PT v 5.00 for happy few ?????

[Ness from Brussels]

As a five years PT user and a PT 24 mix+ owner since december 1998, I don't understand the way you acts with such consumer.
I'm one of the firsts trusting you in buying the latest PT and the give away goes to the latests clients having bought a Pt.
Why version 5.00 will be free for them and not for us ?
This is totally unhonest and I hope you will change your point of view !
Please contact me.

[Avid]

This is standard industry practice by every company I can think of. The reasoning is this:
If you have owned the software for some time, you have had many months of use, hopefully made money with it if you are in a commercial business, and probably have received free updates to the software during that time. We try to go a reasonble amount of time between paid upgrades. (this is not always industry practice. Some companies charge their customers for upgrades 2 or 3 times a year.)

We also protect the customer when they buy new hardware. For instance, when we released Pro Tools|24 MIX, we offered a very inexpensive upgrade to MIX to customers that had recently purchased Pro Tools|24 systems.

Our last paid upgrade was Pro Tools 4.2, released in June of 1998. Every one of our valued long-time customers like yourself has received any updates free between June of 1998 and the next upgrade date which will be in October of 1999. That's 16 months.

Someone that has recently purchased the product has obviously just spent their money for that product, and we feel that it would be unfair to ask them to immediately pay again. If we gave away every upgrade to the more than 100,000 Pro Tools owners worldwide, we would probably no longer be able to afford to ever develop and release another upgrade.


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Bruce Paine
Technical eMarketing

[Ness from Brussels]

First, I've to say that the aquisition of the 24 mix+ was very expensive .
On the other hand, you're telling that I've received free updates for 16 months; that's totally untrue. By buying a brand new system, I've bought in the 31 december 1998 a second right to use your soft. Having received my system the 15 january 1999, that's after 10 months that you're asking me to pay an upgrade.
I can understand that you can't afford 100.000 upgrades, but I'm disappointed that this upgrade is not free to all your customers that have trusted you and your new system: PT 24 mix+

[deerock]

you are being silly ness from brussels....

get over it.