Thank you. And yes you’re right, but again, no matter how great your product is, some people will always be adverse to change, and I can’t blame them! I’d be a little risk adverse too in some of their cases.

And you’re absolutely right about increasing sales. Each new version we’ve ever released has increased our sales! I don’t think it’s so much that people are waiting for that one feature to buy, but that the total value of LandlordMax for them just keeps getting higher and higher. In other words, the more it does and help them, the more they want to buy it!

Something to note, more of a personal preference really, but I really don’t like to sell LandlordMax based on upcoming features. I know a lot of companies do this, but it’s not for us. I’ll only mention a feature is coming if it’s already built in our development environment. Otherwise it’s too easy to disapoint someone later. For example, if you tell a potential customer that feature X will be in the next version, and it has to be pushed back for whatever reason, then you’ve just annoyed them! Why do this? The most we’ll ever do is say a feature is “anticipated”, which means we’d like to have it, but we’re not promising.

I think Joel Spolsky says it best in his article: Mouth Wide Shut.

Actually, that’s pretty much the same model we use, but it’s not officially called a “subscription model” (although in essence it is). When you purchase the software you receive a year of free upgrades, including all versions.

The problem with this model is that not everyone upgrades with each version. As well, not everyone wants to deal with upgrades. Upgrades can be scary!

For example, you talked about changing the backend from a proprietary format to an SQL database engine. Depending on the type of customers you have, and how critical their data is, such an upgrade can cause a lot of anxiety. I don’t know much about your application, so please excuse my ignorance if it’s not applicable, but with LandlordMax, some of customers are each dealing with up to ten’s of millions of dollars of accounting and management information. Some of our customers want to be absolutely sure everything works, and therefore are willing to push back upgrades, even if it has new amazing beneficial features…

For new customers though, this model is great! You don’t need to wait until a major cycle to release new features. And this is what I especially like about it.

As well, it takes a lot of the risk of purchasing out of the equation. If you don’t need to worry about when the next version is going to come out, it’s a lot easier to make that purchase now than wait until just after a major version becomes available! I know I personally prefer to purchase software with these types of licenses.

That’s actually one of the features we had to push back on for this version again. We’ve been wanting to add it since version 1.08, but we just haven’t had the time. It’s all based on priorities of what our customers want and need. I’m really hoping to push this into the next release with the other two major features…

In the past it wasn’t so much an issue since we only released 3 patches over a little over a year. But with version 2.12 we had 5 patches in 6 months. At least 1-2 of those patches could almost have been considered new versions! Anyways, assuming that we again want to release another major shortly, I think this is becoming a higher and higher priority feature.

And thank you for pointing out the spelling error. It’s appreciated. I’ll fix it in a moment. And yes, that’s a great feature in FireFox 2! I’m really glad they added it. I’m just downloaded this week, I’m still using 1.5 on the box I write though.

That’s a good point, and many people actually do!

As for forcing the customer to update, no we absolutely don’t! If someone wants to stay on the last version their entitled to, we have absolutely no problems with that.

Firstly, if your customers subscribed to your blog they would know what to expect and what concern you have for the value of your product and your client’s satisfaction.

You have solved part of your dilemma by having a great product that:
-Includes 1 year of upgrades/support.
-An easy one step upgrade function.

I would go with option 1, as you have decided.
You are getting your added benefits out now; increasing sales, customer satisfaction.
If you release it with a well worded primer about the next update (released before tax time, and free with your 1 year upgrade), the client can chose to install the new upgrade now or wait for the release.

It might also increase immediate sales, as the client might have been waiting for the “coming” features, but will buy now, as they know it is coming, will be free and in the meantime have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the product, convert their systems etc..

Great subject and insight on the inner workings of your business…

Cheers,
Eric

Actually, no offence, but I believe the dilemma is false.

We’ve struggled with the very questions for years and I believe we have found a solution; we are now shifting to subscription-based model. It’s definitely a matter of what you like and what you don’t like but it *is* a solution that lets you avoid having to answer the kind of questions that you’ve stated.

To illustrate it, the users of our FollowUpXpert (http://www.xtreeme.com/followupxpert) buy a license along with a subscription for 1 year of free upgrades and support. After the year they can extend it by paying a percentage of the retail price ($39 instead of $125 for the Professional Edition). Of course, they can keep the software for however long they want but won’t be able to upgrade (with the exception of critical bug fixes).

It enables us to make releases as fast as possible without decreasing the revenue. The most important thing is it works!

We still have “major” and “minor” releases but “major” is a word reserved for releases that have extensive and “horizontal” impact (for instance, version 4.0 we now work on will let the user use a SQL database as a backend instead of the current proprietary forma) and “minor” – for smaller, “vertical” changes (e.g. adding better support for web-based sign-up forms etc.).

Just my $0.02.

BTW, it’s spelled “dilemma”, and Firefox 2 has a built-in web spell checker, if you post from your browser.