LastPass, a service to help people remember their passwords, announced on Friday that it is joining LogMeIn, a remote computer access company. While both companies have unsurprisingly touted the deal, LastPass customers don't appear to be too happy about the news and many have shared their dismay online. The reaction, though obviously not ideal for LastPass or LogMeIn, is not all that surprising considering the fact that the deal involves individuals' highly sensitive information—passwords—being moved over to a new company they may know very little about.
The comment section on LastPass' announcement of the new deal is rife with complaints from customers. Here, several dissenters of the new partnership have shared intentions to drop the service and have asked for alternative password management service suggestions.
"Time to wave LP goodbye.. What’s the best alternative? And I hope they make a tool to easily export all of my data," wrote one commentor under the name 'B'.
Similarly, user 'Thoralf Will' said: "I’m a happy LastPass Premium user for quite some time. Guess that will change soon and I’ll start looking for alternatives. LogMeIn managed to scare me away from their service once and I have no intention on repeating that. Sad to see a good service being doomed."
Others took to the platform to share their views on LogMeIn's reputation and raise concerns about it. For instance, 'Anonymous' wrote: "Are you CRAZY?!? This news has just ruined my day. Now I’m going to have to spend this weekend moving to an other password manager. LogMeIn is probably one of the most unethical software companies in existence. Seriously, this is just one step above selling to the NSA. What contempt for your user base."
'SeatCompgeek' commented: "As a customer who is currently fighting with LogMeIn on non-enterprise capabilities of Join.me, this makes me worried quite a bit. [LastPass] has always been great with security, customer communication and support and my current experience with LogMeIn is they sit behind their agreement for service and do little to nothing from a support perspective since we have a [contract] and can’t escape. That does not create happy customers. Not jumping ship yet, but I’ll be watching closely."
Another commentor, 'Kellen Murphy' echoed this message. Murphy wrote: "Time to find another password service to recommend to my clients. [LogMeIn] has a terrible reputation with small and medium business customers. That you are merging with them irreparably damages your reputation as a customer-focused company. I cannot on good conscience do business with you any more."
When reached for comment about the backlash, LogMeIn COO and President Bill Wagner said that much of the negative feedback to the acquisition might be related to the transition LogMeIn made a few years back from a free service to a paid service.
"I think people might be upset because they used to use a free version of LogMeIn that we discontinued several years ago. I get that. But those circumstances were very different—it was free for ten years but ultimately became a very mature product in a small market," said Wagner. "LastPass is actually a lot more similar to our join.me product: Both are great, simple to use products serving large, growing markets. Both have the highest customer satisfaction of any of the products in their respective space. Both have free products that we expect will be around for a long time to come."
A post on Hacker News by a user under the name 'jmuguy' seems to corroborate Wagner's theory, while also calling out some other customer service related issues with LogMeIn:
"A lot of folks only have experience with LogMeIn from the horrible way they handled transitioning users from the free to paid service. My company has used LogMeIn Central for remote access to hundreds of PCs for years. The core software is great, reliable, and has been ever since we started using it.
The problem is that LogMeIn the company knows they're on top of the heap when it comes to remote management. They have no reason to innovate or improve where they can. They added 2FA but otherwise we haven't seen a single new feature that we've taken advantage of in a very long time. Any features they do add hint at them wanting to be a RMM service but you'd have to be an idiot to trust them with more responsibility of your networks.
Also a lot of those features require LogMeIn Pro which adds an insane amount of cost depending on how many systems you're managing. Meanwhile there are bugs that have been around literally since we started using the software. For instance copy/paste while in a session will randomly break. The LogMeIn client software is very buggy on OSX, crashes often, search will randomly break.
Their support is basically non-existent, although I haven't tried in a while if you opened a ticket it would take days if not longer for a response and they'd usually just direct you to some unrelated KB or tell you post on the forums. We use Lastpass as well so this should be interesting.
I've yet to see a merger that actually improved things from our end as a MSP. Cisco bought Meraki,
Dell bought SonicWALL, at this point I assume any time we see a merger that its time to find a new vendor."
According to a company press release, LogMeIn purchased the popular password management company for $110 million, with an additional $15 million promised if the company hits certain milestones and retention goals following the acquisition. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.
