This seems to me a bit of a dilemma. As a consumer, I know the feeling of buyer’s remorse that comes from making a purchase and then seeing the deal get a lot sweeter right afterward. That last happened to me when I bought a Panasonic GX85 shortly after it was released. My only consolation, after new kits arrived in store with an additional lens and battery, was that I didn’t have to wait for my copy of the product. I had to be honest with myself: I bought when I did because that’s when I wanted the camera. And I was willing to spend the money I did. Caveat emptor.
Mark, you wrote that at least one reason you adopted early was to help DxO financially. You’re right, that was generous of you. But also, you must have thought the price was worth paying at the time, all things considered. Why has that changed? Only because others received a benefit that you didn’t? Or because you never really felt good about paying so much for this upgrade that doesn’t yet have much over its predecessor? Did you ask DxO about upcoming sales before buying? Or did you ask them to issue you a credit for missing out on the sale?
There’s another way of looking at this. Profitable businesses can’t sell their products at fire-sale prices for very long. DxO’s within their rights to lower the price short-term, just as their competitors and other producers have done. The 50%-off sale ends today - will there be no new buyers of DxO Labs software between tomorrow and the next sale (which probably won’t be as generous)? I doubt it.
Honestly, I’m not sure what’s fair here. I have reasons to feel unappreciated by DxO, also, but have to weigh that against the balance. I’ve gotten some good deals but have had to eat crow for missing out on others - not to mention, losing on investments and the like. So it goes. I hope that in a year we’ll all feel good about what we own and the company behind it. If not, there are alternatives.
I only thought the price was worth paying because I really love Photolab and I wanted to be supportive in their time of need. I honestly do not want the software to disappear because they become financially insolvent. If this was a larger firm and not in dire financial straits I never would have upgraded until they provided significantly more new or improved functionality. This is the main reason I am annoyed. I am not angry, I am not furious, just annoyed.
I went through a similar situation once before when I purchased the upgrade from Lightroom 5.7 to Lightroom 6 standalone which also had very few enhancements in it. In that case I wasn’t aware of the paucity of new functionality until after I purchased it. As a result I have been turned off to Adobe ever since and chose DXO Photolab Elite as my path to get away from Adobe all together when they decided to no longer support a standalone version of Lightroom. And I’m glad I did. I much prefer the results I get with DXO Photolab.
DxO, do your homework and get your pricing policy/ PR right. First you upset half your loyal customers by releasing an upgrade with hardly any new features for a ridiculously high price. Then, just 3 weeks later, you reduce this price by 50 % for Black Friday and upset the other half who bought the upgrade at the initial price just after it’s release. From a customer relation point of view this policy is a disaster. As a customer I have practically no other possibility but to think that you don’t care. If I had bought at the initial price I’d feel ripped off by now. And as one of those who waited I feel sorry for all those who paid the full price. Like I said, it’s disaster.
If you bought practically anything in the US thirty days ago and compared your price to what was being offered between 11/23 and yesterday you probably had a sad face. DxO is hardly alone.
Regardless, PL2 and supporting DxO’s efforts are worth every penny even at full retail. You wouldn’t still be here if you didn’t agree.
I agree with your post. I was one of those who did not upgrade because I felt that there was not enough new functionality to warrant the upgrade price, but did upgrade when the Black Friday sale appeared. I did so for 2 reasons. First, the price was attractive enough to justify the cost for so little new functionality and, second, there were indications that a long time bug report from me (now 5 years old) would finally be addressed in the very near future.
But the point of this is that there is a Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) sale every year and almost everyone would know about that, so the sale should not be.a surprise. I do not think of the Black Friday sale as being a slap in the face of those who were early upgraders, but only something forced on Dxo by the market, and hence not something they could easily avoid.
If it turns out that the expected bug fix does not show up, then I will probably stop upgrading PL completely and give up on the product as hopelessly unwilling to address known issues but until then I will perservere, knowing that it is one of the best raw converters.
There is one other comment about the sale that I wanted to make. While I have, and use, PhotoLab, I also have a licensed copy of CaptureOne and when it upgraded to the latest version I also decided to not upgrade as their new functionality did not warrant the cost of the upgrade, which was something like $99. I guess I was not alone as they also had a big upgrade sale a couple of months later which offered the upgrade at $45 (as I recall) and I upgraded at that price. As with Dxo, the new version of C1 did not offer enough new functionality to warrant the cost of the original upgrade, but did offer enough for the reduced cost.
The C1 sale was not a Black Friday sale, but perhaps Dxo, like C1, came to the conclusion that not enough people were upgrading and so offered a special sale to get more customers upgraded, and thus, as the Latin says, Caveat Emptor.
Here’s the difference. The upgrade had little-to-no added value. I did it for the early adopters’ price because I hoped there would be added value eventually, as promised. But to then have it go on sale for $25 less? Nope. I’m done. DxO will never see another dollar from me. (But let’s be honest: between DxO’s customer service and their project management, odds are there will never be a PL3.)
The real idiocy is which? found most black Friday deals were cons. 86% of products they tracked were actually cheaper before or after the event. Which? December 2018 page 8. It was just a small % of firms like DxO who made real offers and pissed off a lot of customers in doing so
I’d be much less annoyed if I’d actually paid full price before Black Friday. But as it is, they made it seem like there was an early adopters’ sale ending just before Black Friday and then HAHAHA SUCKERS! Fool me once…
But congratulations, DxO. You fooled me. I thought I had to act fast or miss the deal. Well done. It cost you a customer, but you got an extra $25 out of me.
> between DxO’s customer service and their project management, odds are there will never be a PL3.
Actually I have to disagree. Just a couple of comments.
The ability to get a project out the door on any kind of schedule is difficult. I worked as a software engineer and system architect for 25 years before I retired and I have seen many, many projects that were unable to actually get released. The pressure of new features, OS upgrades and customer bugs, all competing for attention, was just too much for the management of those projects and they failed. Some were finally released, but did not work properly, other never were released and sometimes those involved were let go. It is not easy to get a project released and Dxo’s team has done so repeatedly.
There is almost always friction between the competing demands of the developers, the bug reports and customer service as they are often at odds with each other. Bug reports often require changes to the underlying code base (rather than just a local fix) and those are often opposed by developers because they may introduce unknowns into the system. Customer Service tries to keep customers happy, but often that is at odds with developers who have a fixed schedule to keep, and developers may or may not consider bug reports to be actual bugs.
The Dxo team has been successfully releasing upgrades and updates regularly ever since I first bought Optics Pro (version 5, I think) and has shown itself to be more than up to the task. I have been complaining about the missing ability to re-process externally edited images but, aside from that issue, the software has worked flawlessly. Only well developed products function so well.
There may be some sore/hurt feelings due to the competing demands of marketing and customer service, as shown in this thread, but we should not confuse that with the ability of the development team to release a product. I expect to still be around when PL3 is released.
I saw that a couple of days ago and decided that I was done with CaptureOne. The lowest US upgrade price was $149 and that seems absurd to me. I suppose there will be a sale sometime in the future but I have decided that as good as C1 is they have lost me as a customer.
I assume the high upgrade price may be designed to move people to their subscription model. That has been extremely profitable for Adobe and I assume PhaseOne may think it will benefit them as well.
In comparison that upgrade price makes the PL2 upgrade seem like a bargain.
Yeah, but at least their upgrades have new features. With DxO, you pay for an upgrade hoping you’ll eventually get new features, and then get ripped off because DxO believes its loyal customers are suckers.
I understand that you are upset because you paid for the upgrade and then found that there was a Black Friday sale for much less, and I sympathize. I personally think that Dxo should offer to reimburse those caught in that situation.
However I do need to say that the previous version of PL had the Nik functionality folded in as new functionality and this version has the search functionality. The Nik stuff was, in my view, a major piece of new functionality and the search functionality, which I do not need or care about, seems to be the first step in a DAM, so that is also new functionality.
The discussion is about new functionality in Photolab. The Nik Collection is priced and sold as a separate software package with as yet no more integration into Photolab then it has with other post-processing software packages. I do not see how it could qualify as new functionality. You might have been able to make that argument if they had added a relatively simple Export to Nik collection feature where you could select the Nik application desired, but, they did not even do that.
