CrAKeN Posted April 5, 2017 Share Posted April 5, 2017 Over the weekend, a disgruntled customer was taught a lesson in civility after the owner of an IoT company disabled client's product after a post on the vendor's forum and a negative Amazon review. The IoT vendor is a company named Garadget, which sells a device that can be mounted on garages and will allow customers to double-check if they left their garage door opened via a smartphone app and open or close it while away from their house, via the Internet. The whole debacle happened Saturday late evening, when a customer going only by the name of R. Martin went on Garadget's discussion board and left a rather rash complaint. Quote Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iphone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here... Almost immediately, without even explaining what "the app started doing" and without giving the IoT vendor a chance to respond, considering it was late Saturday night on a weekend, the customer went on Amazon and left a one-star review with some pretty harsh words. Quote Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products. The following Sunday morning, Garadget's owner wasn't at all pleased with the bashing of his product in a matter of minutes, without having a chance of fixing the customer's problem. His decision was swift and to the point: Quote Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection. Hours after the whole debacle, this short forum exchange was everywhere online, on Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and so on. Most people were bashing Garadget for having the nerve to brick a customer's product. Even Elon Musk took notice: Responding to all of his accusers, Garadget's owner, a man called Denis Grisak, restored the customer's access and posted the following three messages on his forum, explaining why he took the action he took. Quote Technically there is no bricking though. No changes are made to the hardware or the firmware of the device, just denied use of company servers. Quote Ok, calm down everybody. Save your pitchforks and torches for your elected representatives. This only lacks the death threats now. The firing of the customer was never about the Amazon review, just wanted to distance from the toxic individual ASAP. Admittedly not a slickest PR move on my part. Access restored, note taken. A quote from a random guy. PS: Anybody has Streisand's phone number? Quote I thought I made it clear I'm not planning on repeating my Apr 1st stunt. Yes, it was about badmouthing the product that I spent nearly 2 years working on, in the community that I'm trying to foster before giving me any chance at resolving the situation. So? what are your thoughts on the vendor's response? Was he right to boot the customer off his service? Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dMog Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 the customer had a technical difficulty that most likely could have been fixed...it gave the customer no license to act like an asshat.... maybe next time he will have a more rational response. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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