Canva?!????!

[Walter Stecko]

Affinity has a user base primarily because of perpetual licensing. Introduce subscription licensing and you lose much of that user base. Without a substantial user base the software becomes effectively worthless.

[Granddaddy]

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,|
And God fulfills Himself in many ways
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices.

I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not.

I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn."

It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to.

During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web.

My experience in those wars led me to formulate:

Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason

1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 

2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software 

I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038

 

Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software.

Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

[Bit Disappointed]