re: #56 tatterdemalian

… if I couldn’t shake the feeling that the expense of providing lifelong free wi-fi internet access wasn’t actually going to be subsidized by a planned obsolescence scheme to ensure that “lifelong” doesn’t actually mean what people think it does.

There was a hilariously notorious dot-com startup here in Silicon valley during the height of the dot-com craze (late ’90s sometime). They offered an incredible deal: “Lifetime”-long internet access, for only $99!

It was so tempting, they actually got a million customers. But they had no plans for how to make this “business model” profitable in any way, and predictably, after two or three years, the company went belly up and declared bankruptcy. “Lifetime” internet access for most of their customers was actually more like one year. (And this was lame dial-up service, too.)

Never ever trust a promise of “lifetime” anything.

To this day, I wonder whether those people who won “a lifetime’s supply of Turtle Wax” on Let’s Make a Deal are still getting their Turtle Wax.