Hmmm. I'm going to assume that the existing etacts service will, in fact, be shut down, and that the team will work on implementing the same (or similar, or perhaps completely unrelated) functionality within Salesforce's products.
If the shutdown message made reference to the fact that they're being acquired by Salesforce, then perhaps users (who may not necessarily read their emails all that carefully) would assume that the existing service would be continuing under the Salesforce banner. Then the etacts folks would have had to spend the next N weeks correcting that particular misconception by answering a bunch of emails from users going "Waaah I don't want to be in Salesforce" or "But I already have a Salesforce account, how do I integrate the two" and "wtf is Salesforce I tried to log in and it didn't work".
I don't think customers would notice, and if they noticed, I'm not sure they would believe it, and if they believed it, they might act delusional about it. In other words, I agree with hugh3 that it may have been wise for them to do it this way.
I also think there's a certain elegance in delivering news that is actionable without news that isn't actionable. It's kind of like the [ANN] messages in user group mailing lists.
Sometimes I put on my action hat and am likely to see things as being action-related even when they aren't. I doubt I'm the only one.
If the shutdown message made reference to the fact that they're being acquired by Salesforce, then perhaps users (who may not necessarily read their emails all that carefully) would assume that the existing service would be continuing under the Salesforce banner. Then the etacts folks would have had to spend the next N weeks correcting that particular misconception by answering a bunch of emails from users going "Waaah I don't want to be in Salesforce" or "But I already have a Salesforce account, how do I integrate the two" and "wtf is Salesforce I tried to log in and it didn't work".
On reflection this makes sense.