I'm considering getting a third 5040 unit. If they had dumped my lifetime
activation on my existing two units, there's little chance I'd get a third unit.
As it stands, from the information I've seen so far, I'm grateful D&M bought
out Replay and there's plenty of goodwill generated towards their products.
I might be a small liability, but I doubt it's very noticeable. If they had
to maintain special servers and special contract just to service me, then
maybe, but as it stands, all the infrastructure and all the contracts need
to exist to service the monthly folks. The difference between supporting
0 dialup and 0 guide users and (hypothetical) 10,000 users is pretty
significant, but the difference between supporting 5,000 monthlies split
between ethernet and dialup, and 10,000 users is much less. Most of
the contracts charge you less per user as your numbers increase, so it
isn't a linear equation, and the biggest hump is the initial few.
The existing user base isn't quantified as an asset from an accounting
standpoint, but we are definitely an asset for the company. I don't
think MSFT sees their huge installed base as a liability even though
they still need to spend money on bug fixing and improvements and
they already got the money from me. Yeah I'm a liability on paper, but
it's nice to have a monopoly.
I'd argue that lifetime customers as a whole are probably a better group
to market to since we had the free cash flow to pony up $250 up front
per unit. That's not to say monthlies don't have money, just as a entire
group, the lifetimes probably have more free cash flow to spend on
bleeding edge stuff.
So yeah, we're probably a small liability on paper, but worth far more
as future repeat customers.