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Mindjet MindManager
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Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Sep 5, 2012 at 07:53 AM
The announcements by Mindjet or Mindsystems are a irritating for me.
I have a valid MindManager 2012 Professional licence.
Mindjet offered me to upgrade to the new Mindjet product including an all-inclusive 12 month licence for € 236,81€.
The same offer by Mindsystems is AUD $ $188.85.
When I convert these values to Swiss Francs I get CHF 284.35 for Mindjet’s offer and CHF 184.90 for Mindystem’s offer.
Huh?! This is a difference of CHF 99.45 (= US$ 104) !
They promise:
“It lowers the entry cost for new users”
Hey, what is with the existing users? I don’t see a benefit here.
Apart from this, the upgrading offer is too steep for me and it is still not clear for me what I will get in return for this money. I don’t buy a such an expensive black box.
From October 1 to the 21st of December, the offer will increase to AUD 249 or 296,31 €. It isn’t possible anymore after the 21st December to upgrade old buying licences.
What do they write in the Marketing blurb? “You are being not forced to upgrade”. Nice, but indirectly you are forced because if I don’t upgrade until the 21st December then you have to pay for a new licence.
New features? Yes, but I am not impressed at all. They do not qualify for a new release, more for an update:
- Calculations between topics for planning and budgeting
- Synchronized task mangement
- Improved usability
Especially the last one is hot air or just blabla.
I hope to get more clarification from Mindjet during the next days.
Dominik
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Sep 5, 2012 at 01:35 PM
I have always been off by the MindManager price, and reading the user group did nothing to make me feel like investing in MM (that is when I would have had the money to do). Instead I began to use MindGenius, which has a rather nice feature set for planning and projects. For aesthetics I like NovaMind.
http://www.mindgenius.com/?_kk=mindgenius&_kt=8020e022-27bc-4aeb-a373-b4e2397393e4
http://www.novamind.com/
By the way, for those of us outside of the US, we need to watch very carefully what is actually billed to our credit cards. I purchased NovaMind for about US $150 - at a time when the Cdn $ was about 98 cents in relation to the US $ - however, I was charged about $170.
The culprit was Digital River, a company which handles transactions for a number of software developers.
http://corporate.digitalriver.com/store/digriv/ContentTheme/pbPage.Homepage/sectionName.home
At the most I should have been charged something less than $10, taking into account the exchange difference and any conversion charges.
I wonder if anyone else has had issues with Digital River. If so, perhaps we could discuss them under a new thread.
Daly
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 9, 2012 at 05:17 PM
There is a clear paradigm shift in the software business model, driven by Google and other web services, from purchase to subscription-driven. With Microsoft moving its Office suite to such a pay-as-you-go system, programs that have long been ‘attached’ to Office, including MindManager, are bound to follow.
Jeremy Rifkin spoke of this years ago in The Age Of Access, calling it the ‘end of ownership’.
From the client business’s perspective the move makes sense, as there are less upfront costs. In the current state of the economy worldwide, it also makes sense for individual users.
I’m not sure how good this news is for the developers of much of the classic software we discuss here. As more people are exposed to software as a service (SAAS), purchased-license-driven software may become less accessible. Let’s see how Neville/Surfulater does.
The move is supposed to bring in more steady/predictable growth to the SAAS business; yet when upfront costs are less, clients may more easily decide to change to another service after a while.
Posted by Cassius
Sep 9, 2012 at 07:23 PM
WinZip promised a lifetime license, but when it was sold, the new owner reneged.
At the rate things are moving to the cloud, I foresee the day when be are back to using almost dumb terminals with almost all processing being done in the cloud.