I don’t think I understand your question.
Mark
I think he means goods that are tangible and physically stocked (rotting in some b&m warehouse) vs software licenses
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It makes no difference whether or not there is physical medium / stock. Consumers can’t resist a bargain and so more people, who’d otherwise not spend money, are more likely to part with their cash if the price is discounted.
Ah. I now see what he meant. Thanks. Licenses can also “rot” in a warehouse if only a small number of customers are buying them. The purpose of a sale is to generate lots of business in a defined timeframe which may be profitable to a company even at a significantly reduced price per unit.
Mark
something that does not exist until generated like licenses from thin air when actual sale transaction happens can’t “rot” … tangible hardware license carriers (like physical keys - usb dongles, etc) can of course as they do exist physically at least in the container form even if not activated to function … and intangible assets like DxO PL codebase, data, R&D, IP, brandname, TM, whatever - are not actually being sold to DxO products consumers.
Of course not. It was intended as hyperbole.That is why I put it it quotes. What I meant was like a physical product, a license generates no profit until it is sold. And please lets avoid discussing the accounting tricks that might allow unsold inventory to be profitable.
Mark
but not “rotting” either… unlike tangible stuff that also keeps costing you to maintain
As I said it was hyperbole, an exaggeration intended to make a point. You are being too literal.
Mark
I haven’t had a chance to read all the replies, but I’m surprised at the folks who says the onus is on the customer to know a company’s release schedule. Really? Not IMO.
If we follow that to its (illogical) conclusion, let’s say this person had in fact looked back a year, or even 5 years. Okay, does that guarantee anything? Certainly not. Companies are free to change their schedules at any time, without warning or notice. Case in point, I read somewhere that DxO released a bit earlier this year than usual.
Also, look at ON1, whose website I cruised to a couple weeks back. They had all over the site that 11/2 they were coming out with a new version, but if you purchased now, you’d get a free upgrade. Don’t know how far back that went, but probably not 2 months, most likely a month or so. And that’s what I’d expect from a company that chooses long term relationships rather than short term cash.
As long as folks give cover to DxO for behaving like this, so long they’ll keep doing it.
Speaking of absurd pricing, what about FilmPack? $79 for an upgrade. Can anyone look me in the eye and tell me that it delivers 72% of the value of PhotoLab? I doubt it. The only way they can hope to hook people in is through their use of the “hostage features”. I for one will not give in to this extortion. I detest that kind of tactic.
As a long time developer, I can say with some certainty that companies don’t like support tickets. It costs them money. So, I’m going to open one and ask they cease this type of pricing structure. Granted, it probably won’t go anywhere, but it’s my attempt to communicate with them how much I dislike this. I invite others to do the same, even if you’ve purchased FilmPack. There is strength in numbers. MAYBE if enough people tell them they’ll get the message. We can only try.
I recently opened a ticket because I couldn’t log in (they require different accounts for the store and the forums, also absurd), and the message said something about my account being locked out. The support person said it wasn’t and closed the ticket. I got an email asking me to rate the support person, but when I tried, it said I couldn’t because the ticket was closed!!!
I have become more and more unhappy with DxO over the past year. Support is useless, and the docs are terrible (everything I’ve looked up so far has either not been documented at all, wrong, or worded so badly I couldn’t figure it out). Their file/metadata management is terrible, moving my images to a new machine, or a new disk, should be easy and well documented. It’s not. Well, I guess I should say it’s not if you care about your editing history in your images, which I do. More than once I’ve found it useful to undo the last few actions and re-do them a different way, rather than starting from scratch.
Brian
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the only support that is actually worth something is when you can directly write to the developer and get it fixed because they have capacity and desire to interact when request has merits and laid out in a proper manner (in my personal experience that were : FastRawViewer / RawDigger, Iridient, RPP raw converter, ArgyllCMS suite of utilities, BabelColor PatchTool & CTA - no wonder they are small shops, often just one person operation )
From my experance support know little of whats going on with DXO product’s
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I agree with a lot of your writings but I don´t think you will have any problems moving your images and the image catalog structure from one machine to another as long as you still use Photolab.
I would suggest you put all your image folders under the same “top folder”. Then it is easy to move it all to the new machine. Then it is very easy to just select the “top folder” and “right click” it and choose to “Index folder”. That will not just index all XMP-metadata in the images beneath the “top folder” but also build/rebuild the keyword-list with all the keywords used in these images. In fact I think the index functionality in Photolab is pretty elegant and easy to use.
As long as you migrate from one Photolab installation to another there should be no problems, I think. … BUT, there are absolutely problems if somebody likes to use their own “vocabularies” and import these ti Photolab since Photolab unlike for example, lack features for export and import of keyword-lists.
When it comes to both hardware and software-prices many items have become more expensive. That goes even for Capture One when they abolished the cheaper versions for Sony, Nikon and Fuji. Still, I think many users have a strange view on costs. It is often fine that lenses and cameras costs a lot but when it comes to software a lot of people seem to believe that it is a human right to get it for free, but it isn´t is it. Personally, I rather spend a few hundreds of dollars on new upgraded software than on hardware. Often it gives so much more bang than the hardware does for the money.
Last years I seem to totally have lost the interest in new hardware gear. I feel for example, the new upgrade of Capture One, is far more exciting than a new camera body or new lenses. When it comes to the most useful investment for me the last years so far, I must say it has to be Photo Mechanic. Just over 200 U$ spent over three years and the free upgrades just keep coming. I am more than ready and willing to pay for a new upgrade of PM Plus, if not for anything else, so for the support of their brilliant support that really takes care of their users - Gold Star.
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Agreed, and I’ve just been the recipient of such support from DxO regarding activation codes. DxO Support dealt with the matter within 24 hours of me raising a ticket.
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That might be an exception because they know they will get a lot of bad will if they don´t handle things like that promptly. Sad to say problems like that DXO have brought up on themselves by poor design.
In Capture One the users can activate or/and deactivate their installations of the software by themselves. No need there to contact support and wait for a support ticket to get processed.
I would like something like this even in Photolab.
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Moving to a new computer is easy as you say, IF you don’t care about editing history. If you do, then it takes a lot more effort. I’ve done it, and it’s all good, for now.
On Mac the editing history is kept in the DB, no idea about Windows though. You need to backup the DB on the old machine and then restore it on the new machine. Pretty simple, but when I asked support about it they just said, “Customers who have tried this in the past have not been happy with the results.” No attempt to find out the truth or test anything.
When it came time to copy my images from one disk to another (got a bigger/faster SSD), I got the same answer. The docs have a Copy/Move section, but it was worded so badly I couldn’t figure it out. Luckily the interface is easy enough to use I figured it out on my own. But it should NOT have been that hard!
Thanks for the reply,
Brian
Same for Adobe…and probably other apps too.
A few years ago, the shop account would list the number of installations registered with DxO, but that info vanished after a few weeks/months. DxO could make their (and our) lives easier if they implemented a license/installation manager à la C1 or Adobe or… but DxO seems to trust manual effort/actions more than they trust their customers - at least for now.
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deleted by user because response to a too old message.
those topics are very long …
@platypus
I have an example even worse than DXO and that is the Chinese company manufacturing the excellent backup program EaseUS. I thought it was by far the best backup program I ever have had BUT last year when my moving company totally destroyed my computer when I moved and I had to install on another computer I felt very lonely.
Then when I wanted to install it on my new computer and make at least a partial restore I found myself in hell trying to get a new activation code - my old was no longer valid. It took half a week before I could sort that through numerous mails. It just can´t work like that with backupprograms.
Everytime they released an upgrade all sorts of verification problems appeared and new mails had to be sent to their support. At least for now they have finally fixed the verification issues with new service releases, I think, but I have ceased to install them not to get into more troubles. I´m happy for now and don´t try to fix things that are not broken yet.
Having used both, I strongly prefer Macrium Home Reflect over EaseUS.
Because it’s very powerful and full-featured, it has a little more of a learning curve, but as long as you follow their instructions
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/
to build one or more Rescue Disks when you install Macrium (or at least before you really need it) and keep that in a safe place, it will get you back up and running when the whole system is gone.
It does full image, incremental, or differential backups and can handle switching among multiple backup devices.
The permanent license version is $80. Minor upgrades are free. Major version upgrades are discounted and optional; Macrium is only up to version 8, which came out in 2021, and version 7 came out in 2017. You can instead subscribe for $50 a year, but you only really need to do that if you want phone support after the first year of a major version upgrade. There is customer forum support similar to this one that’s free to all that can solve every issue I’ve had. Macrium Support Forum
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Agreed. It’s a very reliable, strong and incredibly fast product. I use it with SyncBackSE for various synchronization tasks. Before, I have been using Acronis True Image since years. With time, each new version of ATI added its load of bugs and useless features and the product eventually became unreliable.