To my knowledge reneging only applies when it's a voluntary decision. A company that has been sold by its previous owner for generating a 800k loss is not doing much of anything by choice. It's just fighting insolvency.
IANAL and I'm not making legal claims, if that's what you're getting at.
Just on the basis of fair expectations in the marketplace, if you say all you need is a fixed rate to serve me for the rest of time, then that's the deal. Anything short, insolvency or otherwise, is reneging. The mismanagement of the company is not my concern.
And before people hop on and make it sound like people with this expectation are naive for believing a company could offer this lifetime service for that fee, AntennaPod + gPodder.net provide the _exact same service_ for the low price of $0. I gave PocketCasts money, and somehow they turned that into -800K .
I don't know where this mentality that customers owe companies that fall short of their promises grace or understanding come from. When I fall short of my obligations to companies, collection agencies rather than thank you notes usually appear.
The company could also go bankrupt and shutdown. Lifetime subscriptions are nice but notice that in other real-world transactions say a "lifetime warranty" on a stove or whatever is defined as the expected lifetime of the device. I agree that "lifetime" is deceptive marketing, but it's not unusual marketing. It is a bit unusual perhaps that there isn't a defined term for the life of the software or service.
I hope you never hear about free refills that they have in some restaurants.
You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago. Why can't you instead be happy with all the value you got from the app? We aren't born to be small minded and stingy, look up to greater goals and a greater attitude in life. We only have so many years before it is cut from us.
The app updates aren’t free, I paid for them with my lifetime subscription.
They could do what other apps have done and release a new SKU for a new business model or with a new feature set that justifies asking for more money. Reeder has done this, for example.
I think JetBrains has one of the most fair and honest subscription schemes where you pay for a subscription but when you stop paying you’re free to keep using the last major version that released while you were subscribed. I think that’s much harder to do on mobile app stores, though.
But you can still use the app you paid for during the rest of your life. Nobody is forcing you to do updates to your phone, certainly Pocket Cast aren't forcing you to update your phone.
They didn't warn us ahead of time that there would be ads. The patch notes didn't even mention the ads! Shifty Jelly used to have legendary patch notes, but it's been a long time since that was true. And since app stores don't actually let you downgrade to a previous version, your comment is simply untrue.
But the original agreement was for updates for a lifetime. Of course people are going to be upset if they were promised one thing and ended up getting something else.
It's a life time membership, not a decade time membership. And OP is still alive.
Why they feel entitled to the thing they paid for is not hard to see. A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support.
> A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support
This is what I would like to know. Granted, Google makes it hard to be an app developer these days with constant requirements to update things just to stay compatible and compliant with all their requirements. But still - $800k a year is like 4 full time well paid staff. And that was their loss, so add all the revenue to that.
The real answer of course, is they aren't just maintaining the app as is, they are trying to push all sorts of new features into it and this is what's costing them. But why should previous users be paying for that?
If someone tells me one thing and delivers another I am never going to default to "happy" and be quiet because I "should be thankful" for the deal I did get.
I don't know what world that failing to keep your word is OK, but just because an entity is a company doesn't give them a free pass. No matter how good the deal is.
So how about those free refills at McDonalds? Clearly you have the right to return there every day for the rest of your life and fill up hundreds of cups each time. After all, it is in the agreement between both parties, so go for it!
There's a free refill policy at Starbucks too, but it specifically states the constraints, which I used the hell out of for years, and is just part of the deal. It's advantageous in a number of different ways for them, but if it wasn't they can take that out of the contract. Worth noting that it still remains despite lackluster and varying performance in the market; their milk sales would compensate anyway.
"Free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee and tea. Starbucks Rewards members may receive free refills of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea during the same day in store visit at participating Starbucks stores (excludes Cold Brew and Nitro Cold Brew, Iced Tea Lemonade, Flavored Iced Tea, and Starbucks Refreshers® base). To be eligible for free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea, your initial order must be served in for-here ware or a clean reusable cup."
While the timeline isn't explicitly stated, free refills are implied that it's for the duration of your visit. In fact you can see the implication given that's how it's used most of the time.
Telling someone they'll get "lifetime" access for a one-time payment is not the same.
Except those are not even close to the same type of software to fairly compare. A file manager has virtually no inherent servicing costs to pay compared to a podcast player.
Probably the location they were last registered to vote? If they've never been registered to vote, then the place they were last domiciled?
If we're on the democratic reforms train, then this is all a silly discussion we're forced to have because the US doesn't have proportional representation.
> ...you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things.
I think it's a worthwhile message to tell folks that we, collectively, should be mindful about the resources we consume and the waste we produce. For such razor-thin (lol) gains in QoL, I think it's worth reminding people to consider whether it is worth the huge increase in waste. Knives are metal and wood/plastic... awfully efficient tools for the work they get done.
EDIT: And to balance the negativity, I _love_ the Seattle Ultrasonics logo.
> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.
This style of classical fascism or economic fascism, or whatever the term is differentiate it from the modern unrelated usage of fascism, being used in the US is a bit unnerving, and it's crazy that it's usually from the Republican party, who claims to espouse free markets.
It also happened under G. W. Bush with banks and auto manufacturers, but the worst offense was under Nixon with his nationalization of passenger rail.
At least with the bank and car manufacturer bailouts the government eventually sold off their stocks, and with the Intel investment the government has non-voting shares, but the government completely controls the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (the NRPC aka Amtrak) with the board members being appointed by the president of the United States.
We lost 20 independent railroads overnight, and created a conglomerate that can barely function.
That's how post-WW2 France was actually rebuilt. You could also see big hints of that in the US WW2 economic effort, which couldn't have been done without the Government taking a direct hold of things and instituting central-ish planning.
You're speaking of what is referred to as neo-corporatism [0] and it's a tripartite, democratic process, not the fascist sort where everything is within and for the benefit of the state [1].
There was not that much democracy in the French post-WW2 technocratic establishment, but I agree that they were not technically fascist (nor otherwise).
There's big difference between government allocating tax payer dollars by passing a bill than a president using their influence to force dealings between corporate entities that benefit the ruling party.
The parent comment is speculation. But yes, speculatively, a legislative act of investment would be less authoritarian than the whims of an executive that puts tariffs on your product constantly unless you do what he says.
Is the method by which it’s communicated what gives you negative feelings? Because this is an approach to handling the labor dumping that’s been allowed in nearly every industry since the 1980s, and it’s been used numerous times in the US and abroad. They typically only offer temporary relief, while domestic industries should be adjusting and better trade deals get negotiated. The last I checked, that’s been happening to some degree… but it also probably needs to be supported by the ability for companies to borrow money, which the Fed (until recently) seemed hell bent on preventing, while we continued to watch the job market burn to the ground. So cash flush businesses investing in each other to keep competition alive seems like a positive here. Maybe that’s just me?
Most regulation is effectively coercion. The difference is regulation isn’t easily rolled back, whereas the current approach to modifying behavior is (as we’ve seen, numerous times in the last few months even). One is more tolerant of failure than the other.
There is an extreme where policy cannot be modified, and there is an extreme where the whims of one person, and the precedent of having the US government defined as the whims and whiplashes of one person, is immensely harmful to our national credibility. It fucks with investment, immigration and education.
While the reasons you list reduce the cost to ABC for cancelling Kimmel, it is no less outrageous and alarming that the current administration forced Kimmel out because of his criticism of the government.
Maher, like the Dixie Chicks and Garofalo, criticized a deeply popular war (regardless of what you think of it) and were ostensibly cancelled pre-cancellation era. The government didn't issue a statement through a right-wing podcast stating that the network better toe the line or get it's affiliate license revoked.
You are right, this has happened before. This is far more like the purges of the red scare. People were just (perhaps naively) hoping society had progressed from where we were ~70 years ago.
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