gnucash roadahead

[Robert Heller]

  Andrew Sackville-West <andrew at farwestbilliards.com>,
  In a message on Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:45:36 -0700, wrote :

AS> table costs and donated it to GNC. QB/Quicken became a mature and decent 
AS> product many years ago and the company has had to change its model to 
AS> continue making money. They do this by providing annual updates with 
AS> lots of cruft, and then forcing those upgrades down your throat if you 
AS> use any of the other services they tack on. Not a good plan. and they 
AS> lock you in by preventing you from exporting your information into other 
AS> formats. </rant>

This is an (unfortunate) 'feature' of vendors of commodity software that
have locked themselves into a business model that is just not
appropriate for software.  Software is not like typical manufactured
goods.  Software never wears out or gets used up, so once the product
hits a certain maturity level, there is no need to 'buy it again'. 
Also since most of the time computer programmers spend their time fixing
existing code and not writing code from scratch, the software industry
is better thought of as a *service* industry, not a *manufacturing*
industry.  This is a problem for vendors that have a manufacturing
oriented business model for producing and 'selling' software. Companies
that 'produce' software with the intent of selling lots of (mostly
empty) boxes at places like Staples or Media Play or Best Buy sooner or
later find themselves in a 'strange' situation: their product has
matured and their customer base has become saturated (virtually every
potential customer has a copy of the mature product and has no need to
buy 'upgrades').  When this point happens the software vendor is faced
with a problem: how do they pay their programmers to work on only bug
fixes and security patches?  Eg, now that all of their customers have
the big box with the CD-ROM stuck in the middle, how do you collect for
on-going minor updates?  Can you entice them buy the software with a
pile of bug fixes and some cosmetic changes?  Or do you have to somehow
'strong arm' (eg extort) a license fee out of your customer base?  It
sounds like this has happened with QB...


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Robert Heller                        ||InterNet:   heller at cs.umass.edu
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