This reeks of a team floundering trying to figure out how to keep a ship from sinking.
1. Our "Free" product is now $6000/year ($500/mo)
2. OR give us a link-back
3. OR prepare for a lawyering
While the response is inflammatory and wonderful for up-vote fodder, I can't imagine any calm, decent person ever taking this tact with a client.
There are 17 different emails they could have sent to SupportBee that would have been more constructive than this.
I wonder if the Gigya team is too young to know better or if they have back-breaking pressure on them from their investors to turn any sort of profit before they are all taken out to sea and shot.
Obviously a stupid response, but really seems to be a response out of pure desperation more than anything.
1. $6000/year, OR
2. link-back, OR
3. If neither of these options are chosen within 3 months,
we will disable the service on our end.
The $6k/year price is a bit steep, but that's their prerogative. Similarly, they are well within their rights to disable the service after reasonable notice. They may even be within their rights to sue, but suing clients (or even threatening to) is not the way to Win Friends and Influence People.
Let's not assume that not knowing better requires youth. Because let's face it, there are plenty of older folk who are still this stupid, and plenty of younger people who realize that threatening to sue their clients for no good reason is a Bad Move.
This is such a facile meme, and now you've stretched it to a new level of absurdity. Lawyers doing pro bono work don't have clients? Somebody for whom you are doing work for trade isn't a client?
Nonsense. If someone is using your property (or widget) without your permission (or license), it is reasonable to consider them a thief (or pirate), and absurd to consider them a client (or customer).
That description is almost but not quite entirely unlike what actually happened. They were using the widget with permission, and suddenly they changed their minds and wanted to start charging for it, but without doing anything to enforce that.
It may or may not be unlike what happened depending on if, when and how the terms of service were revised.
For example if the TOS were revised two years ago, then it is possible that there was no longer permission to use it (it is also possible that permission continued).
"Obviously a stupid response, but really seems to be a response out of pure desperation more than anything."
Yes, that seems to be the simplest explanation. But from the original article this was the second communication as well. The first one, (which is linked), was pretty clear that the choices were 'give us a link or pay us money, your choice.' The author notes it had a useless subject line. And useless or not, if a vendor I'm using sends me an email I read it, and if it truly is useless I ask them to not send useless email.
So this was an escalation on the part of Gigya from "We've changed our pricing, we don't offer a free version any more so you have to choose a new option." To "You ignored our previous response, let's be perfectly clear about what your choices are."
Now you can argue that the sequence might be: nice, nice, threat. But if the company is looking at a shrinking runway they might cut out the middle 'nice' version of the communication.
And the author comments "This almost makes it a paid link that can help them rank up for ‘Social Media for Business’" No, this is exactly a paid link for helping Gigya rank higher on Google. Clearly they feel like the paid link is 'equivalent value' to the $6,000 which they want to charge.
The only economic question here is what economic value does SupportBee put on a paidlink on their site? If it were less than $6,000 then they win by giving the link to Gigya, if its more then they should just pay the $6,000/yr. (or use a different service).
I can't find a lot of fault on Gigya's part here. That it caught SupportBee by surprise seems to be because the author didn't read their mail.
> So this was an escalation on the part of Gigya from "We've
> changed our pricing, we don't offer a free version any more
> so you have to choose a new option." To "You ignored our
> previous response, let's be perfectly clear about what your
> choices are."
Exactly right.
> I can't find a lot of fault on Gigya's part here. That it
> caught SupportBee by surprise seems to be because the
> author didn't read their mail.
Again, no argument from me (or I think anyone else?) -- the hub-bub is just over the tact Gigya took.
As you pointed out above and I mentioned in my comment, there are innumerable better ways to state what they were trying to get across and they chose one of the poorer ones.
So no problem with what they did, just how they did it.
I also can't help but wonder why they didn't just disable the widget for that client after the 1st or 2nd notice, let the client come to them and then start a peaceful up-sell discussion where a well-informed decision could be made (exactly the way you stated w.r.t. to the worth of the widget/vs first-page linking for SupportBee).
Net-net, nothing to see here, just some people being more rude than expected.
Why so rude? My guess is financial pressure is causing them to act more aggressively to secure income; as you put it, a shrinking runway.
The only economic question here is what economic value does SupportBee put on a paidlink on their site? If it were less than $6,000 then they win by giving the link to Gigya, if its more then they should just pay the $6,000/yr. (or use a different service).
I think this is almost the right question. The real one would compare the cost of having a paid link on their homepage, the cost of the service ($6000) and the value of the service. If the service isn't worth the cost of the paid link or of outright purchase, then dropping the service is the right decision.
I seemed to have missed the part about why Gigya did not just suspend the non-compliant users' service, or indicate they would do so in a communication.
Threatening legal action to the very people you worked so hard to get to use your free platform is just asking for problems.
Most of the Gigya apologists I've read seem to say something along the lines of, well the chips were down and they were shooting from the hip. As every true gunslinger knew, this was the fastest way to get killed.
There are 17 different emails they could have sent to SupportBee that would have been more constructive than this.
I wonder if the Gigya team is too young to know better or if they have back-breaking pressure on them from their investors to turn any sort of profit before they are all taken out to sea and shot.
Obviously a stupid response, but really seems to be a response out of pure desperation more than anything.