First off: I really like PL. I bought the ELITE edition of PL1 and did the same with PL2. Although, it’s lacking a lot, I want to support the further development of the product and therefore help me to get additional features & camera support in the future. I know you had trouble last/this year, so I am willing to look past the current situation, but only a bit.
Coming to the “marketing” and “customer friendly” part, though, this is another story. To be honest: it is a disaster and, as a few others already pointed out, you did yourself as a company a huge disservice. I know in this forum we (the users) might be a vocal minority, but I guess other “normal customers” will also be wondering what exactly there is to version 2.0 - coming from 1.X - that justifies the current price tag.
The release seems rushed (I am looking at you (not even) half-baked DAM functionality!). So apart from that it feels like you just needed the money. Which is a bad practice and might (or will) alienate current customers. I am myself looking at other options, but stay for “PRIME”.
What I expect you (DxO) to do now is to come out of the shadows and present some roadmap / rough backlog overview - or at least something, which tells us customers: this and that will come in version 2.X over the next months - and NOT - in another version 3.X in some very distant future.
Others already mentioned this, but you need to work a lot on your (external) communication skills! A lot!
Like Chris I really like PL. I chose it over Lightroom, Capture One etc after extensive testing. Í really do prefer its results after processing. When the local adjustments were introduced, I thought that the implementation while not the best had huge potential to make PL one of the premier RAW developers. So I was very happy to pay for the Elite version and then support them through the whole receivership process.
As far as this current upgrade goes it provides some extremely limited DAM functionality which I don’t need and is of no use to me, colour management features which are also of no use to me and finally an enhanced Clearview which if I use on the current version is in a very controlled and subtle way so I suspect that is of very limited use for me at best.
For me at least, the upgrade price in no way reflects the increased value I could possibly derive from upgrading to PL2. Neither is there a published roadmap for future development that I know of for me to know where the product is heading and what I am putting my money into. That is unfortunate as, I am now left thinking after the financial problems earlier in the year that maybe DxO are needing to generate revenue quickly and so wondering whether I should be investing further in the software. What is DxO’s policy relating to skipping upgrades? There hasn’t been any credible response from the company to the criticisms thus far and I sincerely hope that will change. If not DxO I fear hasn’t learned any lessons regarding how to engage with customers and keep them on side since then.
If this was subscription software I would be upset. Since it is not I can decide to use the software that I bought for the time being. It’s my choice.
If you think this was bad marketing, think twice. As a new customer I would Google DxO and find news about chapter 11 and worse, most of them misinformed.
The new release brings fresh news on the top of the search engines: PhotoLab 2 in October, Nik Collection by DxO in June. Now that looks like I may spend my money on a product which is still actively developed.
In terms of aquiring new customers you’re perfectly right. But in the end you want to keep them, this is not how you do it. And if the reputation is being built upon sacrificing features for “a quick buck”, you won’t stay afloat for long.
I agree and I believe that’s why this release was pushed out right now. It seems to be aimed more to bringing in new customers rather than as an upgrade for the existing user base. Give their financial situation I can understand that. Hopefully they will have several PL2 point releases throughout the year containing real updates to the core functionality. In the meantime I think we need to take solace in the fact that they are still around. PL2 is still a great product, its just that after all the talk on this forum we were expecting so much more than we got.
I also “blindly” upgraded to find out how little had really changed. There were a few tweaks for Apple Mojave compatibility that could have been added in a point update. A few modules were added, but an upgrade wasn’t really needed for that and could also have been in a point update. The “enhancements” to the management capabilities are weak, though I don’t think where that is where attention should be spent.
What I was expecting was perhaps some manner of performance improvements, which there were none from what I have seen.
I will say from what I have seen, DxO does have the best RAW conversion, at least for Nikon, than any other platform with the Prime noise reduction being simply incredible.
Over all, it seems what we got was a point release we had to pay for.