So, what's the downside?

Sador

Sador

Well-known member
Licensed customer
No, seriously. I've spent a couple of hours in here, and still haven't found anything bad about XenForo. Everything looks great, I keep finding new stuff, the speed is terrific, everything works better than expected... so where's the catch? :P

What do the rest of you think?
 
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Lawrence said:
The price just needs to be realistic. This forum already speaks for the quality of the product. I must say, I am very impressed.
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To be fair, that's what I thought about vB4 as well. We all know how that ended.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love XF already and I'm sure it will be even more awesome than I can imagine right now. But like I said before, we know Kier & Mike, we know what they can do and have done, and we know it will be good. Other people, people not familiar with vBulletin > a year ago won't know them, to them this will just be another piece of software. And even if it looks quite damn good on this website, if they have to spend ~200 dollar for a piece of forumsoftware, most people will likely choose a well known product like vBulletin or IPB rather than something unknown.

Agreeing with Eriksrocks on this point, if they start out low and increase the price as we go along, there's no telling what they'll achieve. If they're overplaying their hand in the beginning, no matter how great it is, it probably won't last.
 
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If someone wants to take the idea of the iPhone, they are free to. Although, the only reason why the iPhone gained its popularity, was not due to its price, but its premium feature set, ease-of-use, low setup time and availability to be used by people with little technical knowledge.

I can't think of many successful launches of products with a high price. However, having said that, XF should start by underestimating demand and the value of, for the product. From this, calculate the total costs, analysing the competitive landscape, and thus, map-out a complete, but omnidirectional long-term strategy. For the business to succeed, the price must simply be greater than the overall costs for the business to survive. In product launches, it is often that the businesses underprice the product.

What I feel is that the business needs to understand segmentation. This will come through both qualitative and quantitative research, but more of the latter. Consequently, you can manage and optimise market penetration and how you should adopt a pricing strategy when one set of customers is willing to pay more than the other. The one thing I don't recommend is to start a price-war.
 
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feldon30 said:
Again, excellent news. I don't believe in foolish consistency, but the vB3 license model meant you got direct feedback from the customers on how they felt about the quality of updates, whether you'd get a rash of re-ups or not.
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Here's how I saw things under the old vB license/pricing model.

Under the old system, vB had a financial incentive to work hard at improving their software and when they did, they were rewarded by their customers as they (their customers) would pay to renew their member areas to access the new features and updates.

Under the new license scheme, vB demand to be rewarded in advance based on vague promises that they will deliver an improved product at some later time down the road. The underlying problem being, that because vB gets their money in advance, the truth is that they really have very little incentive at that point to deliver anything at all to license holders. And worse, what they really have more incentive to do, is to hold back software updates and bundle them into a new "major" version so that they can essentially extract new license fees from their customers and then the cycle starts all over once again.

To me at least, that's a totally dysfunctional model from the customer's perspective. ;)

-Chris
 
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GodForum.com said:
Chris keep in mind also that IB is competing with their own customers ...

how many companies do you know want to help their competitors succeed more ?
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They are not competing with all customers, but they seem to be creating a pool of areas to capture. I'm sure Ashley has this all planned out and it'll be fine, but I am curious to see how he'll handle this.
 
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Sador said:
I hate conspiracy stories.
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It's what make the world go 'round.
frog.gif
 
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Lawrence said:
True. But this forum is testament to what you will receive. And it has never been released yet. Already, it will be a very wise investment. :)
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Fair enough, but I don't think this was made possible by a huge amount of money. Rather because of a couple of very talented people that work hard and know what they're doing.
 
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Sador said:
Let's keep it at this: money does a lot of things, but it doesn't automatically mean you get a good product just by having a lot of money.
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I agree but have you seen the people running IB ...

I wouldn't call them stupid ... so they are bright and have the money yet nothing comes of it ...

and to say they do not compete with some of their customers is simply not true.
 
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It has been a huge amount of fun guys. I will have to force myself to not come in here again until Monday otherwise I will get no work done at all.

Reading and posting here has been addictive and I am afraid if I come back before some work is done I will be trapped again.

Later all.

Nice work guys.
 
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