Monday, March 13, 2006
David Lee Todd, Unknown Product Manager
SOFTWARE SUNSET LUNACY
Lee Gomes, the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal, published a
terrific article in the Journal yesterday, 22 February, lambasting
software companies for periodically sunsetting products, forcing the
customers to upgrade or lose support.
He was talking about Quicken, a consumer product, but the same goes
double for the enterprise space, where I work. Why should you *ever*
sunset a product? Suppose you bought an annuity. Every year the
annuity company sends you a check, for which you have to do little
work other than opening the envelope. Yet after four years, you tire
of the annuity, and tell the annuity company not to send the checks
any more, because it's too much trouble to open the envelope.
What???!!!
Yet this is what most software vendors do. You have customers
regularly paying support fees. They are happy with the product. After
three or four years, most of the bugs have been discovered, and it
costs you very little to keep maintaining it. Yet you tell the
customer to either upgrade, at huge expense and risk to them, or
you'll stop supporting them. The usual excuse is that it is "too much
trouble" to keep supporting an old version. Too much trouble for whom,
the mailman?
This is lunacy. Software vendors everywhere are recognizing that one
of their biggest assets is the support revenue stream, yet they do
everything they can to disrupt that stream by sunsetting products.
Mercedes-Benz still stocks parts for forty-year-old cars. They'll
still happily service them. Maybe they know something that our
industry doesn't.
Lee Gomes, the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal, published a
terrific article in the Journal yesterday, 22 February, lambasting
software companies for periodically sunsetting products, forcing the
customers to upgrade or lose support.
He was talking about Quicken, a consumer product, but the same goes
double for the enterprise space, where I work. Why should you *ever*
sunset a product? Suppose you bought an annuity. Every year the
annuity company sends you a check, for which you have to do little
work other than opening the envelope. Yet after four years, you tire
of the annuity, and tell the annuity company not to send the checks
any more, because it's too much trouble to open the envelope.
What???!!!
Yet this is what most software vendors do. You have customers
regularly paying support fees. They are happy with the product. After
three or four years, most of the bugs have been discovered, and it
costs you very little to keep maintaining it. Yet you tell the
customer to either upgrade, at huge expense and risk to them, or
you'll stop supporting them. The usual excuse is that it is "too much
trouble" to keep supporting an old version. Too much trouble for whom,
the mailman?
This is lunacy. Software vendors everywhere are recognizing that one
of their biggest assets is the support revenue stream, yet they do
everything they can to disrupt that stream by sunsetting products.
Mercedes-Benz still stocks parts for forty-year-old cars. They'll
still happily service them. Maybe they know something that our
industry doesn't.
