It’s been a rough few weeks for AgileBits, the company that makes password-manager 1Password. It announced that the new version of its Mac app would be built on a new, powerful and consistent code base, ensuring a consistency of product and a faster upgrade pace. Sounds good, right? It certainly did to AgileBits, which clearly saw its decisions as a win.
Of course, many Mac users reacted quite differently. What AgileBits actually did was throw its native Mac app in the garbage and replace it with an app built with the web-development system Electron, one that would be identical to the versions of 1Password on Linux and Windows. Good news, Mac users! We’re replacing your Mac app with a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator version! Please clap.
Too often, when a company stumbles, it’s not because it made a fundamentally bad decision. It’s because it made a decision that benefited itself rather than its customers and lacked the perspective to understand that customers don’t applaud when you lower your costs or the quality of your product.
As someone who has been observing the tech industry for the last few decades, I can tell you that this sort of thinking is incredibly common. I’ve seen businesses of all sizes make the same mistakes, and it all comes down to getting caught up in your own business and forgetting that you’re there to make a product that serves a customer.
Invisible upgrades
Back in the days when software was sold in boxes and on CD-ROMs, every major version of a program was a paid update. And as you might expect, that led to a distortion of the way software was developed to focus on “marketing features”—namely, new features added to the software that would convince buyers to spend for an upgrade. Fixing bugs, especially bugs in the previous version’s marketing features, were never a high priority.
Say what you want about subscription-based software, but when a software developer has an incentive to keep its customers happy on an ongoing basis, it becomes a lot easier to soothe them with bug fixes rather than jamming through poorly thought-out marketing features to boost upgrade sales.
Just as AgileBits made its decision for some sound technical reasons—there’s a whole blog post about it—sometimes developers make technical decisions and expect their users to go along with them.
I’m reminded of a Mac app that I reviewed for Macworld more than a decade ago…
