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by FinnLobsien·2mo ago·view on hn ↗
I think it depends on what exactly happened.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

3 comments
> But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving.

At least, more room than if not.

I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.

Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is).

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan.

Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).