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The company I work for also had this problem. The solutions was in fact simple: we told our customers we wouldn't add any features or changes other than bugfix
by ohwp 13y ago
The company I work for also had this problem.
The solutions was in fact simple: we told our customers we wouldn't add any features or changes other than bugfixes.
When you are telling the software is outdated and the support is gone they all understand it's time to move on [1].
Most of the time the customer also wants to get rid of the outdated website/webapp. So it's also a good reason to start something new.
[1] Ofcourse this doesn't work for all customers.
- gpvos 13y agoThe way you describe it, I understand the customers moved to a competitor and the company went out of business. Or did you have a new version ready and at (near) feature parity with the old version? As the article describes, that investment can become very large when you put it off for too long. And the reasons they had to put it off were, at least initially, quite valid.
- ohwp 13y agoOfcourse there should be a better alternative at the time you tell your customers to move on. But no, they didn't run to competitors. I don't want to sound very arrogant, but when your work is good, customers will stay because they trust you.
- sybhn 13y agoI don't see that approach working in any competitive product marketplace. This is the kind of candy you don't want to throw to you competitor. Anecdotal, there's a company that built their core product on Symfony 0.9x, and never upgraded. That was started around 6 years ago. The company is now worth 1+ billion on nasdaq, and still relies on Symfony 0.9x for the core functionality. From a development point of view it sucks. Ask any developers. From the business point of view, staying away from the kind of 6 month no feature s-bugs-only period you're talking about, is probably the reason it could beat its main competitor, and succeed the way it did.