For many application users, upgrades are welcomed due to a host of exciting new features. However if you’re an engineer, upgrades are often regarded as a necessary nuisance. If your tool or application is doing its job, why change it?
Well, you know that if you delay upgrading, at some point operating system changes, important features, or (in our case) new types of images and documents will cause your product to fail.
So when we breathlessly announce our latest product version, what do most of you do? Well, about 20% of our maintenance customers (who get upgrades at no charge) request an upgrade at the time of announcement. The rest of you can take as long as 12 months.
If you’re going to delay, should you upgrade at all?
The industry is continually changing and obsoleting old products. Your product will eventually fail if you don’t upgrade its underlying technology. And though you can contract for old versions to be supported, that’s not a good solution. You start getting orphaned products that don’t receive the latest enhancements. It costs us and you, much more.
What Do We Recommend?
We don’t expect you to follow our schedule but you should establish your own upgrade QA schedule. We release upgrades once per year and we urge you to not delay from our release by more than four - six months. This gives you time to explore the latest improvements and also be in a position to get any special assistance from us without going to extra expense.
-Simon
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