I'll spare the moral judgements against Tesla for this: The real moral of the story here is that if your business plan and practices is creating occasional weird issues and huge cognitive dissonance in your customers, it's the wrong business plan. Also... the number of people this applies to is likely so low that Tesla really screwed up by not erring on the side of the customer. (They didn't buy from Tesla, but they'…
Yup - at two previous companies (one I ran, one I didn't) we had as a design philosophy "we don't cause regressions". If we gave a customer an extra feature by mistake and they've since started using it and relying on it, that's on us. They don't care that they weren't "supposed" to have that feature, they see that it was taken away. Reputation and the customer relationship are worth more than the company's sense of…
Bingo.
One of the issues with conventional large corporations (mostly outside of tech) is that middle management incentives often align poorly with this type of philosophy.
A few companies have gotten this right, at least at times.
Costco comes to mind in the present. They go out of their way to save their customers money, and to fix issues customers have as easily as they can. Their returns policy is pretty legendary.
Amazon, somewhat ironically given recent issues, had a philosophy early on that, if a customer was talking to them, they probably didn't want to be! ...And it's probably because something in Amazon's process went wrong. So while I think their reputation has fallen greatly, they did spend a lot of engineering effort into "harmonizing" their purchasing and returns process. Mostly because Bezos saw the value in that. And despite all the bad press, I think they still have that not 'right' but 'decent'. Becuase, while I've had a few issues with amazon, they resolved them really quickly and easily for me as a customer. (I think you get screwed as a vendor though...)
Another example I can think of is Vortex optics. Most optics companies had a pretty good guarantee, often lifetime. Vortex just heavily marketed it and took away the edge cases. So while leupold wouldn't replace your scope if you sent it in along with a video of you driving over it with a truck, vortex would. That allowed them to really rapidly acquire a ton of market share.
At the end of the day, customers are human and despite tech's best efforts, they still try to interact with companies as humans would each other. Fucking over your neighbor while being technically correct still leaves you with a pissed off neighbor who will not respond well to anything you bring to them in the future.