Re:Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist ...
by user5994461 on Thursday December 20, 2018 @08:26PM
(#18730775)
What's the rationale behind the current model?
From a business perspective, the older versions are used by older or larger companies that couldn't or didn't want to upgrade, they have money to shell out and should be charged more.
Re:Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist ...
by FigBug on Friday December 21, 2018 @01:56PM
(#18735576)
We don't have many corporate customers, mainly sell to individuals.
The idea is to grow the user base as large as possible and then sell them the latest version or other products.
Give away a version with 3rd party hardware is to grow the user base to new markets. Let somebody else handle the marketing / distribution and get their users. Sure lots people throw away the CD of bundled software when they buy something, but a decent number still install it.
Give away free is same idea. People love free stuff and will download it. Then hopefully they enjoy it and upgrade to get more features.
However, we are going to transition to latest version costs money and two feature set reduced versions gets given with hardware and free.
Having 3 versions to support is too much overhead for a small company. And giving away old versions of our products with issues that we know we've solved gives a bad image of our software to new users we are trying to up-sell to the latest version.