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Grisak'a response in the article is fairly arrogant particularly with the Musk tweet thrown in. If you sell B2B then, by all means, fire customers, but if you sell on Amazon to consumers then you need to deal with them civilly regardless if you feel insulted.

I get the feeling a lawyer told him to explicitly state it wasn't about the review because there is a new federal law that protects reviewers. That statement doesn't jive with his previous posts.

I think it's okay to fire B2C customers, but refund them before you fire them. Even if you suspect they won't return the physical part of the product.

And do it with less snark. Just state it seems clear you won't ever see eye to eye, and give the money back.

I don't think a refund is necessarily sufficient legally. A customer has a contract with a supplier. That contract doesn't usually say (whether express or implied) that the supplier can arbitrarily terminate the contract with just a refund. So doing so would still be in breach of contract.

Legally, the remedy for breach of contract is to make the injured party whole, and that includes consequential damages. The customer may suffer consequential damages in excess of the price paid for the product (eg. "After buying your product I bought a new garage door to suit your product and now I have to get a different one to use with your competitor's product since the next best thing requires a different specification").

Offering a full refund is still entirely appropriate of course; I'm just pointing out that the customer doesn't have to accept that as a final settlement.

> I think it's okay to fire B2C customers

This "firing customers" terminology shows how deep in the Late Capitalism nightmare we really are.

If you even think in terms of "firing" B2C customers, you will eventually fail. "The customer is always right" isn't some kind of service-minded epithet with goodness and wholesomeness in mind, no; it's a loud warning! The customer can make or break you, can cause you to spend disproportionate resources to undo what they can do to you. The customer can, with a Yelp or Tripadvisor review, a lawsuit or a blog post, undermine your entire carefully marketed existence.

If you seriously put your pride on a pedestal next to all of that, you just shouldn't be dealing with B2C in the first place; you will be a menace to your organization.

I think the reaction would have been completely different if the reply was along the lines of "We're sorry to hear that your device does not work. We are issuing a refund immediately to your account - please keep in mind that since the refund was issued, your device won't be able to connect to our network any more. Have a pleasant day, and sorry for the inconvenience".

It would have achieved the exact same result, and I am sure the backlash wouldn't be 10% as severe.

To be fair to Grisak, Musk's "firing" of a customer was also a B2C situation. That being said, there are a number of factors that differ:

- Musk had not already sold the individual a car.

- Musk was (possibly) responding not to the critical blog post, but to the content of the phone conversation.

- It has not been decided yet, but I doubt Garadget will ultimately have the popularity and cachet of Tesla's cars. This, for better or worse, does have an impact on what you can get away with.

- All of the above notwithstanding, maybe this was not Elon Musk's finest moment. Not ever word out of his mouth is useful for all purposes. Citing the fact he said something, even if he was in a situation that is perfectly analogous to one's own, does not justify one's comparable action.

I should of separated out those two sentences since just the presence of that tweet was my problem, and I wanted B2B to be a separate point. I've noticed if some CEO quotes Jobs it is generally suspect too.

That being said, I do agree with all your points. I tend to think no garage door company is going to have the cachet of any Elon Musk company. Frankly, only Elon Musk could send out that tweet and not get hammered.

Can someone link to the original thing that Musk did?
B2B firing customers works because there is (supposedly) a professional on both ends of the transaction evaluating the offer and monitoring the relationship, and often a contract when a party isn't easily replaceable, and/or could get burned by the other.

That relationship is severely imbalanced in B2C transactions, and abusing that it is why consumer protection laws exist. Given the widespread acknowledgment of the abusable nature of that relationship, the only reasonable expectation to abusing it that doesn't rise to the level of crime or tort is still loud public disapproval.

I'll be honest (realizing it's not a popular opinion): I find it more than a bit hypocritical that when Musk pulled the same thing, everyone on HN seemed to support Musk. Yet this guy is just a complete jerk... because?

I personally think they were both completely in the wrong, but I get where he's coming from. Heck, the guy probably hangs out here and felt like he was in the right given the reaction to Musk's childish stunt.

A company can't ever fire a customer. An employer fires someone they pay, by no longer paying them. A company is payed by its clients, and so it is the clients that get to fire the company when it under-performs, by no longer paying for its services. A company can quit its clients by refusing to take more money from them, but to speak of firing customers is an abusive cognitive power play.
> A company can't ever fire a customer.

Why not?

> to speak of firing customers is an abusive cognitive power play.

The guy responsible for the term "fired" was well known for abusive power plays - http://meta.ath0.com/2015/03/17/etymology-of-youre-fired/

> Patterson had a way to deal with executives who particularly displeased him. in a previous case, he had the businessman’s desk and chair dragged out onto the lawn, where they were set on fire. Apparently Watson’s desk was similarly dragged out and burned, and the man himself was dismissed. When other employees asked where Watson was, Patterson simply said “Fired.”

What do you mean fire customers in B2B? You can terminate service with business customers anytime you want to?
> you need to deal with them civilly regardless if you feel insulted

I strongly disagree with the assertion all customers can be dealt with "civilly" while still remaining sane. Customer irrationality is widely varied, and sometimes you just need to take matters into Fate's hands to get back to rationality. OTOH, it's not something you want to do regularly, with the customers that is.

> That statement doesn't jive with his previous posts.

Nope, it does.

His original post (not posts) pointed at foul language first and foremost, which was then compounded by posting an equally charming Amazon review without making any attempt to wait for a reply. So his follow-up matches the post that led to this whole brouhaha.

But let's not allow this ruin all the fun of the vigilante justice and trying to beat the living daylights out this guy.

> then you need to deal with them civilly regardless if you feel insulted.

This is bullshit.

Part of what makes humans work is the fact we often won't take abuse even though it might make financial sense to let's our selves be abused.

You have every right to deal with it civilly, but the few business owers who don't deal with a$$holes are making your life better.

No comment on this particular case.

That's a real the danger of IoT devices. What happens​ if the company goes out of business, Or the company decides to terminate support? Cloud services should be additives not necessities.
One of the problems with these devices is they almost always come with "free" cloud management solutions, meaning you pay a one time fee for the hardware, and get access to "the cloud" for life for no additional fee

So the cloud services must be continually supported by selling new devices at an exponentially increasing rate to support both old and new customers.. In other markets this is called a pyramid scheme where new investors pay off old investors...

I will not buy a IoT product that does not some with a Self Hosted management option, preferably open source, but at minimum installable binaries to run on my own server. If they want to provide their own service for the less technical clients more power to them, but for me self hosted or no buy

There's also data leakage, even within the context of "working as expected."

Recently, a clerk with the local/county municipality showed be a circa 4 am toilet flush and hand washing at my place-- based upon the single spike and amount of water used. Me slightly creeped out. The new remote-read water meters break down usage to at least the hour level -- that's what the interface she was in provided.

I can't go to the can without someone "watching". Do I start "obscuring" or "polluting" my toiletries with random flushes and runs out to the backyard bushes?

Maybe I need to roboticize this with a Raspberry Pi (overkill?) or Arduino. (But what random number generator/source do I use?)

If I had money to burn, I could install a cistern that I would draw into only periodically in large bursts.

My water meter is, via a local 433 MHz uplink, on "the Internet of Things". My friend's dog now has more privacy with regard to his bowel movements.

The point is more that this "company" is most probably run and operated by a single person. Hence he is being upset with not being able to answer support questions at night and being forced to deal with every customer professionally, while being busy with a bunch of other things. But this is probably also calculated into the price of the product, and the fact that its just a garage door device.

If it were some medical device, you would expect that its supported by a large company, the device has gone trough mandatory certifications, etc. But that would also show in the price of the product, or the volume at which those products are produced and sold.

The mistake is expecting that every gadget maker provides service such a multi-billion dollars corporation can. It simply can't, its a single-person company and that person has its limits. So you either have to deal with some roughness, or you dismiss everything not backed by a large enough company. Not that big companies can't be assholes, they just know how to be assholes less personally.

> What happens​ if the company goes out of business, Or the company decides to terminate support?

I agree with you completely. Devices that rely on external servers are not OK. My house's automation uses IoT devices that host their own servers, and/or communicate with those locally that do. I had to build them myself since no company I could find offered anything like this. I'm not a snowflake either, other engineers have done the same.

Currently, IMO, the only reasonable solution to home automation is to do everything yourself, from absolute scratch. Commercial solutions are a combination of insidious spyware and stuff that will become useless when the company becomes acquired, dies, or gets mad at you and shuts down a server.

There was the whole Nest thermostat debacle recently, but no legal precedent as far as I know.
Seems like a real problem. On one hand legacy devices -- keeping them supported and updating their vulnerabilities for exploitative uses as we saw from Anna Senpai.
That is exactly why we need more open standards.
What happens when your nuclear reactor supplier goes out of business? What happens to your handle when your razor blade supplier goes out of business?
It's almost as if people are intentionally expending additional effort to prove that https://twitter.com/internetofshit is correct.
It's the right idea to consider the concept of IoT as an Internet of Shit because, even if the devices function flawlessly, device functionality is not always crafted in the best interests of the end-user.

Even if the device is well-designed and doesn't malfunction, a device might function all-too-well, and act against the consumer who owns the object.

When you have a smart device that's smart enough to be too smart to let you freely benefit from it, everything becomes a rental at best.

If we let this happen, it could very well be a step backward from the status quo of planned obsolescence. (planned obsolescence is also a bad thing, just in case anyone needs that spelled out)

I don't see any additional effort just exactly what is to be expected.
The interesting thing to me is that the level of anger involved in the customer interaction here barely even moved the meter and the support person - who is apparently also the owner and developer - went nuclear. Support professionals are used to dealing with people who are angry at them personally and in this case, the guy was only expressing anger at the product. This should have been a low-stress response addressing the problem itself.

This story brought back memories. I supported software shortly after graduation and the lead developer once joked with me about how we ought to just give people their money back if they couldn't make it work after a certain period of time. Nobody ever let him near customers without supervision. But even he, when confronted with customers disparaging his work, could cope by hand-holding the customer or asking them how they thought the program ought to work instead.

Garadget will fail.

So how did the developer knew it was a toxic individual ? his account has exactly 1 post on the forum which is the one that got him banned.
"Toxic" is the new safe-word for millenials. Don't like a person? Must be "toxic"! Best keep away.
I guess it is a good thing this is not a 'smart pacemaker' manufacturer or similar...

But in all seriousness, I wonder at which point the decision to rescind an IoT 'service' becomes unacceptable. Obviously doing so with a medical device or a moving vehicle during operation would be criminal. But how about a smart home lock? A security camera / alarm system?

There's a few million cars around with remote kill switch technology on board.

  "We can disable the ignition but not while you're 
  driving," Melanie Boudreau, a spokesperson at IMETRIK, a 
  Canadian maker of starter interrupt devices that run 
  around $100 each, told Fortune. "We don't want to kill 
  you."
Maybe in a not so distant future or political regime, this stance on not killing people may change. Remote kill switch are not limited to ignition, there's a moving vehicle version intended for police use to stop a car chase[1] so there's that, we can expect this[2] to be done on moving vehicle in the wild at some point[3].

[1]: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Autos/story?id=3706113&page=1 [2]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/disabling_car... [3]: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

A lot of responses seem to be along the lines of: When doing support you need to put up with being abused.

Seriously?

I think the support guy/founder should have taken the high road, for reasons that are all too obvious based on the number of HN stories I've seen about this.

But, if my kids ever spoke to a stranger like this, I'd make them go clean up dog poop in this person's yard and apologize. "C'mon, we're getting on a plane!"

And further, if your opinion of a product is that it is a "piece of shit", why would you get mad when the product is disabled and you are offered a refund? Are you expecting them to turn a piece of shit into a unicorn? If it's a piece of shit, a refund is exactly what you wan't, isn't it?

When people with no social skills run companies.
He could at least have gone for the "It was for security purposes to ensure that no-one could intercept your return and get into your garage"

Amateur

I can't imagine why I'd want to connect my garage door opener up to the hackers on the internet.
If only someone warned us about shit like this... Some guy was jabbering about it all the time but I don't remember his name. I think he wrote a text editor or something...
The rule of thumb that I have found.. you spend 90% of your time on less than 10% of your clients... so just price yourself out of their market.
I think you'll find people like that, regardless. At the end of the day, people get frustrated when they pay money for something that doesn't work. Plus, posting in a forum can feel like shouting at a wall rather than talking to a person, especially if you're not used to posting in forums. If you're patient enough with angry customers, they can become some of the most adamant supporters of your product.
Why would you think the 10% that's a pain to deal with is the 10% at the bottom economically?
The customer gets to get a refund for the product. This way it is not bricking per-se but refusal of service. My understanding of bricking is that you have a dead device and no recourse in getting a replacement or a refund.

The interesting question to me is what exactly you buy for $99: just the device ? Is the cloud-based service included in the price also? Especially since the developer can only make an assumption as to how long (in years) a customer will be using the service.

Surely whether a customer has a right to review a product and some recourse in the event of retaliation qualifies as an interesting question, as well though, right?
I have found it common to refer to devices as "bricked" without any reference to whether a refund was available, and I have definitely heard people say they returned their bricked device to a store, so I don't think your usage of the term is standard.
Bricked == rendered non-functional. When you brick a phone it isn't necessarily dead of natural causes, there could be a hardware lockout, like a moisture detector.
I don't have the exact quote, but it was definitely state somewhere that the device purchase includes access to the cloud service for the device lifetime.

So for $99 you clearly bought not only a device, but also the required service.