A startup that needs to pivot to survive is probably equivalent to a failure of the startup, but survival for the team and the founders (a "company").
For a customer, the biggest problem is with all of the SaaS "products" which are ephemeral and require the parent company to keep it up or release it as free software. With desktop software, you could at least keep the last version.
But all things considered, if you are not going under, you should at least reimburse for whatever service was not rendered once you pivot.
Generally speaking, if the startup doesn't pivot, what's the future look like for the startup and users?
I get it that if you are paying user you have some support or what ever.
The reason that I'm asking is this: how to justify the trust in some new technology devolved by startup? How can I convince decision makers that this is the way to go when 1 in 10 startups fail.
Rockmelt made one of my favorite browsers (UX-wise) in 2010-2011. A year later they pivoted to ... I don't even remember what anymore. But it wasn't at all a product I cared about.
"Betrayal"? I don't know. It just was pointless to me and I stopped using their products.
Would I have kept using their products if the new stuff they were building seemed useful to me? Yeah, I think so. They had enough credibility with me to give them a chance at another product.
Advocating for using startup tech is an evaluation, risk calculation, and politics.
Is the potential benefit worth the risk? You have to decide that for yourself and then convince others. That involves presenting the problem and evidence this solution is worth investing time in, despite coming from a startup. Pilots, POCs, and presentations are helpful here, but you have to start from a problem or pain they hopefully already voice themselves. (In my experience)
I did this recently and spent a lot of political capital, adpinting Dagger to replace Docker for our image builds and CI, but also a custom CLI that wraps more of our CI process beyond just builds. We started with a POC approved by the CTO and then made a presentation to the managers of the other teams. That presentation centered around the many small paper cuts they complained about infrequently, but when shown together painted a bigger picture, to which we offered a solution that addressed many of those pains.
I still hear complaints about the move from Docker to Dagger, though it was only a piece of a larger problem and solution. Needless to say, I am unlikely to have sufficient political capital to spend on similar endeavors (which I don't foresee at this point)
From just these words and no more information I would like to say "no". But as someone who saw a bit of that, I notice that the way they do it is always falls to "yes, betrayal".
I mean that every service becames influenced by TikTok level of greed but no greed-powered service or proprietary piece of software has ever decided to remove unwanted/unjust functionality.