I first heard the “No User Left Behind Software” term when investigating Econ Technologies’ Chronosync. They used it for their software, since you pay once and all updates are free. So contrary to many packaged applications that are typically sold in retail where you must pay for upgrades and thus many users still use older versions because they object to having to pay for features they don’t want or need (”featuritis“), the makers of no-user-left-behind software save money, effort and resources by only supporting their users on the latest version of their software, since users can (and should) upgrade.
I see more and more software tools offering free upgrades for live. It not only minimizes support, it makes upgrades less painful and even provides for a happy user base. A lot of conventional software makers should evaluate this avenue. If you are currently offering a mature product (e.g., Quicken) and still charge for annual updates, you might want to run a focus group asking people what they think of the new features that they see listed on the front page of your retail box. If the users don’t care about these features, don’t even understand what they are or think they will never even use them (as it happens with me whenever I see the newest version of Quicken), maybe your product is mature and you should consider it to be ready to become a “no-user-left-behind” product? Are you listening, Intuit?
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