Hmm, it's implied at least later in the Twitter thread that it's predatory pricing. John's friend Pieter Level's quotes [0] Wikipedia [1] as follows:
>"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect.[22][23]"
It's a sales person offering to answer questions and (maybe? it's a bit unclear what the scope of "our services" is here) offer onboarding advice/assistance. Considering that to be "predatory pricing" would ban the sales and technical support processes of virtually any company.
Well it's not my claim, but I think it must be what John means.
Otherwise, as you correctly point out, it's clearly just plain old competitive behavior.
Edit: thinking this through, the Automattic sales people aren't stupid, so they're not going to hand over a smoking gun by making an explicit offer that would be provable predatory pricing. But there's a hint there that might be the intention. In the original tweet, John has underlined in red the following phrase:
>To be clear, we don't charge anything for our services.
What is meant by "services"? I think Automattic would claim it's just the Special Projects services
On the other hand, it's maybe deliberately ambiguous: Possibly once contact is made more is on offer.
