| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 COLUMN
Riding into the sunset PERHAPS NOTHING IS more beautiful and relaxing than contemplating a sunset ... unless you're beholding one of the quick and brutal "sunset" policies software publishers have recently instituted to kill off older versions of their products.
Of course, it's not true that all software licenses have to be renewed, at least not yet. But with Microsoft requiring "product activation" for Windows XP and pushing corporate customers toward subscription licensing plans, the trend is clear. In early October, the Gripe Line began getting complaints about the retirement plans Network Associates had in mind for VirusScan and other McAfee anti-virus products. The readers, most of whom were using product versions that were two to three years old, had encountered problems after downloading the latest virus signature update file from McAfee. In looking for answers, they were directed to a Web page detailing end-of-support and end-of-life timetables for McAfee products and the anti-virus engines on which they are based. This led to the readers murmuring suspicions about the update files being used as a way of forcing them to upgrade. Network Associates officials say they have been notifying both corporate and retail customers for the past six months about their end-of-life plans for older products. The swift pace of change in anti-virus technology means older products have to be phased out regularly. "The goal is to provide our customers with better protection, not to get them to spend a few more dollars," says Vincent Gullotto, director of McAfee's anti-virus lab. Gullotto adds that McAfee will support each new anti-virus engine for at least one year. Users can keep using unsupported versions, but updates may not work as they won't be tested with the older engines. I can accept that anti-virus software publishers have good reasons for retiring their older technology. It's harder to be sympathetic in some other areas, though. One reader was upset that a version of PartitionMagic he had purchased a little more than a year ago had been taken off PowerQuest's list of supported products. In asking how to get PartitionMagic 5.01 to work on Windows 2000, he received a reply from PowerQuest that his product was out of its "support life cycle" and would no longer be supported. The surprise was not that he couldn't get complimentary support, but that he could not even pay for help with a product he'd purchased just 15 months before. In studying PowerQuest's Web site, I could see his experience might not be unusual, as all support ceases for a PowerQuest product one year after the next release is introduced. Because the company tends to bring out a new release of most of its products at least once a year and often even faster, the support clock starts ticking quickly. PowerQuest officials explained that their products tend to be tied very closely to the operating system, and they have to bring out new releases on a frequent basis. The company has essentially made a business decision that a new operating system from Microsoft means PowerQuest customers must upgrade. I guess that makes sense from the company's point of view, but I don't think PowerQuest should be overly surprised if customers don't like it. No column about innovative ways to push upgrades would be complete without checking on Intuit's latest technique for getting QuickBooks customers to pay more for payroll capabilities. Several QuickBooks 2001 customers recently reported getting calls from Intuit telemarketers informing them that, as of next year, customers would be required to upgrade to QuickBooks 2002 if they wanted to keep using the payroll service. As usual, it turns out that the telemarketers are telling a few fibs here, but ones based on a grain of truth. According to an Intuit spokesman, under the company's new sunset policies (which are spelled out in detail at www.quickbooks.com/sunset) QuickBooks 2000 and QuickBooks 2001 users are not required to upgrade to continue using the optional subscription-based payroll service. But payroll users of two older versions deemed antiquated -- QuickBooks 6.0 and QuickBooks 99 -- will have to upgrade to a more recent version by the end of 2002. And it is expected that the 2000 and 2001 versions will each be retired by the next releases. New versions of QuickBooks won't necessarily come out on a yearly basis (new tax rules are part of the payroll service), but that sure seems to be Intuit's modus operandi. If so, that works out to a three-year product life. That may not seem totally unreasonable, but accounting packages don't have to change nearly as quickly as anti-virus software. And keep in mind that when the QuickBooks 6.0 customers bought their product, they thought payroll was a feature of the program they could use as long as they wanted. I guess sometimes one only sees the light after sunset. Ed Foster is InfoWorld's reader advocate. Contact him at gripe@infoworld.com. Discuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
