I've finally decided to move from D7 to D2010.  I've held off for several reasons.  

Porting to unicode.  
I have tons and tons of components.  
Many of those components are made by companies that are out of business.
Vista sucks.
Dev environment in XP.

With the apparent sturdiness of Win7, I've decided to make the switch.

With the transfer to D2010, I need to whittle down my components to a few major sets by companies that will be around.  In no particular order; ElevateSoft, TMS, Raize, DevExpress, Addict, WPTools, and a few other.

I also use 1st Class and InfoPower.  I've upgraded several times.  I figured I'd upgrade those components as well so I go to their website and the upgrade is $300.  Ok, that is for both packages.

Except it isn't.  Since I am upgrading from an older version, I need to add an additional $300 to upgrade.

I'm certainly not going to pay $600 for components that are largely duplicated by my other sets.

Of course, I realize that companies are perfectly within their rights to charge whatever price they wish.  

What do you think about companies that effectively require customers to purchase "previous" versions as well?

David

>What do you think about companies that effectively require customers to purchase "previous" versions as well?

Part of me says "well you've been denying them income by skipping generations" and a bit bigger part applies the sex and travel concept. Some additional cost is fair, and some cut off point is fair (as Embarcadero are doing with D2010) but it also depends on the number of additional features and wether they are genuine useful features or more like Word wi=hich is now so feature rich its indigestible.

Roy Lambert [Team Elevate]

Hi David,

I hit a similar situation to you. Was using the likes of Infopower for
ages, but since have other component suites that duplicate most functions.

What I do now is the following:

1) Always purchase my components with source code.

There have been times that upgrading was going to cost me money but
because I had the source I could make the changes myself. Where the
changes were simple (in some cases one single line) - I did this, and
continued to use the product.

Where the changes were more involved, I was happy to pay for the upgrade
because (a) it saved me time, and (b) the developer was obviously doing
the work and earning their money.


2) Have "Legacy" development enviornments.

I have all my development envioronments running in VMWare now. I have a
legacy environment (Delphi 7 on Windows XP) for older applications that
are running components I no longer need (and thus decide not to pay for
the upgrade just to keep them running) as they're pretty much
'maintenance' mode apps now.

This allows me to consolodate my components to just those I wish to work
with for current and new applications and put my finance into those,
while I can still support older applications if/when needed without it
costing me cash everytime I wish to update Delphi.


In short - I don't mind paying upgrade costs where:

a) The developer has made enhancements to the product and I or my
clients are going to benefit from these enhancements,

or

b) A lot of work was required into changing the code to make it
compatible with the newer versions.


I don't like paying costs though when the update only contains a few
lines of codes changes, and the upgrade costs are well in the hundreds
of dollars. In those cases, I revert back to the source code and do the
work myself.

Cheers

Adam.