Subscription craziness

G

ggascoigne

Member
When your experiment with forcing all of your power uses into a software lease model fails, will you please email us so that we can buy the pro version again?

And in case that's too sarcastic, here are some specifics.
  • I have no problem buying the pro version, I've happily paid you money for years, I like your software.
  • I am not prepared to buy a subscription that enables time-bombed software.
  • I am prepared to pay you for a subscription that enable upgrades and when the subscription expires stops getting me upgrades - which is what most people expect when they buy a software support/maintenance subscription.
  • I'm prepared to just upgrade explicitly every year. I would actually prefer a subscription, just not your interpretation of a subscription.
To put this into context, VMware Fusion does everything that I need for work and has none of this craziness so it's no like I have no options.

Thanks - Guy
 
I too would like to have working software when my subscription expires. But the problem with an upgrades-only subscription alternative is: say that you take out a subscription 6 months after the current version is released, you then have 6 months with the current version, followed by 6 months with a (presumably) new version. So for the price of a 1-year subscription, you'd get to use 2 x PD versions and keep the latest one. Whereas the non-subscription users would have had to buy 2 licenses in the same period - and they're currently the same price on upgrade. It wouldn't make much business sense.

Even with the current time-bombed subscription, unless the majority happen to start their subscription immediately after a new release, Parallels will be losing money in the short term until licenses come up for renewal - and cash flow is dependent on the threat of software deactivation, rather than developing new features that might encourage upgrades. Which doesn't inspire much confidence in the future direction of the company.

They've painted themselves into this corner though, so they only have themselves to blame ...
 
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