I’m not a business strategist, so I won’t pretend to know the internal math here. But the answer to most questions here and the logic behind it seems simple: You do this because you (think you) can.
As @_c_ points out, the ball is now in the customers’ side - whether this ages well or turns into another Nokia success story is something we’ll only know in hindsight. I would say stategic moves like this only work “well” when customers have nowhere else to go or a very strong believers. Imho that’s a bold bet to make on a product that’s far from perfect, built on years of user feedback that consistently lost out to marketing priorities. Suddenly shipping long-requested features at this point now, right as the upgrade decision looms, doesn’t read as customer care but as a carrot timed to close sales.
I would say the people you’re testing this on are the worst possible audience. The openBIM folkes here are the ones who’ve spent years preaching open data, interoperability and low barriers to entry. These people, as I got to know them, might rather be the ones looking for alternatives instead of accepting there aren’t any …
Speaking about our situation, we’ve spent lots of time building standards, training engineers, working on templates, and developing API based extensions to make Solibri work for our actual project workflows. Hearing rumors now that we might have to pay to run our own extensions stings. But maybe it’s the wake-up call needed for our internal decision makers to finally justify why building in-house pays off and beats buying in and getting locked out. I really hope it’s not, simply out of respect for the long-standing users and their energy, nerves and time they’ve invested in this ecosystem. If that’s the case though, then thank you for making that argument for us!
Here’s the thing though: If someone walks into my house and starts talking in a way I don’t like, I think hard about how much longer they’re welcome. If it’s an old friend, a long-term partner, I am probably well advised to listen instead what might be the reason for it … However I think there’s little to be gained from discussing this any further in this place. The real conversation has to happen elsewhere where progress is made.
Just to be clear, this isn’t (only) about the price tag and why I think people are upset. It’s also about the stakeholders who use exactly these kinds of headlines to lobby against BIM in general … “expensive”, “unpredictable”, “vendor games” … We’ve been fighting that perception for years, and moves like this hand ammunition to their side. And honestly, it’s also about feeling played, because the communication around this has been way off from the start.
We have zero problem paying good money for good products. But we’ve stuck around for years despite plenty of things that weren’t okay - not because we were trapped, naive or there was no other choice, but it felt like it’s (slowly) heading in the right direction. That perception has changed.
