They've been killing the brand name anyway with lower-quality products over the past few years. If they continued in that direction the brand wouldn't be worth anything.
Wired and wireless are both "pipes" of a certain capacity. When you install the initial investment you build out a certain sized pipe. Wired has a much larger pipe for obvious technical reasons. In both cases, there is no real cost delta between a low to medium utilization.
In both cases, if the pre-built pipe experiences a high level of utilization, it results in irregularity of service (more latency, dropped packets). With wireless, the impact of high usage is significantly more severe and is more visible at a much lower percent of utilization.
The solution to this is to either reduce capacity or improve infrastructure. The latter involves capital expenditure for both pipes, albeit it is exponentially cheaper to increase wired capacity compared to wireless capacity. Cheaper, but it's not cheap. It's not just hardware - technician training, deployment costs, for larger inefficient businesses it's not easy to upgrade an edge node of 1Gbps to 10Gbps because a feeder for 100 families has a handful of hungry users.
From just a straight business perspective, usage caps make so much sense. The vast majority of customers get nowhere near them and will never notice. The small subset of "power" users that are eating your capacity you're losing money on anyway, so it's easy to sacrifice this market segment.
The sad truth is that the internet video push has turned "power user" expectations fully out of whack with what an executive room was predicting. A business that has had a built network has a hard time justifying large capital pipe expenditures for what it's internally viewing as troublesome "power" users who should switch to business accounts. So they're fighting it with these policies.
The simple truth is that the bandwidth demands are going to continue to increase across the board and this will need to be accepted and the capital spent to expand the pipe. However, a lack of competition will make this process long and painful.
It's a combination of education/credit card access/disposition against toll (EZPass guesses the numbers to pre-fill for you, people on tight budgets can't have $50 randomly disappear from their debit cards). Some people are driving cars they don't own.
There's other stuff that's less acceptable - suspended licenses/old registrations/out of state drivers can't keep their EZ pass up to date. There's also a decent amount of Americans living a cash-mostly lifestyle. Many many americans blackballed from ever having a bank account because they let one go too deep in the red.
They are not rock-solid routers and frequently ship buggy releases, especially if you are using advanced features or their wireless offerings. They are great, they have a ton of powerful features, but don't use them unless you plan to spend time maintaining them and learning a lot about them.
Manipulating their firewall rules is also a really cool way to intro yourself to iptables concepts.
Anecdotally I know, but I thought a large percentage of people knew Zynga was way overvalued. That said, how does a company of 3000 people not recognize this and drive forward new revenue? They had the cash, they could and did hire talent. What stopped new revenue sources from being created? I'd love to read a breakdown of what's happened there.