Plaxo.com has been providing Contact synchronisation and management of contacts between different devices and machines for quite some time now.
I’ve joined Plaxo about 3 years ago as a tool to help me keep my laptop and desktop applications in sync when working with my address book.
At the time I believed only in 3 social networking/web applications, namely
One of the main features I liked about Plaxo is that you could have multiple email clients and then sync it to one repository online.
I used to run Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook and would just sync each to the central repository.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve one would have noticed the following message when syncing your contacts or when starting up your machine.
Now it seems they are taking this the commercial root, and now you have to fork out money to have the sync capabilities.
I have actually concidred buying their premium package before for halping me out with doubles etc. but now it feels like this company has been taking me for the FREE-PAY -later ride.
I feel that this type of “business model” is unfair towards the un expecting end user and can cause one to rely one’s whole life on a service set as free and then being later locked down as a paid service.
Google however has perfected this as they’re adwords are floating around their applications and keep generating them money, and probably the latest recession has seen Plaxo having to make this decision that could help them generate extra money but also loose a lot of fans.
I assume their business model was based on the “hope”/prediction that at least a certain percentage of their FREE users will go for the premium memberships, but eventually stuck with the free service, and then they probably pulled on the shortest string.