As Seen in Apple Quicktime 7.2: Forcing Upgrades by Requirement
Apple released Quicktime 7.2 today. This release is highly desirable since it adds full screen viewing of video, a feature long missing from the general release of Quicktime and widely available in free video players from other companies. Previously you had to purchase Quicktime Pro from Apple for $29.99 to get this functionality. This is an interesting study in forcing end users to upgrade by requirement.
Quicktime 7.2 automatically disables Quicktime Pro based on previous versions of Quicktime - Quicktime 5 and Quicktime 6. If you purchased Quicktime Pro and want to continue using its functionality, then you must pay for Quicktime Pro 7.x. Quicktime Pro allows you to import and export Quicktime movies in a variety of formats. While there are plenty of utilities out there that allow more and better conversions, there is a load of convenience to doing this within Quicktime itself.
From a software sales perspective - this release is interesting because of the forced upgrade requirement. Think about how Quicktime is implemented and how well this would be received if it was implemented differently:
Forced Upgrades for Components. Quicktime has application elements such as the player application. But in the end, it is a component that adds new capabilities to the operating system. In most cases, it makes sense not to have multiple component versions at the operating system level - who needs or wants a less stable operating system?
Forced Upgrades for Applications. This is where it gets more interesting. In the 3D content business, many content developers test content within multiple versions of an application, much like a web designer has to test their creation within several web browsers to ensure their web pages show correctly. They cannot give up a previous version until the market declares backward compatibility for that version is no longer relevant.
A terrible example of Force Upgrades by Application was Intuit forcing Quickbooks customers to upgrade to a more recent version of Quickbooks, just to use the Quickbooks Merchant Service. There are no inherent differences in the interfaces to this service from Quickbooks 2004 to Quickbooks 2007, and all information is passed in a standardized way. So in effect - no value is added at all by the upgrade in regards to the merchant service, and if you are otherwise happy with Quickbooks 2004 - you just have to suck up and pay for the upgrade or lose your merchant service.
In either case - Quicktime 7.x Pro forced upgrades or Intuit 2004 upgrades - neither company would be able to pull this off unless they were highly confident that the user base would find a transition to another solution more painful than paying up. And this is the lesson to be learned for software industry professionals - unless the total benefits plus pain avoidance clearly outweigh the cost and benefits of moving to a competitive solution, you should think again about employing this strategy.
