View Single Post
  #8  
Old 03-31-2012, 04:40 AM
Nobodo Nobodo is online now
Registered User
 
Join Date: 08-19-2010
Location: Rural Douglas County, CO
Posts: 69
Schferk,
I work as a software architect, and have been in IT since 1978 (concentrating on software development for the past 20+ years). I know very well how hard it is to make a profit on a piece of software that you develop and market yourself, having done it myself a few times over the past years. But I also know that to stay competitive in any software market, you have to invest in the future. Stagnation is death to any piece of software because evolution happens very rapidly in this industry.

Using the example that is in this thread which you for some reason hijacked, the cost of an editor to replace the freely distributed MS one is a pittance compared to the cost of the development itself. For example, I pay nearly $4,000 per year for an MSDN subscription to support my software development effort. The annual cost of updates to other software component subscriptions rivals and in some cases exceeds that annually, but has to be done to meet the needs (i.e. demands) of my clients. Without that type of investment, I would be out of contracts in no time at all.

If you are willing to pay $1000 or more for a single license for an outliner that meets your needs (which would obviously have to be developed by a team, not an individual), then it really makes no sense that you are trolling the posts of people asking about the possibility of very reasonably expected updates to a $99 product. Competitive products are in the same price range as UR, and many much less. To be willing to pay $1000 for such a product would mean you must have requirements that are far beyond those of a typical user of an outliner product so perhaps you need to hire somebody to do a personalized software project for you.

Anyway, in an attempt to get this thread back on track, what I am asking for here is a feature that is present in many competing products in the same or lower price range. MyBase (wjjsoft) has this ability, and also several other nifty features such as the extremely desirable feature of an MDI interface so you can view several client windows at the same time. TreeDbNotes has this ability, and is much easier to style notes on the fly than UR could dream of. InfoQube has this ability along with a ton of other unique and amazing features, and has many very devoted followers but only a grand total of 131 people who have paid the $49.95 price for a pre-release license. Perhaps the extremely low pre-release funding of InfoQube can be used as an example of how futile it would be to ask users to donate money for the possibility of features being added to UR. It just is not a working business model.

There are many features of UR that are not in the pieces of software I discussed above. However, many of those features are probably of no use to many users, like me. Some features of UR I like a lot compared to competitive software, but some like the topic of this thread are an extreme frustration likely to drive users away if they keep getting met with closed answers like "That sort of outlining within the UR rich text editor is not supported.".

So for me at least, the question is just are there any plans to update this for the future? The free MS editor is a dead-end, and needs to be replaced. I would gladly pay for an upgrade to UR if this would be done; there are enough things I like about UR that I would rather not abandon it. In spite of that, competitive software is evolving and moving past the currently stagnant UR in many ways. But to propose that users should be willing to donate money in the hopes that a seemingly disenchanted developer would suddenly become inspired to do large amounts of new development is purely cabaret.

Thanks,
Mark.
Reply With Quote