Checking Back In On The VoIP For Life Folks -- Still Ticking, For Now

from the but-for-how-long? dept

A couple months back, some company came out with the gimmick of offering VoIP for life for $1,000. You can assume, of course, that the "for life" part is more likely to refer to the life of the company, rather than the customer. In fact, as we noted at the time, this company now has the incentive to sign up a few customers, and then quickly go out of business, because those customers all become a liability. It appears, however, that the company has convinced about 400 people to sign up, though, the CEO completely confuses his assets and liabilities by stating: "Having a customer is an asset to us." No, it's not, actually. Once the customer pays his or her up front fee, they become a liability, because service is owed and no more revenue comes in. In fact, the article admits that the company begins losing money on each customer after 34 months. Assuming the company actually survives that long, the incentive for the company is to let its service degrade rapidly, in order to push users to drop it and move elsewhere. In fact, the longer a customer has been on the service, the more incentive the company has to get rid of them.

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