This sort of declaration would have demonstrated Slack’s serious commitment to prevention. Each clause carries weight, it costs Slack nothing to provide it, and it prohibits Slack from entire categories of present and future abuses of this nature for all non-profit customers. The CEO’s commitment below does not rise to this bar, leaving the door open for further abuses, and maintaining price increases already extorted from other non-profit customers. Perhaps a future press release will close that gap.
An apology contains three components: acknowledgment of impact, declaration of whether the impact was intentional or accidental, and whether preventative steps will be taken; it also contains one contextual attribute: whether this specific impact has broad implications. The CEO’s apology meets these terms in the case of this specific customer only, without committing to review and reparation of the customer category “non-profit customers”. It is certain other non-profits were impacted, but their concerns are not in-scope for the CEO’s statements, which apologize for a single instance without declaring intent to review and correct others. Most readers would be correct in rejecting it as a relevant apology, however valid it may be for the one customer above.
“We’re sorry...ish... that our routine pressure tactics and revenue min/max practices got exposed publicly. We are, actually, grateful it was caught now rather than after we deleted their account. That fallout would have cost us far more inconvenience to clean up. Thanks to the limited attention this has drawn, we only need to relax the thumb screws briefly, rather than pretend to an overhaul of the practices themselves, which would still have been, just like the apology, performative and short lived.”
If most people here think like I do, we’re instead doubling down on our efforts to ensure we can exfiltrate our data and jump platforms with only moderate frustration instead chaos when vendors pull this sort of thing.