Hi,
You hit the nail on the head (for me anyway)!
On 21 Oct 2006, at 06:30, Judy Perry wrote:
Well,
I'd argue it a different way:
If you're steathfully (is that a word??) going to switch away from an
oft-vaunted policy of "free year of upgrades" for a license to a
"this is
all you're gonna get" policy of annual subscription fees, you'd really
better be continuously chugging out new versions to keep all the
various
subscriptions at their varying points of the year going full steam,
or you
can kiss your revenue stream buh-bye.
This is the problem with the new "policy". You buy version X, it has
bugs. Version X+1 comes along and you have to pay to get the bugs
fixed! Ok X+1 may have some super-duper new features in it, but you
don't really care about them for the job you are doing, you just want
the bugs fixed. Unless you can separate out Bug fixes from
enhancements you are left with a buggy piece of software that you can
never get fixed! Even paying (again) for the latest version does not
guarantee that you will get the bugs fixed, and since it has a lot of
new features in it, all of which potentially have bugs in them, the
situation just gets worse and worse.
I have found that I can get by with 2.6.6 with a bunch of
workarounds etc., and I am not going to buy or recommend a new
version until problems that have been around since V2.4 (ish) are
fixed, so the revenue stream shrinks..........................
I personally have mixed feelings.
Fortunately, I don't have to actually *produce* anything with
Revolution;
any bugs that exist I can 'program' my way around in terms of
curriculum
change(s). However, if I did, I'd be leery about paying year after
year,
wondering whether (as has been claimed, note that I'm not saying
it's so)
pre-existing bugs of a year or more have actually gotten fixed. I
guess I
should be especially glad that I'm not a *nix user waiting for desired
improvements/fixes. It must be tough to look into a crystal ball
to try
to discern whether some badly-needed bug fix/improvement will see
its way
into the next release so as to make the pre-purchased update pack
worthwhile.
I know that I recommend that one of my customers get RunRev, they
were all for it, until they found out that:
1. They would have to pay "extra" to have bugs fixed and
2. Even if they did pay "extra" there was no guarantee that they
would ever be fixed.
So, there's two licenses that RunRev didn't get.
The sad thing about it is that if they had just increased the price
of the total package and offered a year's free updates, plus a
separate stream for bug fixes as opposed to enhancements, they would
have paid it.
Cheers
Dave
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