Perhaps rephrase the Q: Why isn't there an independent Rotten Tomatoes for x ...

Rotten Tomatoes is owned by:

Warner Bros. (25%) NBCUniversal (75%)

If there was a Rotten Tomatoes for consumer electronics, I would suspect that it would be owned by Apple, Samsung, or Sony ...

Peter principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

... or the "Pro" label is a hint that this is not an MVP (for the masses). Perhaps over-engineered to the point that they expect early adopter feedback will provide guidance on what can be axed.

Macbook Pro vs. Macbook kind of thing.

I have the same feeling. The features they packed into there is like if they had every engineer working on it write something down on a paper note and throw it into a hat and then build everything that was suggested into a single device.

There is probably quite a bit of room to cut out things, first and foremost the EyeSight ( even though it's cool ) to get to a more reasonable product.

We speculate that when Microsoft bought that part of Nokia, somewhere in the process the Sync.com domain name went up for auction (which appeared to be owned by Nokia just prior to the spin off).

As a startup trying to get going with Sync.Us, rebranding to https://www.sync.com really helped us take off.

Thanks to whomever auctioned that off :-)

But doesn't a lot "good tech" have nefarious roots?

The internet got its start as a government weapon in the Cold War?

Any tool is a weapon proportional to its power & utility. Beyond that, there's nothing nefarious inherent in weaponry, the DARPA initiatives that birthed the internet were based in defense, against nuclear annihilation. Seems like a win-win, politics non-withstanding.

We used this tactic as a growth hack in our early days (2016), and it worked great!

It also inspires sharing on Twitter, which helps drive the recommendation flywheel:

https://twitter.com/tdnvl/status/722882182759452675

The trouble is that it isn't easily scalable in-house at high volume. It was great until we realized that we were managing a large scale mailroom. But by then the flywheel was spinning ...

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I was wondering if it would work for saas businesses, as the article talks mostly about e-commerce and hospitality.

Perhaps they start adding quality of life micro-transactions?

Some of which provide enough value that a significant portion of the user-base ends up paying for something?

A long, long time ago I registered a domain name for a close group of friends, and the 4 of us have been happily use the free Gsuite for email @thedomain ever since.

From what I can tell we'd will have to start paying CAD $31.20 per month for 4 users. Seems pricy for our use case?

do the friends only email each other on the domain, or use it for all things email? if doing it just amongst the friends, you can drop to just one account, then share the credentials amongst the group. use it like freedom fighters to just write drafts to each other.

It's their primary personal email account for everything. Mine too.

Looking for a Dropbox alternative? We were M1 native at launch (https://www.Sync.com).

question about your support levels. for a solo basic account, do you really not offer a your-business-hours chat support function?

We offer high speed email support at that level. It's in-house and fast.

Thanks. I’ve been a Crashplan customer for eons and the last two restores I’ve done from code42 went sideways. So looking for a reasonable alternate.

I used to be a paying customer of Sync and hated every single thing about it I'm afraid. The web interface was so painfully slow to use that a simple file share task would take 10 minutes of waiting for things to load or, as was most often the case, fail to load.

Exchanging a problem for another. SyncThing ( https://syncthing.net/ ) is the definitive solution: free software, peer to peer and no data leaking anywhere.