Sabertooth
Well-Known Member
Thread Starter
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2007
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Greetings!
I felt this would be a good time to examine the realities of lifetime licenses. I see a lot of people asking whether the old licenses will be honored or whether there will be new lifetime licenses made available. Short answer, you're old license is no longer valid (That's NOT officially the case right now, it's MY OPINION). This is a discussion about the future direction of licensing.
For the record, James has stated elsewhere that those who recently purchased a license will receive some kind of consideration. I feel for you if you purchased a lifetime license less than a year ago and I understand why you're upset at the turn of events but that's not the fault of the people who are trying to resurrect this program so please direct any venting at the old management and don't un-reasonably hold these guys accountable.
Myself, like many others who proclaim willingness to donate or re-up their license, I've used Anydvd HD for many years (since 2007?) and, at that time, I bought everything that was offered which kicked in an additional discount on the individual prices. So, yes, I feel I got my monies worth especially considering the amount of effort required to keep this software working with new releases. I didn't and probably never will use any of the other software I bought from them and I still think I got a good deal.
This software is what you call development intensive not like say a word processor where a developer is tweaking or adding a few new features every year. I think this translates in to more work hours and more staffing needs required (relative to the word processor) and therefore the people involved deserve reasonable compensation in line with their time and effort.
Lifetime licenses are great for the consumer (like me) but let's consider what a lifetime license means to the developer. Fact is the developer can't spend the lifetime license receipts or at least not more than a small amount of it. Lifetime licenses are pyramidal, meaning when the RedFox version releases, they will sell a lot of licenses but as time progresses and the market is saturated they sell fewer and fewer. Because they never receive another dime from the customer, they need to take a significant part of that money received now and invest it to generate income to continue the operations of the business in to the future. (So they may need to hire a professional financial manager to be sustainable and they'll definitely need an attorney to be retained is a certainty.)
How do they keep the income flowing? What some companies do is release a new program every so often and reset the customer database. The old version is no longer developed and end of life, EOL. For example and this is pure speculation, under Slysoft, they could have done a reset with the release of AnyDVD HD from AnyDVD. All AnyDVD lifetime licenses still work with AnyDVD but it's just no longer developed, EOL. You want the current generation, you have to re-up for the new HD software. Similarly when Ultra HD is introduced they could perform such a reset. Under that scenario, your lifetime license might be valid for 5 years or so. Still that's probably not too bad for $100 up front or $20/yr. so who would complain really?
In conclusion, although I love my lifetime license as a consumer, I suggest ditching lifetime licenses and going to an extended term discounted license say 5 years. Lifetime licenses are a difficult business model to sustain and don't make sense for development intensive software like this.
I'd like to hear your opinion. Thanks
Sabertooth
I felt this would be a good time to examine the realities of lifetime licenses. I see a lot of people asking whether the old licenses will be honored or whether there will be new lifetime licenses made available. Short answer, you're old license is no longer valid (That's NOT officially the case right now, it's MY OPINION). This is a discussion about the future direction of licensing.
For the record, James has stated elsewhere that those who recently purchased a license will receive some kind of consideration. I feel for you if you purchased a lifetime license less than a year ago and I understand why you're upset at the turn of events but that's not the fault of the people who are trying to resurrect this program so please direct any venting at the old management and don't un-reasonably hold these guys accountable.
Myself, like many others who proclaim willingness to donate or re-up their license, I've used Anydvd HD for many years (since 2007?) and, at that time, I bought everything that was offered which kicked in an additional discount on the individual prices. So, yes, I feel I got my monies worth especially considering the amount of effort required to keep this software working with new releases. I didn't and probably never will use any of the other software I bought from them and I still think I got a good deal.
This software is what you call development intensive not like say a word processor where a developer is tweaking or adding a few new features every year. I think this translates in to more work hours and more staffing needs required (relative to the word processor) and therefore the people involved deserve reasonable compensation in line with their time and effort.
Lifetime licenses are great for the consumer (like me) but let's consider what a lifetime license means to the developer. Fact is the developer can't spend the lifetime license receipts or at least not more than a small amount of it. Lifetime licenses are pyramidal, meaning when the RedFox version releases, they will sell a lot of licenses but as time progresses and the market is saturated they sell fewer and fewer. Because they never receive another dime from the customer, they need to take a significant part of that money received now and invest it to generate income to continue the operations of the business in to the future. (So they may need to hire a professional financial manager to be sustainable and they'll definitely need an attorney to be retained is a certainty.)
How do they keep the income flowing? What some companies do is release a new program every so often and reset the customer database. The old version is no longer developed and end of life, EOL. For example and this is pure speculation, under Slysoft, they could have done a reset with the release of AnyDVD HD from AnyDVD. All AnyDVD lifetime licenses still work with AnyDVD but it's just no longer developed, EOL. You want the current generation, you have to re-up for the new HD software. Similarly when Ultra HD is introduced they could perform such a reset. Under that scenario, your lifetime license might be valid for 5 years or so. Still that's probably not too bad for $100 up front or $20/yr. so who would complain really?
In conclusion, although I love my lifetime license as a consumer, I suggest ditching lifetime licenses and going to an extended term discounted license say 5 years. Lifetime licenses are a difficult business model to sustain and don't make sense for development intensive software like this.
I'd like to hear your opinion. Thanks
Sabertooth
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