We provide free technical support to registered customers for the lifetime of the product. In the case of CrystalDiffract 5 this was a record 8 years of free support and updates. We can't think of many companies that have continued to support products for quite so long: the big corporations tend to work on a 1.5-year upgrade cycle, so we think 8 years is pretty unusual.
We do appreciate that some customers have not taken the opportunity to keep their hardware or operating system up-to-date. There may be good reasons for this internally, but customers do need to appreciate that being part of the Mac "ecosystem" really does require them to stay up-to-date: at least, on the operating-system side. Apple works differently to Microsoft, and users must be aware of this:
Microsoft. Historically, Microsoft has always paid great attention to backwards-compatibility. That makes Windows developers' lives much easier, since they can continue to sell old products for use on new machines...
...however, "lazy developers" aren't great for the Windows platform. It means that the operating system has a tendency towards "bloat", and this can impair usability and performance, for all users.
Apple "thinks different". Ever since the release of Mac OS X, Apple has effectively been purging its operating system at regular intervals, clearing out old code, and forcing developers to rewrite large chunks of their software.
The result of this developer "trial-by-fire" is a lean and highly-efficient operating system. The downside is that it requires developers to work hard to keep up (even before they've added new features). Mac development - if done properly - is a specialized and expensive process, and has to be funded somehow.
Many of our users are quite happy with our older software, but we're not in a position to support that older software because our hands are effectively tied by Apple. We don't really want to be in the position where we have users asking for support that we can't deliver.
So, after 8 years, the only thing we can do is to simply say: "it's time to move on". We realise this may cause problems for a small minority of users still using "Snow Leopard", but that's an old operating system now and users can't go on using this for ever. We are convinced that the vast majority of our users would prefer us to move forwards, delivering great new products, and not to stay festering in the past.
With CrystalDiffract 6 for 64-bit OS X, we believe we've given our Mac users the biggest birthday present ever. We just want them to be prepared to share this by staying up-to-date.
See Also