I don't have a horse in the Unity issue, though I've been following it loosely. I can speak to my own response to another organisation.

I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).

It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.

I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.

One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: <https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.

In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:

1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.

2. The long-term erosion of trust and affection for the firm and its products effectively primes a trigger of latent demand for any viable alternative which appears. An example that comes to mind is the exclusive launch of Apple's iPhone in the US by AT&T. On the day that Verizon began officially supporting the iPhone on their own network, people were cramming Verizon stores and phone lines trying to make the switch. (A cow-orker at the time was one of those people.) They were absolutely fed up with AT&T's service and behaviour. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20110112092318/http://www.engadg...> and <https://web.archive.org/web/20101007000511/http://online.wsj...>, discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092273> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765104>.

I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.

Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.