NEW SW Subscription Policy - Effective October 2008

yea someone else brought this up earlier on in the year.. can't remember who..

but it is still cheaper to skip a year if thats what you wanted to do.. either pay for 2 years of subscription (1495 * 2) or skip a year and then get on subscription (850 + 1495)

all depends on if you want the latest and greatest from them.

If they are going to advertise "latest and greatest" and deliver, that is one thing, but if they are going to deliver BetaWare through the first 3 releases until mid-year, then it certainly is not "greatest".

My opinion is: this is obnoxious SW must have taken a dent in their earnings over SW2008 ,and they should have, however that was self inflicted To turn around and compel users to buy, whatever the product quality, to keep dividends up if offensive and arrogant. I see a fundamental choice for my small business -either pay the yearly upgrade (whether I choose to use it or not) or stop buying SW altogether. The only reason I took up my VAR offer recently to resume subs was actually they offered a good deal to do so. If they followed this draconian dictum there is no way I would have paid what they ask. So I guess they would either have to be flexible and only penalise a reasonable amount of $ and make a living or get 0$. Zero $ is fine by me.

well, it could be worse.. they could just keep everything in house, testing, reporting, etc, which would mean they would need to hire more people, which would probably raise the price significantly. Or, with every major release they could charge an extra fee for the upgrade.. Now I can only speak about solidworks, and I haven't looked at any of the other 3d modelers like it, so not sure how they handle upgrades/service packs.

I guess it all depends on if you want to have the newest version or not. if you can live with one version, and don't want to upgrade to the next, then don't.

Just have to take into consideration, with adding of new features, new code, the group of programers that are working on it can only test it so much.. One reason why I like how they did the beta program this go around.

I got my 17 beta points, how many did you rack up? lol

Hi Len, this is a total pisser. As you well know in the aerospace industry it is normal to lock the version of CAD for the whole program, usually 2-3 years as upgrading in the middle of the program is too big a risk. This whole subscription thing needs revising as its only purpose is to support bad programming in the first place. I will have to seriously consider whether we will do this as the option to get

on of CAD for the whole program, usually 2-3 years as upgrading in the midd= le of the program is too big

pport bad programming in the first place.

o get 3rd part addins for the missing functionality will be cheaper.

SolidWorks upgrade costs are just the tip of the iceberg.

A user has at least the following extras once he upgrades & these can cost far more than the SWks Upgrade costs (& I sometimes think SWks bean counters do NOT think of this):

1. SolidWorks training: no small cost in hours, no matter how you count them & their $s whether self-trained or in classes
2. 3rd Party Add-in costs
3. Upgrading prior projects and making sure they "work" or haven't been messed up somehow (time consuming to say the least).
4. Integrating upgrades with suppliers (& those that don't want to upgrade)
5. Falling back to a prior version when something "breaks" (defeating the upgrade "effciencies").
6. Debugging time when things don't go right.

Screwing up a project because of an upgrade can make the upgrade price trivial.

Bo

sion of CAD for the whole program, usually 2-3 years as upgrading in the mi= ddle of the program is too big

support bad programming in the first place.

to get 3rd part addins for the missing functionality will be cheaper.

no matter how improved it gets, it will never do the job for you

If you wait four years to resubscribe SW will have changed so much in terms of user interface that you will probably find that it would pay to evaluate the field.

If you are sitting on a well tuned SW system and don't expect much growth in seat count there is still no incentive to re-up. In times of stagnant growth such as we are in now we can't be always going for the bells and whistles.

It seems to me if they want to keep loyal customers they should put out the carrot before putting out the stick. The carrot would be discounting subscriptions when there is more than one seat.

Here is the TOP subscription plan:

No. Seats Price

In other words knock of 20 percent of subscription for each seat over one.

In like manner knock off 5 percent for each year you stay on subscription over two years.

From a return on investment point of view someone with 100 seats is just not going to get the ROI that someone with a single seat is going to get with the current system. This would level the playing field a bit.

TOP

snipped-for-privacy@edatasoluti> Hello,

And does the short period over which they held Beta give any warm fuzzies about 2009?

SW has final figured out they should focus more on keeping old customers. They used to do it by having VARs that called on customers at other times than renewal time and who could "niche" into their area. As soon as SW let multiple VARs cover the same area they shot themselves in the foot as far as customer satisfaction because of the predatory nature of the big VARs. I have two mega VARs and an ordinary VAR in my area.

And this is a sign of financial concerns within SW. Just hope they don't cut quality again.

TOP

The best plan of course would be for SW to get their act together and impress everyone with the 'product' so that they have willing buyers. Then there is no need to lever peoples wallets open

In the new scenario you are probably remain not only pissed off with out of the box quality, VAR performance or whatever riles you most, but now resentful of the extortionate subs policy as well

Well done SW!

As much as I like to read and talk about "new tech", I want my stable productivity tools to be just exactly that. Keeping the OS stable is one major reason Apple can build a successful series of products.

We can talk of all sorts of "things" like Windows, add-ins, VARs, new features, Beta testing, & more, but STABILITY still tops them all for a production tool, which dramatically affects time spent on an engineering project. That is why the 4 Seasons Hotel still has Windows 2000 running at their front desks. The 4 Seasons simply can't upgrade willy nilly and suffer downtime.

It is up to SolidWorks to fix their system so that their users have

Bo