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Originally Posted by samhu
Anyway, as we are not privy to how many such legacy accounts there are out there, here's a bit of speculation on my part. Pick a number - 1000? 5000? At the lower number, the sum involved would be USD3k/month, and at the higher end, USD15k/month. And that's with a 100 percent conversion rate from "one-time payment" to "subscriber". If this amount is so critical to Fastmail, maybe we all shouldn’t be so smug about the longevity of any of our Fastmail email addresses? Just a thought.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wakaba
Notice the absurd premise that Fastmail should only discontinue member accounts if not doing so would have fatal consequences for Fastmail. The degree of entitlement is remarkably audacious.
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I don't read in it a sense of entitlement, I read logic. Either keeping members affects $FM's bottom line or it doesn't. If it doesn't, they're behaving arbitrarily, if it does, they're potentially financially unsound.
However, I think the problem goes deeper than that in two respects.
First, in my opinion $FM will become more and more solely email for businesses and stop appealing to individuals or families (except some IT professionals). Members weren't businesses. The new organizational mindset won't care about individuals, therefore, it won't care about members. Simple. If it once did, it will do its best to forget.
Second, we have to see this in the context of the 'death of email'. Email for the masses is oversupplied, there's nothing to be gained by giving the masses an exquisite product (particularly not masses who're used to getting everything for free). And people serving the needs of business communications won't have to compete only against other email providers, they have to compete against new products like Slack and other forms of messaging, which might eventually displace email. The competition for the next round of technological advancement is likely to be fierce, and many along the road will perish. $FM's goal is probably to make sure they can offer an advanced technological product, along a profitable user base, so that they can appeal to a big organization, along the lines, probably, of a NASDAQ-listed CRM provider, and be bought up. And I might venture if it wasn't bought in about five years, $FM's value as a business would decline and it might become outdated and unwanted (perhaps like uReach). So, yes, I do see behind this move a move to specialization and profitability and away from the threat of anonymity and irrelevance as a business, but it's in a broader context, not the context of whether or not they keep member plans. Members and member plans are nothing in the big picture, it's a legacy of something past that does not matter any more. Member plans are like the organ that malfunctions and dies before the person (email as a whole) will die. Member plans are no more.