I wouldn’t mind their revenue chasing, if they were in a habit of cleaning their shit first. Some RW issues are dragging on for years, without any action on their part (like publishing and performance, for instance). They just keep adding new features, leaving behind old sores open…
I remember same discussions when we have been on RW6, and RW7 was the new kid in town.
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I have no more issues with 8 than I had with 7. The only annoying issue I had was the jumping pages thing, but after working out what instigated it, I just stopped doing it.
I’ve slowly moved about 70% of my sites over to it. I do like it now, it has just enough features to make the jump worth it.
The simulator is pants though. Badly thought out and poorly implemented IMO. It’s a good start though.
The beta 8.1 fiasco? Classic RW. As mentioned above, compromising your product to get it onto a platform that is dying is madness. I don’t think it’s chasing sales, as there are far better ways to grow the business than pumping all your resources into a platform that fewer and fewer people use. I suspect the desire to be on the MAS is pure ego.
RM have over the years displayed the classic small business problem when creatives/technicals are in charge of running the ship: Poor commercial decision making. This tendency, for the founders of businesses in the creative or technical sector to allow the business to get bogged down is extremely common, and one of the reasons the role of CEO was invented. I’m guessing Dan runs the ship and is the main brains behind RW? He has a coding team but he doesn’t appear to have anyone guiding the company in any particular direction, as such, it’s a rudderless ship that seems to lurch from self-made problem to problem. If anyone with a clear vision was in charge 8.1 wouldn’t have been mentioned at all thus far.
I believe the main issues v8 were fixed some time ago but they haven’t been released as an update. Instead they’ve been held back to add fanfare to 8.1, which itself is being held back for entirely unrelated problems. This is an insane decision and whilst not akin to commercial suicide it’s certainly the equivalent to giving the product a few serious blows to the head.
V8 should have been fixed months ago with an incremental minor update, not holding back the fix for months for a major update, all the while pissing off the existing client base and thus holding back sales.
As I say, this and many other decisions made over the last few years paint RM as a great creative and technical business with no commercial leadership.
IMO.
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Thank you, Steve. That is exactly what I wanted to say on the main RW forum for the last couple of years, but I held back (because I am such a nice person)… ;)
What I have said, though, is that RW’s only reason for existence is Stacks and all add-ons that Stacks enable.
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I know you put in a smiley, but NOT saying something is being “not nice”.
Wouldn’t it be great if all brains (developers) on this forum would put together their combined knowledge and created something better than RW, as an alternative?
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Problem is, few would pay a sensible price for it. So few, it wouldn’t be financially viable. How many devs in the RW community actually make a living from it? I reckon you could count them on one hand. The majority of users want something amazeballs for next nothing and the levels of support normally reserved for products costing ten times the typical stack price, per month!
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True, @steveb, but some are (I presume) doing quite well. According to the podcast that Joe taped last month, his revenue for the past few years has averaged around $275,000…per year. Not bad considering his overhead is fairly limited (no rent, advertising, cost of goods, etc., and his labor burden was very small ($3,000/month).
I’ve also noticed that some other developers are beginning to charge more for their stacks. I paid $50.00 for a navigation stack from Will, and $40.00 for a similar stack from Yuzool. Personally, I look at RW as simply being the foundation (no pun intended) for my library of Stacks…and I have no problem paying decent money if: A) I have a good use for it, B) the stack comes from someone reputable, and; C) it makes my site look/operate better while saving me time. What I’m not sold on, at least not yet, is paying a LOT of money for a system that is: A) tied to a specific domain (and certainly not if it can’t be changed to a different domain if the first one shuts down), and: B) anything subscription based. I get why developers want to move to subscription-based products…but I will always look for an alternative. In most cases, they are available (I can think of two, off-hand, that I use and get my moneys worth out of: iTunes in the cloud and Photoshop/Lightroom).
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It’s beauuuutiful :-). Seamless upgrade :-)
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