http://TechUntangled.com/ampd-mobile-shutting-down-today

It’s not so much that they want to do as they are legally obligated to do this. This is a case where behavior is based on regulation and the only way to change the behavior is to change the law. Would this stifle investment in certain types of startups? Quite likely it would, but maybe that is not a bad thing. Do we really need an everlasting supply of companies that create value for a select few by screwing over many?

This isn’t just a start-up issue. Tons of companies act completely agnostically of the effects they have on people. They’re not immoral, they’re amoral. They simply can’t make decisions for positive benefit consciously, because any kind of consideration for people, any empathy, was left out of the original mix.

If more companies spent less time worrying about themselves and more worrying about regular people, those businesses would do better and the world could be a better place. Yes, it’s a huge problem that SunRocket customers are getting left in the lurch here. It’s a bigger problem that credit card companies regularly manipulate payment dates to encourage people to miss a payment, incur a late fee and lose their advantageous interest rates. It’s a bigger problem still that billions of dollars get wasted each year to develop products that don’t have a reason to exist.

We need to rethink why companies exist. They are not just here to self-sustain and make money — they are here to meet the needs of the people who work for them and for the people who buy the stuff they make. If executive teams just ask themselves, again and again, “What about the people?”, the American economy would be in better shape – and America could, too.

That being said, this is a classic game theory problem (a Prisoner’s Dillema of sorts).

Startups as a whole would find it easier to find early adopters if people knew that even if a start-up ran out of money, they would make it a point to provide a smooth transition for customers.

Startups that are going down the toilet want to pay back everything possible to their investors/debtors and screw their customers as much as possible. The startup’s name will likely not be used again and customers rarely know who the management team is so that same management team can now do another company and their past will rarely haunt them.

So things will remain as they are. Dying start-ups will screw their customers and new start-ups will have to convince their early adopters that things won’t be THAT bad if they fail.

for example , if you sign up for their service for $199 a year and had been a customer of sunrocket and you had 4 months left on your sunrocket plan.. they will give you 4 months free

here is the link.. copy and paste this link in your browser

Amp’d as a company had to take care in who they wanted to sell their service to. They did not look into the financial viability of their customers, and went for growth and subscriber count instead of putting better business practices.

The question is what to do about it.

Two items today attest to what I hope is not a trend in today’s tech-based service world. The first is Matt Richtel’s article in the New York Times about the human cost of SunRocket’s sudden shut-down. When I initially read…