Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!kth!draken!tut!santra!kampi!jmunkki
From: jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Upgrade Policies [Was: DMCS upgrade policy, if any ?]
Summary: I've got an idea!
Keywords: software distribution
Message-ID: <21576@santra.UUCP>
Date: 25 Apr 89 20:18:08 GMT
References: <255@my.sm.luth.se>
Sender: news@santra.UUCP
Reply-To: jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 48

In article <255@my.sm.luth.se> Lars-Gunnar Taube <taube@my.sm.luth.se> writes:
>What is the upgrade policy from Electronic Arts (if any)?

It seems to me that upgrading software is generally a lot harder than it
should be.

  1) You have to know that an upgrade is available.
	This is relatively easy, if you're talking about products
	like MS-Word or MacWrite. Almost everybody knows someone
	else who is using the program.

  2) You have find out who distributes the upgrade.
	The company who used to make your product sold it to
	a bigger company. How are you going to know that this
	happened if the bigger company is not interested in
	sending an upgrade notice?

  3) You have find out how much the upgrade costs.
	You might be entitled to a free upgrade, but if no one
	tells you, how are you going to know about it?

  4) You have to make sure that they remember to send send the upgrade.
	If you are lucky, they send the upgrade within a month
	from the order and the post office doesn't loose it...

I'm not willing to do the above for every software product that
our university bought. I'm sure the university would be willing
to pay a company to keep our software up to date. So far the only
two upgrade notices/free upgrades that I remember are FoxBase and
MatLab (and we have a lot of software). We've mailed all our
registration cards, but I guess the effort has been pretty much
wasted.

I'd really like to see a company that would take care of all our
upgrades for a fair price. The service might resemble a book-of-
the-month-club. They would send us their catalog of upgrades
every month or two and automatically upgrade all our software
unless we told them to skip the upgrade.

So where would their profit come from? They could charge a yearly
fee for the upgrades and they might take a percentage from the
upgrade price and they might even sell the software.


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|     Juri Munkki jmunkki@hut.fi  jmunkki@fingate.bitnet        I Want   Ne   |
|     Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre        My Own   XT   |
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