there's a huge philosophical gulf between the group of happily-paying annual FastMail members and the legacy "Member" users, and it's probably difficult to bridge that gap between those who feel that an e-mail address and account borders on being a basic right and those who feel that anything important is worth paying to get done properly. I'm not even saying that one philosophy is more correct than the other — merely that it's hard for one side to really understand where the other is coming from.
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(The following isn't necessarily directed at the author of this quote in particular, I just picked it as a summation of sorts of what several members have been saying.)
Actually, the philosophical gulf here is between those who feel that when you voluntarily offer something as part of a contract, it's not OK to reneg on it later just because you changed your mind, and those who see nothing wrong with "hooking" people or raising funds with an attractive promise and then later going back on it because "Internet time" is somehow different, or some other hand-waving excuse. It's not very fair to treat the customers complaining here as "unreasonable" because they in good faith chose to take up this promise over other alternatives they may have had - and at the same time defend as "understandable" the actions of the company who (voluntarily!) made said promise and now wants to weasel out.
Just so we're clear, I don't have a Member level account and I absolutely don't mind paying yearly for FM service and have been doing just that for more than a decade. But, I also happen to believe that it's not right to break promises to customers, especially not over reasons as nebulous as "
we have decided to no longer support this account type to help simplify our internal architecture".
I'd love to hear what exactly this simplification entails and why it is in fact necessary, because right now this is just using technical-sounding language to justify what looks very much like a business decision. I think this may well be what's so upsetting to those affected - that this is apparently being done "just because", without any obvious reason that people could weigh. We know these accounts are lightweight in terms of resources and FM says there's a "limited number" of them left, so what exactly is the problem with keeping them around? This is more difficult to fathom than the shuttering of the Classic interface, because while Classic reportedly takes 20% of developer time to maintain and has an evident architectural impact, Member accounts are accounts like any other, with no obvious overhead like that. Or am missing something big here?