Personally, they had lost my goodwill already with their old upgrade policy. If you bought a license on 01/2014, it expired on 12/2014, and you didn't need the product again until 04/2015, the upgrade you purchase in April begins on 01/2015, retroactively beginning after the end of the previous license. So you don't get the full 12 months they charge you for. When I realized that it was the end of my support for them.
Why would it work another way? You are paying to extend your old license, of course it carries on from when it finished. If you want a year from the present moment, that's not an extension, it's a new purchase. Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.
> Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.
That's only a problem if your renewal price is different from a new license.
This is the Oracle model, by the way. Say you buy Oracle with its compulsory support package, then you stop paying (because you don't need or want support, you're not going to upgrade etc). If at any point in the future you decide you'd actually like to buy the new version, you'll have to pay retroactive fees for all the time you skipped renewing. It's... not really nice.
In this sense, a switch to clear per-month pricing is actually welcome; it's just the "disabling stuff you paid for" that grates.
Because I shouldn't have to retroactively pay for a period I didn't use a product and the natural thing for me to assume was my status as a previous customer/license holder was what enabled me to an upgrade with the advertised "year's" worth of upgrades? Because that's how upgrade licenses work for other software products? (Windows/Office, other stuff I've used.)
They can define a license however they want, it's just up to me whether I find it worthwhile, and I didn't.
But at least in those days I had the option of continuing to use the older version after it expired.
So you'd rather they packaged all the updates into big yearly versions you paid for all at once, rather than getting things as they are done? That sucks.
If you still want updates as they come, either they are free if you own the version (in which case, you feel cheated if you buy a version then a new one comes out soon after), meaning people will avoid buying the product until the new version comes out.
With the year of upgrades included, it works. Now, in your case, you want to have your cake and eat it too - you still benefit from the upgrades the software got while you were not using it. You were not paying for using the software (that's the new model), you were paying to receive updates, so you either pay continuously for them at a reduced price, or pay for a new year when it runs out.
In fact, what is kind of crazy is what you are saying is you only want to pay for the software while you are using it, which is exactly the new model. You want to use the version you have forever, get all the updates, and also not pay when you don't use it. How is that going to be a sane business model from the other side?
Hey, sure, it's not worth it for you - that's your call, but what business model would actually be good enough for your standards?
Is it crazy when Windows does it? I paid for Windows 7, I didn't want to get Windows 8 when it first came out. Later on Windows 8 was improved. I was eligible for upgrade pricing because I owned Windows 7. You can argue that this is too customer-friendly if you want, that's subjective. But you're acting like my expectation is unusual or unprecedented, which is wrong.
Microsoft is desperate to push people to upgrade, because the value of a new version is non-obvious to most and the normal upgrade path is getting a new PC. They are making a choice to do something that is worse for them in some ways because having people using the newer versions is very important to them (as proven by them flat-out giving away 10).
