John, that's exactly what makes me so cross.
We go out and buy 09 knowing that 09's EE will make it complete. Now that 10 is announced, it makes the people who bought 09 look stupid.
"Haha, we've tricked you. Now we're going to sell you 10 which was originally intended to complete 09 but is now a brand new title, has everything that 09 has and revolutionary features! And you're going to buy it."
And by revolutionary I'm not joking. SpeedTree and Layers are about the most exciting things in Trainz since the DLS. It's just Auran's sales/marketing that ticks me off. As someone questioned on another thread, "why sell us 4 different small products instead of 1 good one?"
Nicholas.
Nick,
Ignore the marketing spin and look at the product for what it is. In a nutshell this is called software development based on a single base platform. So what's the big deal? There is no trickery here. This is not unusual with most of the software we purchase today. The '09 version doesn't make anyone look stupid if they've purchased it. If that was the case then many of the people still using TRS2004, UTC, Sp3, TRS2006, would be deleting their programs in embarassment, and only whispering their Trainz versions when asked.
This is how software is written today. While new full versions of programs are written, a team is working on interim programs that add features through updates and new versions, depending upon how the sales department wants to sell the product. How many versions of Adobe products have you purchased? How about software from Microsoft?
With the latest released version of Windows, Vista not W7, people complained that it was too revolutionary even though the underlying code is pretty much the same as before. The problem was that it did things differently. Would you want to have to relearn how to use the program with every new version that comes out? The fact that Surveyor looks and acts the same is a plus for the majority of us that purchase the new version. We could say this about Driver too, or remember when TRS2006 came out with the new CMP? People here were in an uproar because now this program acted different than anything else they used, (We won't talk about the initial technicial difficulties) and complained loudly and almost violently in the forums here.
Each of a software version is built on the other. Adobe is one of the biggest cuprits in this. They sell a version of Illustrator for example for a lot of money. Then they charge a lot to upgrade. The upgrade is nothing more than a few more buttons with nothing is fixed underneath, and in fact more things are broken and the program runs a lot slower.
The net result of their upgrade are more useless features and no fixes, and to add insult to injury, you end up needing the stupid upgrade because the brainy customer decided to go with the latest. So you fork out $350 for an upgrade. Ah, this is a special deal for the upraders. The upgrade, by the way won't install unless you have your old disk and serial number around as well, and you need to phone home to Adobe with both serial numbers.
The full version I forgot to tell you is $850, and this new version crashes because there's now an undocumented limit on the number of spline points on a curve. And to make matters worse, they give you the option to write to the previous version so other people can still read your files. This sounds great and probably worth part of the upgrade package. The poblem is they don't tell you that this really isn't fully compatible, and they also don't mention the undocumented feature that makes the previous versions of the files useless for anyone that really needs them because certain things are stripped out that worked before in the old versions of the files. This will cost you a few customers because these customers didn't upgrade to the latest version.
The other gotcha is the software won't run on older versions of Windows or Apple OSx. So then you need to up grade your systems just to run one package in order to stay in business. The snowball effect gets worse. Now that you've upgraded your new OS, there are now other programs that need patches, full verisons, and upgrades in order to operate on the new system. This can get worse if you're using an older Macintosh (No Apple wars here, please). They are very version specific with their operating system and hardware iterations, so purchasing the new OS may not work on your hardware. This is probably and extreme example, but it's not unusual.
I could go on with many examples of software that is based on previous versions. There are many reasons for this including the ease in development. It's a lot faster to build on something already made than it is to start from scratch. The overhead costs are a lot less and the development time is less so the cost to the company, and sometimes to the customer is a lot less.
It's not such a big deal really, and for the cost of this program is a worthy upgrade even for the other features they are adding in.
John
