Upgrade Prices????

[Pete_Delgado]

I just went to the Macrovision web site to get a quote on upgrading several of our licenses to IS2008. Imagine my surprise when, as a long time user, I see an upgrade price of $1700+!!!

Is everyone else paying this amount or did Macrovision just decide to punish our company with this so-call "upgrade" price?

As someone who has been a beta tester in the past and spent quite a bit of time helping IS develop quality products I am disgusted by this huge price increase for an incremental release! I will NOT be answering any more beta invites in the future unless my company recieves some kind of a benefit.

While I do feel a bit better for ranting about it, I can honestly say that all this price increase has done is allowed the competing products to have an in-road within our company. I have now been asked to evaluate everything from WISE to Wix for the licenses that we have.

Macrovision may have just lost another company to the competition!

-Pete

[esiemiat]

We subscribe to the maintenance plan, but that requires you to renew each year, which I think costs roughly $1300. The benefit is I get unlimited support and free upgrades.

[Pete_Delgado]

esiemiat wrote:
We subscribe to the maintenance plan, but that requires you to renew each year, which I think costs roughly $1300. The benefit is I get unlimited support and free upgrades.

We typically do not require support. The few times that we have actually used support, it was mainly to report product defects. That was one of the reasons for our inclusion in the beta programs in the first place! We needed to verify that the defects we had found were fixed in newer releases.

I've taken a quick look at several other products and they are far cheaper than IS even if you add language packs to them!

While I appreciate the fact that InstallShield has included many additional features into IS, the simple fact is that we don't use a majority of them such as the cross-platform capabilities. I imagine that these features add a lot to the cost of the product and at this point we wonder why we are paying for features that we will never use!

Basically we just need an IDE to create Windows Installer installations. I like the IS automation interface and it has been improved somewhat with the 2008 release of IS, but I can script or create programs in multiple languages to do the same things using the Windows Installer automation layer or SDK. The IS IDE gives me resource editing, string management, localized screens and a project concept for my installations, but the price for the current version of the product simply outweighs any benefit for my organization.


-Pete

[gridman]

Which version are you using? Are you using IS Premier 2008?

I use IS Pro 2008 and got on a silver maintenance plan at the beginning of the year. I get unlimited phone support (which I thought I would never use, but have) and free upgrades. I paid $865 for the year.

So far, it seems to me to be a good deal, because it would cost me nearly to have upgraded to the 2008 version. So, for a little bit more (< $100) I get phone support which I have used a couple times when I have been stuck. Most of the time I just use the forum.

[Pete_Delgado]

gridman wrote:
Which version are you using? Are you using IS Premier 2008?

I use IS Pro 2008 and got on a silver maintenance plan at the beginning of the year. I get unlimited phone support (which I thought I would never use, but have) and free upgrades. I paid $865 for the year.

So far, it seems to me to be a good deal, because it would cost me nearly to have upgraded to the 2008 version. So, for a little bit more (< $100) I get phone support which I have used a couple times when I have been stuck. Most of the time I just use the forum.

We currently have about 10 licenses throughout the company for ISX and newer versions. Some were upgrade purchases and others were upgrades from previous releases. We have a legacy with InstallShield going back to version 1.5 if I recall correctly. Since I have been with my company for 15 years, I know for a fact that our relationship with IS goes back at least 13 of those years. Prior to that, we did not release products on Windows and concentrated on UNIX.

I think that if the cost were under $1000 per license to upgrade all current licenses we would likely gladly do that, however the amount shown for upgrade purchase on the IS web site is robbery, plain and simple and I refuse to recommend that my company upgrade the licenses that my team uses. I'd rather investigate other products that provide what we need than pay extra for additional features that we don't use or need.

-Pete

[Tim_Mayert]

Peter, if you are still reading these posts, what have you found out about other installers? Did you do any research on WiX and if so what are the comparisons between it and IS?

Any recommendations for other installers compared against IS?