I was going to post about this at the WayTools forum, but seeing how the incident was back in late March, I decided it wouldn't be a good idea to resurrect the topic and get it all stirred up again. But I can certainly comment about it here.
Before the bizarre paranoid behavior started, I actually really liked that WayTools rep. He (very likely a he, based on the way he writes) wrote some very intelligent and well-written posts that I enjoyed reading. When he first began accusing people of being corporate shills, I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting. Maybe." But once he started accusing every person who posted negative comments of the same thing, it became worrying, to the point that I wondered about his mental stability (early signs of schizophrenia, maybe?).
Over the years, I've seen many examples of tiny indie developers where the person who did the design, coding, and business operations, was also the same person who acts as the face of the company and communicates with customers in online forums. Some did it really well and actually had personalities that were likable and could remain cool under pressure. Some acted like complete a-holes and couldn't withstand any kind of negative criticism, and would cuss out customers, throw tantrums, threaten to end development, and other bizarre behavior that did irreversible damage to the company and its products. In all those cases, if they simply had let someone else handle public relations and customer service--someone who was actually suited for the task, they would have prevented those problems. But unfortunately, for really tiny developers, they often couldn't afford to hire someone and it's just a one-man bedroom operation.
In WayTools' case, I think they probably can find someone else to take over as the public face of the company, but I suspect the person who's been doing it is likely one of the central personnel in the company--likely the founder, the designer, or engineer, thus feeling like he "should" be the public face because he can field questions from customers with the highest level of authority and expertise. This also explains why there doesn't seem to be a higher authority monitoring his actions and stopping him--he likely IS the higher authority (or at least one of them). But unfortunately, despite being highly intelligent and knowledgeable and passionate, he sucks at handing negative criticism, is overly paranoid, and lacks emotional intelligence in some circumstances.
The fact that he cannot fathom why anyone can be passionate about keyboards, buy and own many keyboards, and would write thousands of words on forums about keyboards unless they are corporate shills, is telling of his lack of emotional intuition about people and about the nature of obsessive hobbies. He knows about communities like GeekHack and Deskthority, and he himself is passionate about keyboards, so why was it so hard for him to understand that for some people, it is simply a passionate hobby and people writing long rants about anything related to keyboard products is perfectly normal. By accusing passionate and vocal customers of being corporate shills, he's alienating the same type of people who are the most passionate about his company's product.
BTW, SpiceBar, did you end up doing that Skype chat with WayTools? If so, what came out of that conversation?
