How do you feel about the 365 Program?

[roly]

Hi, I was just reading about Magix ( http://www.magix.com/ca/company/ ), then I read the Innovation link and then I went to Magix portals and went down to partners and as suggested tried to get to know Xara... Nothing, nothing, nothing about the company or technology or team, only what products are available. So perhaps this is why we get no responses from Xara. They must be "silent partners" so perhaps we are wasting our time voicing our opinions and wishes. They will do what they want, when they want and if we do not like it that is our problem. So perhaps in about 50 days, April 13, 2017 (for Xara Web Designer software users) we will see what they want to show and offer us. That will be decision time for many Xara users, and Xara will have to live with the consequences.

Ciao

Roly

[slavelle]

@browj2: I get what you are saying. I understand that the idea is that you buy the existing software and the extras are what you would have gotten NEXT year if you bought the software then, but had to wait. I really do "get" this.

I also get what is being stated by so many others, which is that if you develop things with the features that you got during that year and subsequently decide that you don't want to renew the following year, some features may not work in the designs you already made, which is bad because some of these things would break a design from being used - especially if it was stuff like website design features that got added. Would the project even load any more or would you get that "sorry, thjis project was built with a newer version of Xara and some features might not be available", which kind of equates to "sorry you will not be able to run that set of business cards for your client again that look just like the last version" or "woops - I know that your site USED to have this cool parallax effect on the page, but when you wanted that address change in the footer, well - I didn't renew my application, so I lost the ability to export your site the same way".

Maybe it would be better to actually look at this as a subscription instead of an early access thing. Like a magazine subscription, they don't come to your house and take away the newer issues you received (and read) because you didn't renew. To get that renewal, the company who makes the publication needs to show the value and you will keep subscribing. I see the same with Xara.

I know that this kind of flips the accounting on its head, turning things from "in arrears" to "forward billing", but for something like this, it makes sense for the end-user. Xara/Magix are who made the decision to change the way this stuff works, not the user base. Now the user base is telling Xara how they feel about it and the way I think people are hearing the message coming out from Xara at this point only proves the case that it "feels wrong". Xara is basically saying "you know all those fears you had about a subscription-like model, well, you were right to have them. I know we described how great this whole thing was going to be for you, but we are going to take your money now and then if you want to keep the functions that you learn and use over the next year, you will have to pay for them again if you want to keep them."

It just sounds bad. I know it's not really all that bad and as I said in my other post, I mostly view this methodology as positive and for those of us who are likely to keep going year-after-year, it flat-out doesn't really matter anyway, we will always have those new features.

That's all for now. I'm going to try to learn a few other things about Affinity Designer and see how I would accomplish the same in Xara Designer. AD looks pretty impressive, but I'm sure there is a certain amount of "oooh aahhh" about watching how the demos work and such. I tried the program out when it was in beta and I have to say that the video overviews made it look a lot more impressive than it felt "in use".

Enjoy the constructive and well-thought-out debate here, Xara. I'm sure there is something to learn.