After a few years of using my Dropcam Pro as a baby monitor, I finally found the perfect way to repurpose it after my kids got older: my aging mother in law lives far from us so I thought I could install it in her home so our family could easily get in touch and see her on camera. She finds technology challenging so this seemed like a great solution.
I finally got around to attempting to setup the Dropcam Pro at her house and learned that Google is terminating all support for the product in 5 weeks. Bummer, I had kept it in the box for the past year and a half and it still worked well when I last used it - I don't understand why a perfectly good camera is being killed due to the business dealings of Google/Nest/ADT - they're not scoring any points for environmental consideration and it's quite frustrating that I'm falling victim to some myopic choice that is clearly meant to suit some sort of corporate interest but screw over consumers.
I then read about a supposed "redemption offer" involving a credit of $200 at the google store for owners of a Dropcam which sounded quite sensible. I searched my inboxes for the redemption offer that should have been sent but could find nothing so I gave google support a call. The rep was very nice but had to escalate to find out what is going on. Turns out, because I did not have the Dropcam Pro connected in the last 1.5 years, they never sent me a redemption offer so now I don't qualify for it.
WTF Google? Do you understand that that is just extremely poor customer service and totally inappropriate?
Even your own support rep was surprised and profusely apologized but could do nothing after escalating it to his superiors.
So all I can say about the situation is this: I will never buy a Google product again. This is not how you treat customers - everyone would agree you can't pull this kind of stunt if you were sold a car, why do they think this is ok? They are a mighty corporation and I'm just a single consumer with no bargaining power so refusing to do business with them in the future is the only recourse I have.
I will proceed to tell everyone I know this story and strongly recommend avoiding anything sold by Google - clearly they have some screwed up priorities and will likely do this again with whatever products they are selling.
Shame on you, Google - you've really lost the plot and are a consumer and environment unfriendly company as far as I'm concerned.
