“This summer, for the first time, it wildly misread its users. It raised prices on its subscriptions, infuriating people, and then tried to separate its DVD-by-mail business into a new company called Qwikster, infuriating its customers even more.”
The events recounted happened in the summer of 2011 - does it sound as strange to you as it does to me to refer to it as “this summer”? I’d call it “last summer”, and use “this summer” to refer to the upcoming summer of 2012 - any thoughts?
Yeah, I’d agree with you. In general, if it’s not currently summer, I’d interpret ‘this summer’ to be ‘the summer that falls within the current calendar year.’
‘This past summer,’ or any variant of that phrase, would be June-August 2011.
As ever, one must infer meaning from context. I do not think there is any fixed rule about expressions like “this summer.” Here, clearly they cannot mean the summer that has not come yet, so they must mean 2011. I agree that they could and ideally should have expressed themselves more clearly, and saved the reader from having to figure it out.