I know, with that title everyone thinks of Windows Vista. Although that is a good example of one of the points I want to make I don't think it is even the most severe. I think that vendors make two consistent mistakes in the continual cycle of upgrades. We as customers have come off the manic edge of enabling both issues but a lot of us are still bad about upgrading for upgrades sake.
Vendors lose sight of what their clients are looking for.
Yes this is the Vista one. The same mistake was also made by Goldmine, Doctor Solomon’s Software McAfee, Adobe and nearly every other vendor at one time or another. Maybe product management has a vision and has not done research. Maybe marketing did their research with myopic vision. Sometimes a vendor is trying to be a thought leader by adding or redesigning features and we as a consumers chose not to follow.
This variety of version change that degrades (or confuses) functionality is excusable if not laudable. I think the quintessential explanation for this is the 1958 Edsel. This was a good car despite some of the reputation it got. It was just not what consumers wanted. When, as a society, we were on the cusp of the 60s and everyone wanted their first VW beetle. Ford put out a big roomy monster with Tires the size of a bathtub. And when the buying public chose to not buy the big Ford (here is the big Vista comparison) set out in an ad campaign to let us know how misinformed we were and our expectations were askew, that Edsel was a great car! We just needed to wake up to its greatness.
In the same vein Doctor Solomon’s Software made a similar mistake in 1994. The Product Management Team decided that Microsoft Exchange and Lotus notes are just a fad and mail clients like that will never catch on. SMTP anti-virus is what the world will want. The then they spent the next year trying to talk the software consuming world that they don’t want MS Exchange! Doctor Solomon’s tried to upgrade their security suite by driving an upgrade product where no one wants to go.
The severe "bad upgrade" however is when a vendor knows they are pushing a dead horse a mile farther.
Sometimes there are game changer technology changes like Wifi or web-apps. Sometimes hardware has improved to such a degree a products traditional architecture is absurd and surreal. (I used the NEW version of an app literally in the last 3 weeks that requires separate Data base server, management server, web server, communication server, data collector and load balancer for even the 1st blush of functionality all physical servers!). Sometimes a vendor’s crown jewel functionality has just gone past their useful time. How would you like to own Qmem or Gramatic 5?
In the same way I can understand vendors trying to lead or being misled by bad marketing I find those that are driving a product too far after the KNOW it is past its useful maximum I don’t. It often crosses the line between being a bit delusional OR badly informed and plain unvarnished greed.
This leads into the sticky discussion of brand loyalties. If a product comes out from a favored vendor it must be good, right? Off the top of my head I can’t think of any vendor that hasn’t put out a pig in a poke at least once in their run.
So if we avoid blind loyalty, and are skeptical of suite pricing, maybe we can avoid both types of bad upgrades.
