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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

"Throwing a tantrum"? The review in question is something along the lines of "the control app is flashing and doesn't work at all. This is junk, don't waste your money on it. 1/5 stars." If you make any public facing products, you will occasionally get such (and worse) reviews even if your product is a shiny perfection forged in heaven by angels themselves and wrapped in magic. Fact of life.

On the other hand, the support engineer's response (that ends with blocking the user's device for good) _is_ a bona fide tantrum, worthy of textbooks.

I am also quite surprised by the number of comments here at HN siding with Garadget. People like these shouldn't be allowed anywhere near tech support roles, as a single such incident can ruin the company unless they can spend tons of money for lawyers.

(This is why it is, in my opinion, better to start with enterprise products. Enterprise sales are much less public and you can afford to fire customers you don't like with ease, and vice versa.)

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> the support engineer's response (that ends with blocking the user's device for good) _is_ a bona fide tantrum, worthy of textbooks.

I don't think that's a support engineer. I'm pretty sure that's Denis Grisak, the founder of Garadget. I find it fascinating that he used the phrase "only demonstrates your poor impulse control" to the customer while arguably his own response seems to suggest his own impulse control may require reinforcement.

That explains some things.

I have been a founder too, and I am aware that this is a lot more stressful than it seems from the outside, and this one star review might have been the last straw.

However, dealing with angry customers is a part of the job (like everything else, until proper employees are hired). Let's say that this person is not particularly good at said job.

I was a founder and did tech support for years. Eventually stopped doing it for a couple of years and tried doing it again.

I wanted to fire every customer who called in because of the abusive way they treated the support people. The support people patiently explained to me that it was part of their job and they didn't take it personally.

I have found people are on a grid with "people helpers" as one axis and "problem solvers" as the other. Close to 100% people helper, you know that you can help this person because you've done it 100x. Close to 100% problem solver, you're going out of your mind because you've done this 100x.

They wouldn't have had an issue here if they'd just kept this quiet and via direct support email instead of in public.

It's not like he was being abusive to an individual support staff member, he cussed about the app in an Amazon review and on their forum because it was genuinely failing for him. Nothing wrong with that, people get worked up when stuff doesn't work sometimes, you need to be able to handle some level of that when doing support for your product.

And worse, they're selling a physical product which they just made effectively useless after that customer invested time in installation and setup. Sad to see the warnings about cloud services being abused in this way seem to be quite true.

Yes. Former founder here as well. One thing many would-be founders don't seem to realize is that like it or not, good companies satisfy individual humans, and successful ones scale that to satisfying a lot of individual humans.

Companies aren't about the big idea. They aren't about the product. They're about serving other people. To do that, having a big idea and a product can definitely help. But the very easiest way to fuck up a company is to forget that success comes down to a great number of small interactions.

It's quite clear a lot of people in here are approaching this with a "B2B" mindset where clients and contracts can be fired and terminated.

This scenario is "B2C", "the customer is always right" may be a tired phrase but it rings truer than you might think.

A lot of people are saying this guy should be respectful of this small, indiegogo compnay. Problem is, they are ignoring the fact the product is being sold on Amazon, this may be the customers' only exposure to the company so they might not have any idea of how large the company/operation is! Customers have an expectation of quality on Amazon

> the customer is always right

This is a useful perspective to take if you're in sales. For a support engineer, not so much. When I did Tier 1 for credit cards, the mantra everywhere invoked was instead:

"The customer is not always right, but is always deserving of respect."

Which has always struck me as a much more balanced and sensible attitude to take, when the objective is to solve a problem.

Sometimes that problem is between the keyboard and the chair. It happens. But it's still a problem that merits solving, rather than being a jackass about, because it's still stopping the customer from using your product, and why should he give you money for something he can't use?

Of course, that doesn't seem likely to apply here - pretty hard for an app crash to be a PEBKAC. I've found it a useful enough perspective to merit mention here, in any case. And perhaps such an attitude would've dissuaded the Garadget representative in this thread from so precipitously making a fool of himself, too.

The two are exactly the same from the outcome perspective; you always treat the customer with respect and try to please them.

Ideally, yes.

The more nuanced formulation acknowledges the existence of limits on what will be done - you don't, for example, get a 90-day delinquency reaged off your account once you pay up to date, no matter how you ask.

It also, and I think this has merit for Tier 1 reps who are constantly exposed to all the marvelous and frequently trying vicissitudes of humanity, explicitly calls out respect as a value. Certainly I found that explicit reminder useful from time to time, and I know others did as well. Perhaps this fellow might have, too.

There is a slight nuance with this when it comes to support - support often doesn't have the ability to satisfy all customer wants, and sometimes what the customer wants is outside of the supported use cases or the scope of support.

For the topic at hand (Garadget), the rep was absolutely out of line; I don't know if this was a policy they were enforcing or just a bad day, but I've been called worse than that by my customers even on good days, and it should just roll off you at this point.

But, always trying to please the customer has a nasty effect of backfiring a lot of the time, since sometimes pleasing them means getting into support situations that are untenable.

Respect? Absolutely - usually customers are smart, and as long as you are reasonable and respectful, so are they. But aiming to please gets people into a bad mindset of not being able to deliver bad news or establish policy.

Edit: corrected spelling mistake.

"You never win an argument with a customer."

That is a hundred times better than the standard version. I am stealing that for sure. Do you know who to credit?

It was something my boss told me when I used to work retail. I think it's part of the commons now ;) no attribution.

Or more importantly,

"You'll never win a customer with an argument."

> This is a useful perspective to take if you're in sales. For a support engineer, not so much. When I did Tier 1 for credit cards, the mantra everywhere invoked was instead: "The customer is not always right, but is always deserving of respect."

If you're going to split hairs to that degree I would absolutely expect you to notice that the customer called the product a piece of shit, not the support engineer.

Respect in this case, or the principle of charity if you prefer to consider it in those terms, requires acknowledgement of the fact that such intemperance of language from a customer almost certainly originates in extreme frustration provoked by the malfunction of the product.

In the course of a year and a few months spent doing credit card Tier 1, taking on average about 150 calls per day, I dealt with a lot of people. A very few of them were indeed just assholes, of the sort who'll open with "your product is a piece of shit" just because that's their attitude in general. They were easy to identify, but hard to work with. A vastly greater number were instead moved to unusually assholish behavior out of frustration with the situation in which they found themselves. Given a touch of professionalism, they were easy to identify, too, and easy to work with as well once given the opportunity to vent some of their ire and settle down enough to behave rationally again.

Perhaps the customer in this case is just an asshole. But my experience, which is not inconsiderable, shows that that is extremely improbable. Given, as I mentioned before, a touch of professionalism on the part of the support engineer, I see no reason to doubt that this situation could have been brought to the same sort of mutually successful outcome which I so often produced in my time wearing a headset all day. Instead, the engineer has succeeded only in producing a PR nightmare for his company, and I hope also in getting himself fired for cause. (I would! On the spot, in a heartbeat. Just as, in any of the several customer-facing roles I've had, such incredible behavior on my part would certainly have incurred the same response.) I fail to see how such an outcome has any utility for anyone involved - the customer's still stuck with the same broken product he started out with, and the company's out both money and reputation, too. I'd be fascinated to see how anyone could argue that that's a reasonable expenditure to buy a mean and fleeting little moment of satisfaction for one support engineer.

I don't agree. As a freelancer, when I do business with someone, I expect them to comport themselves in a civilized manner. If they're too thick or ill-bred to manage it, they can take their money elsewhere. I don't see why it should be different for any company. The exchange of money isn't a license to ignore standards of social interaction between equals.

You're absolutely right! Engaging in this kind of substantive retaliation because someone said a swear word you didn't like is totally unacceptable in any professional context.

You can try enforcing those standards, as this company did. But you may find that doing so causes your business to be economically unviable. That's fine as long as it's your preferred outcome, but if it isn't, you need to suck it up and deal with people who don't treat you how you want to be treated.

I'm convinced that there are enough reasonable, civil people in the world that I don't have to pucker up to kiss the behinds of those who can't behave with a modicum of decorum when their expectations are slightly undermined.

The problem isn't the people you "fire" directly. It's that those other reasonable, civil people might wonder where exactly where you draw the line, and justifiably avoid you based on not knowing. There's enough folks in this category that you really have to be more careful unless your product is truly out-of-the-park stellar and one-of-a-kind.

Sure. And if you are the maker of an App or product, the customer can then give you a poor review, or make his story go viral and totally fuck over your business and you proceed the recieve hundreds of poor reviews.

Feel free to piss off your customers at your own peril.

> this guy should be respectful of this small, indiegogo compnay

This guy should be respectful in general.

That's a basic prerequisite for any normal communication regardless of the context.

If you can't or won't maintain professional conduct in the presence of others who conduct themselves less than professionally, then you can't really consider yourself professional either, can you? You're just playing at it, when doing so suits you.

"The customer is always right" is a good mindset for both B2C and, to a lesser extent, B2B; but it should not be taken literally. If a customer in store is abusive, politely but firmly showing him the door is the right response. Do not deal with bad customers. But attacking a bad customer, stealing his stuff, etc. is a really bad idea.

Disabling a previously bought product for a negative review is probably illegal in most jurisdictions. It is clearly illegal under Amazon ToS. If I were the device buyer I would just return the unit. Even if they restore access this is an accident waiting to happen.

Reading this reinforced my conviction that I do not want my home hardware managed remotely. At least not the stuff I regularly interface with.

"The customer is always right" is an aphorism which applies to market forces, not individual customers. People keep misusing this phrase to mean that you should never disagree with a customer, but that's not the meaning of it at all.

I absolutely agree. From an outsider, the reaction from Garadget will stay in my mind far longer than the initial review. Imagine this in a bricks and mortar high-street shop? 'The customer is always right' is a difficult but noble stance - if a customer is being difficult, suck it up, be sickly nice then go out the back and scream when they've left.

That's only because the reaction was so unusual. I'd react the way you suggest but I admire people who react the way he did. And, every now and then you hear of a business with a fuck you attitude that succeeds, e.g. Ryanair

Ryanair only succeeds because my tolerance for "fuck you" is more than my tolerance for expensive flights. The moment I have a cheap alternative, I'm never touching Ryanair again, and sometimes not even then.

In my experience there are a small percentage of customers, bullies basically, who are toxic and have the ability to ruin the experience for your good customers by taking up an inordinate amount of resources in money, time and employee mental state. Maybe part of the reason they are cheap is because they don't pander to this type?

Dunno. I once tried to check in online, but the service was just giving me errors. Tried for half an hour.

When the service was back up, it wouldn't let me check in because that closes two hours before the flight. There were around 20 people at the check-in, all of which had had the same problem.

They made every single one pay 45 Euro per boarding pass, telling us to file a complaint later.

Filed a complaint, got a canned response "sorry, those are the rules". Didn't feel like suing them.

So, let me say this to Ryanair: "I'm very sorry for being toxic, and ruining the experience. Also: eat me!"

You left it rather late to check in by the sound of it, though. Just saying

Do you not have recourse to a Small Claims Court or similar process where you are?

Here the mere threat of using the Small Claims Court is frequently sufficient to prompt adequate redress. No lawyers are allowed to advise parties. The head of the company has to show up in person and sit waiting on a bench along with everyone else waiting for the case to get called. Court sits outside of normal working hours, and there's no appeal. For small amounts it works incredibly efficiently.

Another horror story: A friend of mine had booked a trip with Ryanair to Hungary for a week, Sunday to next Saturday. A few days before the trip, Ryanair calls him and tells him that the Sunday flight is not going to happen due to low occupancy, but they can transfer his booking to the Sunday after that. He had already booked the hotel, so he only agreed grudgingly, figuring that he might be able to transfer that booking for next week and asked whether the return flight would be on a Saturday as well, but Ryanair's answer was incredible:

The Saturday (return) flight is going to fly as scheduled, so they said it wasn't their responsibility to reschedule it for free. He could either pay out of his pocket to reschedule his return flight (if he could find a suitable flight), or he could return from Hungary a day before he actually flew there.

Fuck Ryanair.

Could it be possible that your friend got in this mess because they booked two one-way tickets instead of a return ticket? If both flights were on the same PNR, I can't see how such a ticket would be valid.

Yeah, exactly. Their flights are a mass product designed to be as cheap as possible, and not, say, a luxury premium gadget designed to open my garage doors from the comfort of my car without the need to find my _usual_ garage remote key, right? I can use my iPhone for that! How convenient! I will definitely pay $99 for this wonderful appliance, right with my second Aston Martin. /s

My tolerance for Ryanair is zero… I won't give my money to a business that treats me like shit

I wish I had such choice......ryanair is the only airline that flies anywhere near where I live. I could say "fuck you ryanair" and fly with someone else, but then my total journey time home would go up from 3 hours to about 8-9 hours. As much as I dislike them, I'm not going to make my life significantly more difficult and spend more money just to avoid them.

In the mid 80s the route I occasionally flew was monopolised by the national airlines of each country. There wasn't a penny difference between their fares at about ten times the usual fare today. Most people went by coach instead, a 12 hour miserable journey. Everyone flys it today thanks to Ryanair.

And if Ryanair representative suddenly appeared here and banned you from ever flying with them because you talk shit about them on HN, you'd have been rightfully mad.

Even more so if you had the ticket on hands. :)

Absolutely and I know I could rely on the rest of you to show solidarity and boycott Ryanair, right?

Nah, they're garbage, verging on a human-cattle transport service. Fuck 'em. There's far superior carriers servicing the same areas for the same or very similar prices.

Come at me, Ryanair :)

> e.g. Ryanair

Well, actually:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/sep/03/ryanair-cus...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06zv3xf

True but it doesn't negate the fact that they became Europe's biggest airline before that.

Customers are not always right. Making you employees treating them as if they were, or as if the employees were slaves, is morally bankrupt. Grow a spine!

That can actually be a winning PR strategy. Not sure how it is in the US, but here many companies have started to respond with blatant sarcasm and mockery to unreasonable criticism in social media. You'll have a newspaper's support guy answering "brb, getting one of those sweet-paying protest gigs" when someone accuses them of being "paid by George Soros, just like those protesters".

This, however, is not one of those cases. The customer may have been a bit harsh, but his review is completely within the bounds of acceptable human behaviour. They could have reached out to them, and they would have probably been willing to change the review as well.

A lot of brick and mortar shops actually have a sign that says "We reserve the right to refuse service."

Yes but they had better have a really compelling unique product if they choose to exercise that right.

I've worked retail. Pretty much every place that's worth working at has banned a few customers. Perhaps 1 in 1000 customers will be actively abusive towards other customers or towards employees.

I recall my first boss, who once had a customer push to the front of the line in a crowded shop. The customer rudely demand to be served. My boss was a very proper older southern lady, and she said, "Ma'am, you can also find [this product] at the grocery store across the street, and I encourage you go there." After the woman had stomped out, my boss turned the other customers and said, "Well, she wants us to have a bad day, and we're not going to," and she served the next person in line. I'm told the other customers practically cheered.

Of course, if you had told her that her product was a "piece of shit," she would have disapproved of your language but she would have refunded your money and replaced the product in an instant. She took quality seriously. If you were really rude about it, I suppose she might have "fired" you afterwards, though.

As a boss, you need to set limits about how badly your customers can act before they get (politely) booted. Anything less is inhumane to your employees. But this doesn't mean you should fire a customer over a bad Amazon review.

There's "refusing service", "banning customers", and then there's "turning off a device you've already sold to a customer after he's taken it home". There are not many goods/products/businesses who get away with doing that. Even Steve's "You're holding it wrong!" wasn't followed up with "so I'm gonna remote brick it on you"...

(Interestingly, Amazon have in the past remote-deleted Kindle books on people's devices - but for very much better reasons that "you were a bit rude in your review", and they _still_ copped a roasting for it...)

I've had one of my kindles replaced because it wouldn't connect to wifi anymore, and the rep said they are sending me a new one, and I don't have to send the old one back, but they are blacklisting it on their servers - so if I ever fix it, it won't connect to the internet at all.

It was a bit weird, but I guess acceptable in that situation.

> I am also quite surprised by the number of comments here at HN siding with Garadget.

You are? I'm not. A lot of people here are just as unscrupulous as the developer and will defend any unethical and terrible behaviour as long as it makes a dime at the end of the day. Take a look at any Uber thread and you'll see the same kind of comments from people who think that, if they're as ruthless and unethical, one day they'll be the new unicorn on the block.

> I am also quite surprised by the number of comments here at HN siding with Garadget.

This behaviour is all too common, sad but true.

>I am also quite surprised by the number of comments here at HN siding with Garadget.

I don't agree with disabling the customer's device, but I also don't agree with customers somehow being absolved of having a minimum level of decorum.

He called their product a piece of shit and that justifies bricking his device?

I don't think customers get to behave however they want without repercussions, but come on...

Thanks to psychology, there is a nice way of making it work for both sides (not in this particular case, of course — the damage is done).

Hardware companies should (and will, eventually) offer the devices for free and switch to subscription model.

Devices like these are not products, they are services. They are useless on their own without the operating backend, support and maintenance. If I am buying the device, I expect it to be working. If I am subscribing to a service, I know that it can be cancelled anytime.

(And $5/month are worth much more these days than $99 once. If you can keep the customer that long, of course).

I agree

But "subscription model" for a garage opener is, sorry to say, stupid

Of the things in my home I want a garage opener to have pretty good reliability. I need a plan B if the power is out for a conventional one. I don't want to get locked out if I miss a payment (this is not like rent where these things are regulated and lack of payments are handled through actual notices)

Relying on the internet to open your garage is just naive.

The product is basically a cloud-enabled garage door remote. It doesn't replace the buttons on the wall in the garage, nor does it replace the garage door opener you use in your car, or however it is you work your door. It supplements them, like buying a spare remote, except this one is app-enabled and can be used without line-of-sight to the door.

I have a smart garage door opener, smart deadbolt, smart car (remote start/heat/cool/etc), smart thermostat, smart light fixtures, smart smoke detector... all of them function without internet, or power, as applicable. Light switches, buttons, keys, etc still work. Most smart devices are like that; the remote functionality is supplemental, not a replacement.

It is not that simple. Do you remember one of those bear toys that were sending the recordings of their conversations with children to an exposed MongoDB instance? I bought one of them for my daughter a few months before. And I am a software engineer who knows what an exposed MongoDB instance is. My voice and my daughter's voice are now in the leak. Thankfully, the toy was only used with my supervision, so I know what was said there.

The problem is that is was advertised as a Bluetooth-powered toy to communicate with your child via recorder messages. "It's fun" -- I have thought, so I bought it. Only later I realized that it forwarded everything that was said to their servers via their "cloud app".

OK, I have thought, so they have the recording. But at least do they have some decency to not share it with the public? And that, indeed, turned out to be a little naive.

The toy became "broken" a few weeks before the leak when I was finally fed with it, but the damage is done.

Now I have similar worries about my NetAtmo devices. They do look cool and measure CO2 content in my rooms, which is the reason I bought them, but they also contain an always-on microphone for measuring "noise pollution", and I am not sure at this point if they don't transmit everything I speak in my room to the CIA, NSA, Russians, our reptilian overlords, or whoever else needs to hear the shit I say at home.

There's a really easy solution to this. Don't buy junk you don't need sold by people who don't care. Who convinced you you needed it in the first place? That's probably a bigger source of noise pollution...

I want (in fact, I need, because of my sensitivity to CO2 levels) a nicely working CO2 sensor in my room. I tried a few cheaper options, but they didn't work as reliably. I did my research, and it was either NetAtmo or some industrial-grade sensors, more expensive and ugly.

The "sold by people who don't care" is a bit of a problem. How do I know they care? I'm a software engineer, I'm much more technical than most people around me. I have a hard time picking my way through that - is that childs toy bluetooth or wifi, with whom does it communicate what, how do they handle the data that they may or may not gather. Is it using a secure protocol to do so? How am I going to explain that to my less technical friends that don't have my knowledge? How can I educate them or how can they self-educate to a point where they can make a conscious decision about which toy is trustworthy? Heck, Miele had their dishwasher hacked, generalize for all IoT devices.

I love the idea that you have any concept at all about whether or not someone needs an item. We're all glad you aren't materialistic, but we don't really care about your opinions on other people's spending habits

>minimum level of decorum

Free speech doesn't mean much? Entire nations were founded on the basis of individual rights to bitch about things they don't like, without incurring oppressive retaliation.

Really, this is imperialism versus the free market. Either you harden up and listen to the people whose participation influences your survival directly (i.e. customers), or you go out of business.

In this case, the latter condition appears appropriate.

> Entire nations were founded on the basis of individual rights to bitch about things they don't like, without incurring oppressive retaliation.

From the Government.

> From the Government.

Because we shouldn't be protected from business interests when they get too powerful?

The discussion is about words, and no you shouldn't be protected from the words and speech coming from business interests.

That's not even remotely what he was saying people should be protected from WRT business.

Words were exactly the subject of his parent comment.

One mans business is another mans government.

Yes, we should be protected from business interests when they usurp our basic rights to free speech. We should be protected - by our governments - whenever our rights are misused/abused.

What else is government for if its not to protect our basic rights?

If you operate a business in the Internet age and delude yourself that customers are required to have decorum, you are in for a rude shock, sooner than later.

You can require your customers to show decorum if you choose.

Fair enough, but please tell them that before they enter a contract with you. Don't take their cash followed by not providing a service for reasons not stipulated before accepting the money.

You would think "please don't be an asshole" would be common sense, but I suppose adding it your product description about you providing support is being explicit.

Not only providing support, but unilaterally disabling the product they purchased after the fact. That should be incredibly explicit. And even then.

Just look at Ham Radio Deluxe.

This is actually not true if you hope to sell long term as an Amazon marketplace seller.

Is existing only at Amazon's pleasure any kind of long term strategy for a business?

Depends on what you mean by long-term. It seems to be working well enough for a significant number of businesses at the moment, and has been for some years now.

Nope.

If you've already sold them the product, you really cannot do this.

No? If I went into a store to complain and my first words were "what kind of shit have I bought here?", then I don't think I'd have any cause for complaint if I were forcibly ejected and told to come back when I'd learnt how to behave myself. Same should apply online.

If the store then came to your house and confiscated your product, you absolutely WOULD have the right to complain.

The store owner could go to jail, because that is called theft.

Screwing over customers has a cost.

This story went viral. And now this business is going to receive hundreds of negative reviews.

The product wasn't confiscated though, only the service was cancelled, and a refund was offered for returning the product. This is the main point a lot of people are missing here.

As it stands, this is how ANY court of law would see it as well.

People don't have decorum IRL. When something doesn't, they tell of their friends it's a piece of shit. If you submit yourself to a review system, you gotta expect it. If you can't accept that you need to change your view to see the world the way it is, not rambling, expecting the world to change for you. Unless you are able to change the world. But people rambling never do.

Calling a product a piece of shit is perfectly acceptable behavior, it often is a reasonable and accurate opinion about a product and definitely meets the standards of the "level of decorum" expected for customer product reviews.

Customers shouldn't be absolved of having a minimum level of decorum, but that minimum is at the level of (a) personal insults at specific people ("Bob in customer support is a piece of shit" wouldn't be ok but "your customer support system is a piece of shit" is fine) or (b) libel, as decided by the legal system.

For direct criticism of a product or service literally anything that I imagine would be above that minimum level of decorum. Insulting people is not ok, but insulting products definitely is.

No, I'm sorry, that is not perfectly acceptable behaviour.

It's not illegal - but it's also not helpful, or constructive, and nor is it desirable if you're trying to build a helpful community.

There are other ways of getting your point across, without resorting to insults such as "piece of s*it".

In Chinese, we might call this 家教 - or "upbringing". If you have no decorum, or class - it suggests that your upbringing was poor, or that your parents failed to raise you well.

We often forget that there's another person at the other end of the phone, or at the other end of our comment. In this case, a real-life person who put a lot of work into a product. You don't have to love it - but if you are going to criticise it, at least don't be a jerk, and make some good-faith efforts to work with them through the issue.

It's not exactly like the developer didn't try to help.

The audience of Amazon product reviews is other customers, not the developer. "Don't buy this product, it's a piece of shit" is constructive, helpful, actionable advice to other customers.

It is desirable if you're trying to build a helpful community where customers help other customers differentiate between good products and products that sometimes don't work on arrival or have software reliability problems; a community that recommends to avoid certain companies is a helpful community to have for a buyer.

> It's not exactly like the developer didn't try to help.

In their first and only reply they perma banned the customers device ID. How are they helping?

> In Chinese, we might call this 家教 - or "upbringing". If you have no decorum, or class - it suggests that your upbringing was poor, or that your parents failed to raise you well.

It's impressive that you're able to extrapolate the questioners life up until this point based on three words.

If the product in question is a shitty product, there's no problem describing it as such.

If he's from China (and I'm assuming so), I'm not so surprised. It's a status thing culturally. I've had my ideas at work dismissed on the basis of my not attending an Ivy League school by the sort that spouts concepts like this.

A more amusing instance of this outlook at work: http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1940-china-one-p...

I agree with you in principle, but times have changed. We still have words for this in America, but no longer really have the idea.

The phrase "piece of sh!t" for better or worse, is now so widespread its almost never meant literally. People who take it to heart shouldn't be working in _any_ client facing role.

It might be chinese culture to avoid criticize things directly, but it's also part of the chinese culture to give backhanded compliments like "5 out of 5 stars, when it works, which is never." I don't think the 笑里藏刀 (literally translated as "dagger hidden in the smile") aspect of chinese culture claims any moral high ground over the western straight shooting f* you.

I'm chinese too.

"No, I'm sorry, that is not perfectly acceptable behaviour."

No, you don't get it. From a business perspective expecting good behavior from customers is just plain stupid. It's not customers' fault if they don't understand something and don't take time and effort to deal with your product and just call it shit, they are human after all. You can't defeat human nature. But you can try to understand it and at least be prepared to deal with it and minimize a negative impact on your business.

The problem with this, is that now I don't expect to be able to believe any of the reviews of this product, because their behaviour will make any of their customers who are aware of this event more timid.

To me, this is the seller trying to manipulate public perception by silencing reviews from those with a bad experience. I'll put up with a lot of problems if the seller is responsive and handle issues well, but if I risk having them stop me from using the product?

This seller has demonstrated I can't trust them not to turn off my access to their servers without warning. To me, that is an absolute deal-breaker that would stop me from ever considering their product.

I can understand anger over a customer that rushes to give a bad review without waiting for a support response first, but their response in my eyes made things ten times as bad.

He offered the customer a full refund for the product - I don't see the issue.

(Well, ok, he could have just turned the other cheek - but I suspect most of us here, when at the receiving end of such abuse, have wanted to say - "You know what? Take your business elsewhere."

He disabled the device.

And you don't see the issue?

To be clear, he disabled the app, not the customer's device.

The device's primarily-marketed feature is opening your garage from an app. To do this, the app and the device talk through the company's server. This developer blocked the customer's app from the server. That breaks the device's primary functionality.

Yeah, I misinterpreted "device" (as "iPhone").

As a side note, I wonder about the original app design, I mean, Wi-Fi/Internet connection is down and I cannot enter my garage (unless I still have anyway handy the original garage remote or key), the company's server is down (for whtever reason) and I am locked outside the garage, there is a DDOS on (say) Cloudflare and I am locked out of the garage ... :(

Usually this kind of hiccups happen not in a sunny warm day, but when it is heavily raining, during a storm, etc.

This is a major flaw with a lot of technology now. The assumption that you will have an internet connection. It's horribly inefficient, especially when we have robust p2p wireless protocols.

Since Garadget deliberately and maliciously disabled the device, can the consumer sue for compensation for the time wasted on it?

The device is useless without the app. They disabled the device.

Where did you get that from ? It seems to me he simply banned the device unique ID on the server side.

Is it even possible for an app developer to disable an iphone ? Apple would be mad.

"Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection"

The Garadget device, not the customers phone! I never mentioned a phone, did I?

It's an app, so virtual device, I guess.

The "Garadget controller" (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/softcomplex/garadget-ga...) looks like a physical device to me.

You're right. I didn't look carefully enough at the Amazon page.

Sorry confusion on my part, the guy mentions his iphone app not working and the dev answer that the device is banned. My bad.

Anyways, device is not disabled as in bricked, it's blacklisted on the server side of thing.

There isn't too much difference between a bricked device and a device that most likely loops trying to connect to the server and fails indefinitely with no other functionality.

"Bricked" being an irreversible state, I agree (technically). If there isn't a way for the customer to reverse the ban, it might as well be bricked in the practical sense, from the customer's perspective.

Mate, if you're aiming to split hairs, you're doing a fine job.

We are talking about the device that he sold him right? Not the iPhone? Lol.

He offered a full refund (although he admittedly could be a bit more tactful).

If he's said - I'm disabling it, too bad, I'd agree that's out of line.

However, what was actually said was - You're a jerk - I don't want your business, give me back the device, and I'll give you the money back.

Now they don't have to deal with each other, and nobody loses out (well, except for wasted time on both sides).

How would you feel if you bought a Tesla Model S, then a few weeks later they called you up and said "we don't like your online review of your car, so we're going to disable most of its functionality, but you can return it for a refund". $8000+ in option packages on that car rely on cloud functionality run by Tesla. If you don't -want- a refund, but -want- the car you already paid for that's sitting in your driveway, should the manufacturer be able to roll back your purchase on their whim?

Yes, great analogy.

But Amazon can nuke accounts and disable "purchased" books, video, etc, at will. So there's a gray area. I think what Amazon does ought to be illegal, but hey.

So, with a little shame I'll admit I've actually been "banned" from Amazon. The one thing I can still access is all the digital content such as books, videos, and like, games or game keys that are associated with my account. I can't get into half of the account settings, can't even view my stored payment methods, for example.

But, to their credit, I can read my stupid Kindle books. Luckily their eBook DRM is terrible and I have liberated my content, but, still... to their credit, they did not block what I had paid for.

Now, I'm not saying it's impossible for them to block this content, but, it seems they are sensitive to the dubious legality or morality of doing so. I suspect it might have something to do with the huge negative backlash they got a few years ago when they did disable someone's entire content library and it got publicized.

Sorry about being banned, bro.

But I am pleased to hear that Amazon is no longer (always, anyway) blocking access after account termination.

If companies want to keep control of media and devices in this way we need a law to make them behave. Disabling a device without due notice should receive a hefty fine and compensation to the user.

Preventing or no longer supporting access to media should be similar and require an alternative format be made available, so Amazon can block access to an ebook or movie but must provide a download instead.

That would balance alittle the current disparity of power the companies hold IMO.

Recently NowTV/Roku unlawfully accessed my set-top box and disabled an app, the main reason for having the device, because they don't like it. They claim it's illegal but it's available from the curated app-store if I buy the more expensive device from the same manufacturer (or indeed a device from many other manufacturers).

I can't afford a lawsuit and we don't have group actions in the UK. Net effect a company cripples a device because they don't like how it is being used, and commit unauthorised access of a computer system in the process (currently illegal, but only individuals are being prosecuted for it).

We need protection from such companies.

I'm sorry to hear about your Roku. Whenever I get a device, I now have to spend time backing up as much as I can, for the inevitable "upgrades" that will hit me. With Android devices, you should always copy all of the .apk files off. I have a script somewhere which disambiguates the filenames and rsyncs them to my backup server. It has saved me many times. It's ridiculous that I have to go through so much trouble to have the same level of stability I had with a desktop pc I would buy from Dell, in the sense that Dell would give you a restore disc that will return your device to factory functionality.

I keep trotting this comment out every few weeks, because it happens so often now that the cloud eats something we own. Probably my most frustrating experience was when Apple forced me to update iOS, but they removed many features that I relied on. BTSync broke, Nightshift functionality that I was using with Flux was rendered unusable. And a ton of other little annoyances[1].

Apple heavily damaged my iPad with an update awhile ago. And Apple won't take no for an answer, and will keep downloading the next iOS update even over a cellular connection, so I had to firewall it.

Computing today might seem seamless, but, just you try and go against the grain. You'll encounter a remarkable amount of resistance. All I want is so have agency over the devices that I buy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500

Musk did actually blacklist a someone for tweeting something unfavorable towards Musk.

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/02/03/sour-model-x-unveiling-...

But he did not disable a car. Refusing to continue to sell new products to a customer you consider rude is very different from bricking the product the customer is already having bought and using.

LOL?

Garadget sold a product to the customer, accepted the customers money -then disabled the product when the customer wrote a negative review.

Who's the jerk?

Yeah, but he disabled the device before refunding any money.

No, he disabled the thing then told the customer that his only option was to return it to Amazon for a refund.

That's not at all the same narrative.

The issue is we've entered an age where, because of devices' entanglement with the cloud, the manufacturer's interest in the object isn't exhausted at the moment of sale. This is a big change in the way things have traditionally been done, and in the long term it could have major consequences.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened - but usually manufacturers are pretty reticent about it, and try to avoid looking capricious in their actions. When Amazon removed books from customers' Kindles they got a bunch of flack for it, even though there was some sort of reason involving the copy not having been licensed properly, or something.

If I brought a normal washing machine and it leaked a lot, I could post a factual review on line without fear of retribution. If I brought an internet-enabled washing machine and it leaked a lot, should I expect that posting a factual review online would get my washing machine remotely disabled? This would not be good for getting trustworthy reviews.

And if a device can be remotely disabled because of a negative review, can it also be disabled because, say, I'm a Yankees supporter and the guy taking my support call thinks Yankees suck? What if the support guy thought it would be funny to see me hopping on one foot while holding a shoe on my head - can he disable my device until I send him a video of that?

"offered"

> have wanted to say - "You know what? Take your business elsewhere"

"Take your business elsewhere" would be Garadget issuing a refund from their end and then disabling the device.

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