Thursday February 23, 2006

Software sunset lunacy

Lee Gomes, the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal, published a terrific article in the Journal yesterday, 22 February, lambasting software companies for periodically sunsetting products, forcing the customers to upgrade or lose support.

He was talking about Quicken, a consumer product, but the same goes double for the enterprise space, where I work. Why should you *ever* sunset a product? Suppose you bought an annuity. Every year the annuity company sends you a check, for which you have to do little work other than opening the envelope. Yet after four years, you tire of the annuity, and tell the annuity company not to send the checks any more, because it's too much trouble to open the envelope. What???!!!

Yet this is what most software vendors do. You have customers regularly paying support fees. They are happy with the product. After three or four years, most of the bugs have been discovered, and it costs you very little to keep maintaining it. Yet you tell the customer to either upgrade, at huge expense and risk to them, or you'll stop supporting them. The usual excuse is that it is "too much trouble" to keep supporting an old version. Too much trouble for whom, the mailman?

This is lunacy. Software vendors everywhere are recognizing that one of their biggest assets is the support revenue stream, yet they do everything they can to disrupt that stream by sunsetting products. Mercedes-Benz still stocks parts for forty-year-old cars. They'll still happily service them. Maybe they know something that our industry doesn't.