I didn't read this whole document but one thing I've noticed that is sort of endemic to all commercial productivity software (and non productivity software) is that there's no 'end game'. In other words, it's now expected that software will somehow always need an update at some point in time. There's no push to do it right the first time. Do you buy a car with option to upgrade later to get the gas pedal installed and simply have a frame with seats and no wheels and no gas pedal, but a really serious engine? No, you buy a complete car that drives you from here to there. You know up front what it's performance is, how it handles, how many it seats, etc.

Unfortunately due to the nature of programs being amorphous then the expectation is that it SHOULD change shape over time but this has been turned into an excuse for many companies to simply not finish a product in order to sell the rest of the program at a later date. It is true, that there's a fear of 'if you do your job as a software design company too well, you're going to basically design yourself out of business' but now that fear has fostered this other line of thinking of 'never give it all away ever'. There's a happy medium, I believe, and it has less to do with software and more to do with support and maintaining the software to deal with bugs (which obviously, no one's perfect and bugs do pop up even in good, well polished software, lots of times due to OS upgrades which are also unnecessary most days).

That said, I would love to see any program at all today Xara or even just a simple time wasting game being sold without expectation of 'upgrades'. I think this mentality is destroying the software as a whole and a lot of it has come about by this cloud updating possibility and always-on internet...when a 'patch' to fix bugs actually used to cost LOTS of money to ship out discs, companies would do everything in their power to make sure they wouldn't have to resort to any patches. These days because it costs very little to just upload a new patch and trigger within the already existing software a redirection to download and install a new patch vs. produce thousands of new discs to fix the problem, it's created complacency that 'just good enough to have something to use' is okay.

I think most people might agree that while Xara's features themselves have needed some fine tuning, in the past before this new paradigm, they shipped working a lot better than previous updates and versions. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but this is definitely true of Adobe products and certainly most other products I used. There was a big joke a few years back about Forza shipping with absolutely nothing on the disc other than a redirect to the publisher's server to download the finished game because the shipping date created a 2 day padding to fix some kind of bug. Rather than push back the ship date, they shipped essentially blank discs with day-1 patch fixes expected to be 'okay'. Yet, this is now the standard operating procedure for nearly all 'professionally produced' software. But it gives me the impression that nothing is professional at all, it's a bunch of people struggling to please investors or struggle to keep finding money where there is none.

To me, where the long term financial sustainability is lies in actual SUPPORT. When Adobe was charging 500$ for a boxed copy of Photoshop that came with a full color printed manual it also came with actual support; you could call someone or send an email and get direct help. This is virtually no longer the case. With Xara, it seems the support is the least of the worries; when it comes to operation they are redirecting people here to let other users help each other (which costs them nothing other than a server fee) and I imagine there's very little in the way of people actually dealing with technical questions about crashes/bugs and the like...

I know I'm a little long winded (I apologize...My school taught me how to type when I was 7 and I've only gotten faster through the years), but in essence, I know Xara is probably staffed these days by people 'following trends' and are being expected to 'turn around a flagging company' and other corporate nonsense that has little to nothing to do with me, or anyone else here using the product and that's precisely the problem. The product is not the concern anymore. When every company is literally putting out half finished garbage, then what's the incentive for Xara to do the same? To me, it's all the incentive in the world, but unfortunately the mass population seems to have been conditioned to expect 'upgrades' where they are simply unnecessary and companies use the term 'upgrades' in place of what's really going on which is 'finishing up a half finished product'.

It's troubling and affects everyone so I hope people at some point wake up to this as I see it as a large consumer issue that is hurting a lot of us. Upgrading is not a necessity for anyone except a company with no long term plans, imo. Again, if car companies practiced 1/5th of what software companies do, it would be deadly.