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@Robert-André-Karlstad-Gråwe , @fejker , you seem to think that I’m somehow favoring ongoing digital transition. I’ll just try one more time taking extra care keeping my observations separated from my expectations as a customer -
do I as a customer expect supporting services to be part of my purchases? Yes.
do I as a customer expect drop of functionality of my purchase or its supporting services during reasonable timeframe? No.
have I observed drop of functionality of my Suunto-branded purchases? Yes.
do I have a reason to believe more functionality will be dropped in next 6-12months and beyond? Yes.
during my time with Suunto-branded devices, have a I observed changes / actions that have directly affected my existing Suunto-branded purchases in a positive way? Some.
during my time with Suunto-branded devices, how would I grade warranty & repair service ? Excellent.
during my time with Suunto-branded devices, would I describe my personal trust curve to be ascending or descending? Descending.
is it possible to change that trend? Possibly - in a long term through series of positive actions measured against given promises; in addition to major negative impact, communications (or lack of it) can have a slight neutralizing/positive effect.
would I consider next Suunto-branded purchase? Probably not before that subjective trust curve has been pointing up for a considerable amount of time, but there are also other factors like current state among alternatives and added value vs cost of ownership over period of time (initial purchase + spare belts & straps + annual subscriptions to 3rd party services)
does any of this makes a difference? Yes and no.
No, because suppliers have no reason to listen as long as 500-1000+€ sports gadget segment keeps selling, and strangely they get away by selling bling and promises, also positive emotions from updates(?!), instead of value that’s there from day-1.
And no, because my consumer habits are probably nothing more but outliers. But for me personally this has been working out pretty well. I was slightly hit when bought my Ambit(1)Black just few weeks before A2 was released, back then it was pretty much the same situation as any other HW update or last feature update announcement you are familiar from past months or years - there’s always a group that feels that their expectations were not met and they make themselves heard. If that same pattern keeps repeating itself, always bringing up the same outcry, it becomes kind of old after 3 times. Anyway, learned my lesson and adjusted my personal expectations to be in par with reality. 2014 Movescount update trashed all my existing macro period planning I had set up there. And change of whole planning logic pushed me more towards 3rd party services, after initial frustration this turned out to be a kind of a eye opener. Moved to Ambit3 once I was sure I’ll be OK with its state at a time (no further updates to expect, Spartan was already released), I would survive if Movescount would just blow up over night (I was already regular openambit user with A1, it gained support for A3 and was actively developed) and can also afford to trash the watch itself should I crash on the next day. And it has been working out really well, both financially and by its added value as being part of a tool set. Some further announcements and changes along the road have sure come as surprises and perhaps even caused some frustration, but if someone out there has decided that world is in desperate need of just another smartwatch company, I’ll rather just step off that train once its curse does not mach mine and observe it from distance. I feel I still have few more stops to go.
/…/ most existing users /…/
Then there’s no need to worry, right? Only logical thing for them to do is to switch brand, Suunto gets a message, changes its focus from new developments to supporting existing and it’s all good for those few who were good at waiting game. (just to be clear - this was the only piece of sarcasm in this whole post).
Mapping a closed dataset is a tricky task, while it can reveal bits, there’s no way of telling what stays hidden. Can this forum be taken as a data source to conclude something how users feel about ditching MC? Maybe, 10k registered users is quite a number. But only about 20% have cared enough to make at least a single post. And forums have tendency to turn into echo chambers where loudest group is not always the largest one. Mh… and considering that link to forum.suunto.com link was sent to every MC user, wouldn’t you expect the number of registered forum accounts to be close to at least 100k if they actually cared what is going to happen?
Remember when someone here collected device & usage stats in Movescount ? That would would probably give some insight though only among a certain subgroup - those who have chosen to go with public MC profile. But there’s no way telling anymore as this was done by scraping through http://www.movescount.com/moves#view=list&sorting=5 - part of MC that was shut down / frozen back in September. If there are any other sources that might shed light over current distribution of Suunto watch and service usage, I’m all ears.
Peace & sorry for hijacking this thread - long break from work and professional cretinism might show.
