I think it is a balance between customer satisfaction through good after sales support and affordable upgrades and generating revenue. I certainly think $55 for an upgrade is steep considering desktop 9 cost $90. I have only had this software for 1.5 years and I do feel ripped off everytime i get these annoying email messages to tell you, you can't get OS mavericks unless you pay for the upgrade. It just generates bad vibes in your existing customers. I won't be upgrading for sure and I am glad there are alternatives out there and will certainly look into that.
Well said. This is my perspective as well. Parallels absolutely has every right to continue the model they've been using, but they'll get some blowback in terms of unhappy customers, and just as us customers will either need to "pay up" or look for alternatives, they too will "pay up" a bit by dealing with the negative feedback.
I've participated in a thread in their forums over the past week. My suggestion to them was to offer a more affordable upgrade price. I use PD7 for Windows 7, and I primarily use it for VPN / Remote Desktop for a couple of clients I support. And I don't do that very often. So, for me, a $50 upgrade to prevent their software from "breaking" (which is the end result), seems steep.
Now, is the amount of time it would take me to download, install, and figure out VirtualBox, plus reinstalling Windows 7 and reconfiguring my VPN / Remote Desktop stuff going to cost me more than that $50? Yes, but I'm still tempted to go that route simply to have the satisfaction of not giving them my $50. I am not "entitled" to anything, but I've found their attitude to be "smug" in this case, and I've noticed that they've started replying to negative reviews on Amazon to try to counter the negative coverage, while not providing any official response in their forums which suggests the least bit of a desire to delight their customers. All they would need to do to keep me is offer a better upgrade price (even just to get up to PD8, since that supposedly offers more limited support for Mavericks).
They have a customer-unfriendly model, IMO. This is demonstrated by the following:
- They effectively sell their software as a service. Upgrade for $50 every 2 years (so, $25/year) or it effectively stops working with that 2nd year's Mac OS upgrade. This would be more acceptable if they actually advertised it this way, but they instead pretend that you're buying a standalone product.
- An iPad app that is sold as an outright service, thereby circumventing the standard iOS app purchase policy which enables you to install iOS software on multiple iOS devices you own.
- The inability to install Parallels Desktop on multiple Macs in your house.
- Rather than seeing the fact that the just-released Mavericks would cause a lot of their customers to be stuck, and proactively offering the upgrade at a steeper discount, they instead seem to be looking at it as a great opportunity to score an easy $50 off of a lot of their existing client base who otherwise were perfectly content running PD7.
I've waited it out this past week to see if their position would change at all, but they haven't budged yet, and I really want to install Mavericks, so I think I'll move onto phase 2 and upgrade to Mavericks, and either go through the effort of installing VirtualBox, or wait that side of it out a bit longer and just use my 2nd computer for the Windows 7 functionality I need. Maybe after there's a larger backlash they'll adjust their position. Maybe not. If not, I'll likely switch to VirtualBox. Some other unhappy customers might even search for cracked versions of their software online. The bottom line is that the free market will sort it out. They shouldn't be "forced" to do anything, but market pressure will either push them in a more positive direction, or they'll lose some sales, which they may be perfectly OK with, and that's their prerogative, too. But online forums (here, their forums, and the review system on Amazon) is a great way to express displeasure/feedback to a company and participate in and influence the free market.
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