2013: Any Developments Since Price Hike?

McQ

It's been half a year since the price increase announcement, several threads, lots of promises, lots of arguments, and then lots of silence. My question to Chris and Don is "Has SM actually implemented even a single new development for the Pro (now Business) Account level yet?"

The noise has died down. But I really want to know what it is you want me to pay for when my subscription comes due at the end of April. How long will SM keep saying, "We're working on amazing new stuff!" without actually showing us this stuff?

Also, has anything happened with this yet?:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1835258&postcount=147

I'm being sincere in my questions. I don't want to start a flame war, but you've talked a lot about things that will be coming and yet here we are, well past the August price increase and I've seen not one new feature announced.

Please help me understand why I should renew at the same level in April. I'll email this as well in case you'd rather go that route.

Thanks.

Andy

McQ wrote: »

Also, has anything happened with this yet?:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1835258&postcount=147

http://www.dgrin.com/member.php?u=55548

Baldy

McQ wrote: »

It's been half a year since the price increase announcement, several threads, lots of promises, lots of arguments, and then lots of silence. My question to Chris and Don is "Has SM actually implemented even a single new development for the Pro (now Business) Account level yet?"

The noise has died down. But I really want to know what it is you want me to pay for when my subscription comes due at the end of April. How long will SM keep saying, "We're working on amazing new stuff!" without actually showing us this stuff?

Also, has anything happened with this yet?:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1835258&postcount=147

I'm being sincere in my questions. I don't want to start a flame war, but you've talked a lot about things that will be coming and yet here we are, well past the August price increase and I've seen not one new feature announced.

Please help me understand why I should renew at the same level in April. I'll email this as well in case you'd rather go that route.

Thanks.

Hey McQ,

You should have email from this morning because you sent this to the help desk and I thought I understood you to want a personal reply.

Thanks,
Baldy

mbonocore

Glenn,

I am writing a response to you now, but just wanted to put a not here so you know I am on it...

Thanks!

Michael

mbonocore

Glenn,

I am writing a response to you now, but just wanted to put a not here so you know I am on it...

Thanks!

Michael

fjcvisual

I think this is a topic we would all like an answer to.

McQ

I did receive a reply to my email. I had no expectations of getting an email reply based on experience. I did write that I was leaving the same message here and on email. My apologies for the confusion.

My outlook has changed somewhat and I'm satisfied to simply leave the matter be.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Pure Energy

Wow! So much secrecy going on in this thread. Pssst, here's the secret handshake... meet me over there later and please tell me too.

At least Andy made it feel like Christmas not knowing what new development secrets we would be led to when we clicked on the link he provided.

Andy wrote: »

http://www.dgrin.com/member.php?u=55548

Well done Andy. Like some presents some of us may have received before... the anticipation and unwrapping is more exciting than the reality but it is the thought that counts... right?

mbonocore

Pure Energy wrote: »

Wow! So much secrecy going on in this thread. Pssst, here's the secret handshake... meet me over there later and please tell me too.

I assure you there is no secrecy. Chris was manning the Help Desk this morning (as he often does) and happened to field the email from Glenn and responded via email. I will be more than happy to get a hold of the email and forward the information to you as well.

Michael

mbonocore

McQ wrote: »

I did receive a reply to my email. I had no expectations of getting an email reply based on experience. I did write that I was leaving the same message here and on email. My apologies for the confusion.

My outlook has changed somewhat and I'm satisfied to simply leave the matter be.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Good to hear Glenn. I had talked to Baldy after I had written my earlier comment, and he had told me he responded to you directly.

BTW, I absolutely love this photo. Incredible catch!


Michael

darklightphotography

mbonocore wrote: »

I assure you there is no secrecy. Chris was manning the Help Desk this morning (as he often does) and happened to field the email from Glenn and responded via email. I will be more than happy to get a hold of the email and forward the information to you as well.

Michael

Michael, if you have information about the developments McQ asked about, then surely the best place to post it is right here, for everyone to see.

mbonocore

Of course. That is what I meant by "forward to you". Forward, within this thread. I apologize for the confusion.

Michael


Michael Bonocore
www.mb-photography-sf.com
www.facebook.com/mbonocore
plus.mb-photography-sf.com

davemj98

Waiting
No public reply?
Dave

McQ

mbonocore wrote: »

Good to hear Glenn. I had talked to Baldy after I had written my earlier comment, and he had told me he responded to you directly.

BTW, I absolutely love this photo. Incredible catch!


Michael

Thanks, Michael.

And so there's no confusion to others who have read the thread, I wrote my question here and then sent an essentially identical email. I had assumed, incorrectly (but based on my experience with this subject and the lack of timely responses over the past six months) that I wouldn't hear back within the thread itself, or even possibly via email, so I hit it from both sides.

Well, to my pleasant surprise I received a really rapid reply from Baldy via email.

I'm sorry if this just created new issues or confusion, but again, I figured the thread and/or the email might be ignored or that there would be a huge delay in response. Communication hasn't been that stellar recently. That is evidenced by us not even being aware that Michael has filled Andy's spot. I still don't see that announcement anywhere. Andy's post just led to Michael's profile, nothing more.

Anyway, Michael, thank you for responding (Baldy, thank you as well), and thanks for the kind words on the photo.

denisegoldberg

McQ wrote: »

...That is evidenced by us not even being aware that Michael has filled Andy's spot. I still don't see that announcement anywhere. Andy's post just led to Michael's profile, nothing more.

Here's the announcement thread - The new Andy on dgrin.

--- Denise

mbonocore

davemj98 wrote: »

No public reply?
Dave

As I stated, Glenn simply had emailed help desk, and that is how Baldy replied. I was going to write a response here with the cliff notes, but Baldy wanted to do it himself. So he should be joining us shortly.

Michael

McQ

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Here's the announcement thread - The new Andy on dgrin.

--- Denise

And there it is! I looked for that so many times and never saw it. Totally my miss on that one. My apologies, and thanks, Denise.

fjcvisual

Looking forward to Baldy's response

davemj98

And...
:cry

JamesGPhoto

FINALLY!!! SOON??? I'm anxiously awaiting.....

Baldy

darklightphotography wrote: »

Michael, if you have information about the developments McQ asked about, then surely the best place to post it is right here, for everyone to see.

I'd love it if that was always true, but alas our competitors tell our partners that they love how open we are here because they get such a good idea of what we're working on. In their cases, they often ask their customers on their forums to email their help desk for more info.

Every week I'm in touch with customers via email, phone or in person in our offices, and if I know and trust them, I admit that I'll say more in those discussions than I will here even though it's in my nature to blurt it all out because I love talking about it. Some people as they read this will know what I'm saying because they are early testers/users/advisors of the stuff we're working on.

(Don't worry, I'm going to get to telling you the gist of my conversation with Glenn.)

I used to work for Steve Jobs and it was incredibly frustrating that he wouldn't let us say anything about what we were working on. Our partners like Adobe were incensed because their business depended on ours and they felt they had a real need to know. But over the early years as I was very open on dgrin, I came to understand why Google, Apple, facebook, even Don's friend Jeff Bezos/our close partner Amazon never tip their hand on what they're doing.

One thing that's severely burned me in the past is to talk about something we're working on and then get sued for patent infringement, as has happened many times. Or having to walk away from an approach we publicly said we were working on because we become aware of a patent, then take it on the chin for not following through on something we thought we could do but had to abandon for legal reasons that we can't talk about. Apple and Google have huge legal departments to deal with lawsuits and technology licensing, but we don't and we've spent millions on lawsuits, money that we otherwise would have invested in product development.

One of the companies that sued us averages two patent applications a week in photo sharing, patents that anticipate what companies like ours will do and secures the patents before we can. You can hear me talk more about this at http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/2012/twip-286-an-evening-with-smugmug/

You'll also hear me say that it's a matter of public record that we've been in a court battle with VPS for a very long time, and that Pictage settled with them for $3.9 million.

One of the things that I told Glenn is that since the price raise, every minute of every day I've asked myself if we did the right thing. So much of the anger directed against us is that somehow Zenfolio is able to offer a cheaper account level, and I didn't know how with soaring storage, legal, and development costs to do it. Should we trim back on support? Go to less than AAA storage? Not invest the millions we are in building a more robust infrastructure for more speed and uptime?

But I think we have our answer now, as they sold to Art.com for what appears to be a firesale price. Maybe it will work for them, but acquisitions of web companies rarely do in the long run. And if there is one thing our customers tell us, it's that they want us to stay independent.

I'm very confident now that time will prove our decision to be a good one because it has allowed us to hire more resources like Michael Bonocore and some very key engineers.

I told Glenn more than this and can say more here later. Please don't think this is some conspiracy sekrat society thing, I simply have a meeting to run to. I can say more later.

Thanks,
Baldy

ZBlack

Thanks for letting us know a bit more Baldy. Being a small time user of sorts, I still greatly appreciate it. I'm excited and waiting anxiously for the long talked about updated stuff, but I'm still quite happy with the service and I don't want a half baked product and fix it later type of thing that many places do. It works in some situations, but with this type of service, I think it would be detrimental to release something unfinished and not completely polished apart from the inevitable bugs. Keep doing what you're doing in my opinion, and just keeping us in the loop if you will is a good thing. I do have the full understanding that there are of course things you cannot publicize.

Thanks!

McQ

Baldy wrote: »

...

I want to publicly thank you, Chris. As hard as I've been on you all these recent months, I have to admit that I just wasn't seeing the big picture very well. My thanks for the significant time and effort you put in to communicating with me.

Baldy

So, back to what we're working on and why it's taking so long...

My perspective is that for the last decade we've seen a lot of good photo sites launch, catch on, and then slowly fade. Photoreflect, Printroom, Photobucket, Pbase, Pictage, Flickr, the many Flash portfolio sites, and now the fire sale of Zenfolio.

They have all been great competitors and we have felt the heat from all of them as customers judge that they do some things better than we do.

A major factor in their decline is simply that their code base became old. You can only glom so many features on an old code base before you realize that it takes increasingly longer, the features don't turn out as well as they could, and it becomes less compatible with a changing landscape (such as the rise of mobile). So why didn't they change? Because it's hard. It takes a long time and in the meantime you're not delivering features at the pace you were and you face a lot of heat for it.

In our case it's an even bigger challenge because we are not just a template-driven site. We allow deep customization with all that that entails.

So while we hate undertaking something so hard, just as you hate us doing it, I have never met the customer who, when they see work in progress, says we're doing the wrong thing. And when they see what's involved, if they have a programming background as Bonocore has, they understand why it's so much effort.

But here's the thing. We've found from everything we do that when we ship anything, it makes some customers happy and some sad, so I have no way of knowing whether you'll be happy with what we're doing. We've all seen many of these scenarios unfold here on dgrin, such as when for years customers asked us for foreign currency and a European lab, and once we shipped them, it was weeks of anger from our American customers.

I could spend all my time communicating to customers about what we're doing, but every day I do delays when the products will actually ship.

Our price hike was about dealing with soaring storage costs, patent litigation and funding this very big undertaking. It has worked for the first two, and now we have to keep our eye on the ball and make sure we nail the third one.

I hope this helps.

All the best,
Baldy

David Evertsen

Baldy wrote: »

So, back to what we're working on and why it's taking so long...

My perspective is that for the last decade we've seen a lot of good photo sites launch, catch on, and then slowly fade. Photoreflect, Printroom, Photobucket, Pbase, Pictage, Flickr, the many Flash portfolio sites, and now the fire sale of Zenfolio.

They have all been great competitors and we have felt the heat from all of them as customers judge that they do some things better than we do.

A major factor in their decline is simply that their code base became old. You can only glom so many features on an old code base before you realize that it takes increasingly longer, the features don't turn out as well as they could, and it becomes less compatible with a changing landscape (such as the rise of mobile). So why didn't they change? Because it's hard. It takes a long time and in the meantime you're not delivering features at the pace you were and you face a lot of heat for it.

In our case it's an even bigger challenge because we are not just a template-driven site. We allow deep customization with all that that entails.

So while we hate undertaking something so hard, just as you hate us doing it, I have never met the customer who, when they see work in progress, says we're doing the wrong thing. And when they see what's involved, if they have a programming background as Bonocore has, they understand why it's so much effort.

But here's the thing. We've found from everything we do that when we ship anything, it makes some customers happy and some sad, so I have no way of knowing whether you'll be happy with what we're doing. We've all seen many of these scenarios unfold here on dgrin, such as when for years customers asked us for foreign currency and a European lab, and once we shipped them, it was weeks of anger from our American customers.

I could spend all my time communicating to customers about what we're doing, but every day I do delays when the products will actually ship.

Our price hike was about dealing with soaring storage costs, patent litigation and funding this very big undertaking. It has worked for the first two, and now we have to keep our eye on the ball and make sure we nail the third one.

I hope this helps.

All the best,
Baldy

Baldy,

Thanks very much, I have spoken to you several times on the phone about these issues and understand how fun (I am being nice) this can be.. Your passion for what you do always comes through and making your customers happy does too. I have not always been your biggest fan at times but, you have always taken my calls and answered honestly. I cannot ask for more than that in this world it seems, you are so willing when many more are not..

I look forward to the new and exciting things,

Thanks

darklightphotography

Baldy wrote: »

I'd love it if that was always true...

<snip>

Thanks,
Baldy

Thanks for the reply. Not quite what I was after, but I better understand why your plans aren't on public view.

Baldy

darklightphotography wrote: »

Thanks for the reply. Not quite what I was after, but I better understand why your plans aren't on public view.

Thanks, everyone, for your understanding. When the backlash happened with our pricing change I wondered what would happen with our team, the ability to recruit engineers and designers, etc. You can't imagine my relief when they decided to dig in harder than before and work more late nights. And our relief when most customers ended up willing to sign up and renew at higher rates.

Now the angst is all about who will love what we're doing and who won't, because there are always people who wish we'd work on something different than we're focused on. One thing's for sure, there is plenty of adrenaline in my life right now.

JamesGPhoto

Baldy, can you give us a new timeline?? When do you expect the new design to be ready??

mbonocore

JamesGPhoto wrote: »

Baldy, can you give us a new timeline?? When do you expect the new design to be ready??

James, I will be moving this discussion to a dedicated thread by the end of the week. It will include some FAQ's....this is one of them.

Michael

JamesGPhoto

Michael, you're the BEST!!

interfx

mbonocore wrote: »

James, I will be moving this discussion to a dedicated thread by the end of the week. It will include some FAQ's....this is one of them.

Michael

Any update on this? Looking anxiously forward to your update.