I wrote a nice letter to all of the executive/managerial people who work at RapidShare that I could dig up from LinkedIn when they decided to shift their core business to become a personal file backup service.
See, in 2010 I was one of about five people were in on the ground floor of a file backup company that stored about 10 Terabytes worth of data belonging to local wealthy people in a datacenter on the other side of the country. Fast forward to 2012 when I left the company (long boring story) we had over 100 employees and I had helped to build a 10 Petabyte ZFS storage cloud where we stored over 1 million virtual machines that could instantly be booted from our datacenter, and they were all created from backups of our customer's systems. I was also the person that launched the marketing intelligence department where I covertly got competitor's pricing information and did price analysis, so I know how much a GB costs in a datacenter
I explained all this in the email I sent to them, and then explained to them that their pricing model was insanely horrible when compared to existing companies that are already out there and do not have a past as being one of the largest facilitators of piracy.
Also mentioned was a list of other companies which eventually had to re-gear their pricing structure from their initial "unlimited storage" over to a "$ per GB" storage pricing model.
This list explained how each of these companies gave their customers plenty of fore-warning about the upcoming changes so that they could adapt - complete opposite of RapidShare's decision to give their customers just 10 days or whatever it was to immediately prepare for their data to be deleted.
I then congratulating them on making the worst business decision I've ever seen made in the backup & disaster recovery industry.
Unfortunately I never did get a response back from anyone at RapidShare, most likely because they knew there wouldn't be a way for them to properly handle such response. But I did get one thing that made me smile, a linkedin update that showed me a number of RapidShare employees had visited my profile
Long and the short of it - RapidShare is a perfect model of how to make a very profitable service based company go to complete shit in just a matter of a few days....