You’d think, wouldn’t you? But there are so many promotions and discounts and bundles going on that it’s never a linear relationship. So no one would be able to easily tell the numbers were diverging for at least a few quarters. And as long as they are both headed up, no one actually cares anyway. But if you wanted to juice the growth rate or slow the churn rate just a bit to look better or hit some target that you were just shy of, it’d be easy enough to add a “bug” to forget to bill some certain percentage of trial accounts.

Or maybe they just suck at the coding that handles trial accounts. As rapidly as this stuff was rolled out, and as late as the decisions about actual promotions probably get made, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t buggy.