I was in Perth on Tuesday night, showing RAD Studio XE6 to a bunch of developers. Afterwards, one of them came up to me and said (edited for profanity):<\/p>\n
“I’m on XE5 and I don’t think it’s fair that I pay the same to upgrade to XE6 as someone on XE4 or XE3. I’ve given you money more recently than they have, so I should pay less!”<\/p>\n
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This struck home for me, not just because I agreed with him but because it told me we need to do a better job of explaining what we already have.<\/p>\n
See, we already have exactly what he’s asking for: The Recharge upgrade<\/a>. If you’re on the latest version, you can upgrade to the new version for less than half the price of someone on a prior version. Given the new version today is XE6, anyone on XE5 can recharge for a lot less than someone on XE4 would pay to upgrade.<\/p>\n Interestingly, I asked him if he’d heard of Recharge<\/a>. He had, but thought it was a contractual commitment like Software Assurance<\/a>, and he didn’t want to commit\u00a0to upgrade until he’d played with the Trial Version<\/a>. So that’s our fault for not explaining it properly.<\/p>\n So just to be clear, Recharge and Upgrades are largely the same. The differences are in the versions that qualify and the price you pay. For XE6, XE5 qualifies for a Recharge, while for an Upgrade it’s XE to XE4 (after June 30, it’ll be XE2 to XE4).<\/p>\n