Tactical Grace
26-05-2004, 11:29
I have been a loyal, unpaying customer, with a certain free ISP since August 1999. I remember joining when they first appeared. The following year, they still had only 50,000 subscribers. When things went wrong, as they often did, the Founder would e-mail all the customers explaining what happened, and offering his apologies. Eventually, he stepped down from the post, as he explained, to spend more time with his family. It was real customer service. You really got to know the people who were running it.
Later, they introduced pop-up ads on webspace. Then a fee-paying premium service. Then more services, and business IT solutions. Finally, they became a big, corporate ISP, like all the rest. But they still honoured the contracts with their dwindling number of first users. For this, I continued to respect them.
Two days ago, I got an e-mail, saying my accounts will be terminated today, because I am using Broadband, not their Broadband, nor their dial-up, to access my accounts. Yes, after nearly 5 years of using, almost exclusively, their services, and never giving them beef even when the servers got switched off for a week at a time, I am being kicked off. Unless I want to pay a ridiculous amount of money a month to switch from all the stuff I am using today.
You would think that the handful of people who stayed with their company from the very beginning, through numerous collapses and near-liquidation, would have deserved to keep an e-mail account and a few MB of webspace. But no.
Now I am forced to move my stuff to Yahoo, a lot of which will end up as broken links on a whole load of websites, forcing me to send a whole load of e-mails to a list of webmasters I have yet to compile.
This sucks.
Later, they introduced pop-up ads on webspace. Then a fee-paying premium service. Then more services, and business IT solutions. Finally, they became a big, corporate ISP, like all the rest. But they still honoured the contracts with their dwindling number of first users. For this, I continued to respect them.
Two days ago, I got an e-mail, saying my accounts will be terminated today, because I am using Broadband, not their Broadband, nor their dial-up, to access my accounts. Yes, after nearly 5 years of using, almost exclusively, their services, and never giving them beef even when the servers got switched off for a week at a time, I am being kicked off. Unless I want to pay a ridiculous amount of money a month to switch from all the stuff I am using today.
You would think that the handful of people who stayed with their company from the very beginning, through numerous collapses and near-liquidation, would have deserved to keep an e-mail account and a few MB of webspace. But no.
Now I am forced to move my stuff to Yahoo, a lot of which will end up as broken links on a whole load of websites, forcing me to send a whole load of e-mails to a list of webmasters I have yet to compile.
This sucks.