The number and intensity of comments on this thread are evidence of how problematic VSL's change of policy is. As I have said several times in earlier posts, this policy change does not affect me personally. I never purchased the First or Pro Edition - - I have licenses for the standard part of the Symphonic Cube, the Bösendorfer, and the complete (standard and extended) solo string library. So, however I might question the wisdom of this decision, I have no personal stake in the outcome.

My attitude towards the folks at VSL is that of a friend. I am deeply respectful of the quality, intellectual brilliance and commitment to excellence that VSL's products demonstrate.  If I am critical of VSL's recent policy decision, my criticism is that of a friend suggesting to his friend that an announced course of action may not be in my friend's long-term interest.

That said, one has to analyze why a company might make a decsion that even a novice could predict would be a public relations disaster. What this decision suggests is that VSL is under financial pressure. The problem may be that the market for the kind of excellence demonstrated by VSL products is relatively small. In this context selling and reselling the same samples to the same audience might become a matter of economic survival. I have no doubt, given the idealistic nature of the entire project in which VSL has engaged, that they meant what they said about the VIP upgrade path when they originally announced it. But, it would seem, circumstances have changed. If this speculation is correct, then the question is what is the best way to deal with the change in circumstances. Is it, for example, wise to risk alienating a significant part of the customer base and to risk, further, the loss of trust that this recent policy change engenders among committed professional customers? If a promise made so explicitly - - and so recently - - can be breached, what certainty can customers have that any new promises will be kept? 

At the same time, one has to recognize that economic survival has to be the first aim of any company - - no matter how idealistic its intentions. Look, for example, at music notation software. The worldwide demand for sophisticated music notation software is such that it has been able to support the ongoing development of only two applications, both produced, until recently, by small, financially shaky corporations. (Sibelius was recently acquired by Avid, a far larger, more financially secure company.) Anyone who works with Finale can perceive that, although it is probably the most flexible notational software, it is saddled with many layers of legacy code. I am sure that the folks at MakeMusic (Finale's parent company) would love to remedy this situation and do a complete rewrite so that the program would not exhibit anomalies such as huge consumption of CPU power for simple MIDI playback, but the problem is, most likely, that they cannot afford to hire the programming talent to accomplish this and that, to survive, they must come up with a new version of the program every single year. 

Perhaps it would be better for VSL to take its customers into confidence and state the facts of the situation rather than to provide lame cover stories. I suspect that many customers would feel more positively, if VSL simply stated that they could not afford to continue their original upgrade policy and that, to provide support for ongoing development, they have, very regretfully, been forced to break the promises they originally made. Being frank about the facts of the situation might go a long way to renew the culture of trust and collaboration that has, hitherto, existed between VSL and its customers. After all, we are musicians, so most of us know something about the conflict between ideals and economic reality. 

It saddens me to read this thread. I do not own any VSL products but am seriously considering either the SE package or Appasionatta strings. I have always thought of VSL as the "Rolls Royce" of orchestral samples and finally have thecash to start out. It is so sad to see so many loyal customers frustrated by what feels like a very poor marketing decision.

Imagine if the brochure read "Pay for the same samples twice" or "The VIP program is subject to change at anytime" A lot of people may have thought twice. I still belive that VSL makes the best orchestral sample lib but there are alternatives. Kirk Hunter offers a heck of a deal for a lot less money. As does EW and a few others.  I think Herb and his team run a class act. Pricey, but arguably the best product of it's kind. It seems a shame to tarnish such a reputation with this announcement.

Sincerely,

Darren

Awesome.

2 Years after spending +$1000 on my Opus 1 and 2 the product is discontinued, replaced, and my upgrade is being taken away. I should mention I got in my last year of my music undergrad and as a new and young composer/producer I literally can't afford to upgrade. If I had known things would work out like this I would have NEVER bought Opus 1 and 2. 

After this annoucement even if I had the money to upgrade I'd be taking advantage of EastWest's 20th Anniversary "Buy one get one free" deal instead. VSL makes great products but there is no way I can support a company that treats it's users like this. VSL has lost me as a customer, I will not be buying from them again.

@benbartlett said:

The Cube is no longer on my shopping list, whereas the piece meal packages probably will be. Ultimately, as a professional, I would rather divert my budget towards sessions of REAL strings etc than spend the equivalent to have, lets face it, samples.

@shredordead said:

Awesome.

2 Years after spending +$1000 on my Opus 1 and 2 the product is discontinued, replaced, and my upgrade is being taken away. I should mention I got in my last year of my music undergrad and as a new and young composer/producer I literally can't afford to upgrade. If I had known things would work out like this I would have NEVER bought Opus 1 and 2. 

After this annoucement even if I had the money to upgrade I'd be taking advantage of EastWest's 20th Anniversary "Buy one get one free" deal instead. VSL makes great products but there is no way I can support a company that treats it's users like this. VSL has lost me as a customer, I will not be buying from them again.

I'm pretty much with you there. I was intending to buy everything, including all the newer special libraries.  Even after this announcement I thought of loading up a credit card to manage all the upgrades now. We'd decided that all the 'slack' in our budget, for the next few months, was being put aside for VSL, so I figured if I could get a 0% credit deal, then paying it off would just be the same commitment, except I end up with the libraries up-front.

The problem is I no longer trust them. Their products are frankly not that much better than the rest, but are massively more expensive. I've been paying that because of their business model, which it now turns out was a lie. I could go £2500 into debt to buy the VIs that I don't have, only to be told my product is obsolete on July15th, and that I need to pay another £6000 or so if I want continued support. With the whole world of computing currently up in the air, with 64bit not yet fully working, with Vista not yet being a clear option, etc, there is every opportunity for the VSL people to make sure that the VIs we purchase cease to function some time soon, and force us all to upgrade again.

I won't be taking the risk.

Apart from the fact that this VSL ad does say that the VIP offer will last a "lifetime", I also note that it uses the word "investment" (which some on this board have suggested is incorrect!).

The First Edition if my memory serves me right was discontinued the 15th of semptember 2005.

But both the Pro Edition and the Horizon series were still here by the end of last summer. They were discontiued the 16th of september 2007.

The close-out sale included an advertisment (VSL own newsletter) that stated:

"What’s more, your purchase qualifies you for fantastic upgrade possibilities to our Vienna Instruments Collections!".

This is a direct quote from the VSL newsletter. Other advertisments of the VIP program has been quoted by other posters, and as I've said before...the cancellation of the "old" VIP path is a complete u-turn regarding their policy.

If you took advantage of the close-out sale, which have to be regarded as a best-case-scenario in terms of expenditures, you would have spent almost 3000 (2861 euro + taxes to be exact) euroes on the complete Pro Edition. Now this sale was at the end of last summer with the "promise" of upgrade possibilites.

Now, not even one year later those upgrade paths will be removed. So if you got into VSL last fall, spending 2861 euros (sale price) on the Pro Edition, you would now have to spend another 5410 € to get your "promised" discount. I don't know about you guys, but in my view 8271 € + taxes is a huge amount of money. And this would pretty much be the best case scenario when it comes to money spent. Others have paid much more. What has also been pointed out by other posters, this is just the amount spent on the sample library. You can't make music with that alone, now can you? Customers believed in the VSL company. Believed in their product and in their policies. Thats what makes it possible to spend these kinds of amounts on this kind of product. How can anyone blame us for feeling in some way cheated?

Yeah...maybe this is a typical way to go for a company, and yeah we probably won't get far with this as it is not our decision to make. But morally? Please don't even try to defend it. But just to mention one thing regarding this from a markeding (PR or CR) point of view, this decision by the VSL company has left a whole business class, including the professor quite puzzled.

Reply to the earlier post about the diffuculty of reading single blocks of text...

Apparently there's a bug with Safari in which formatting isn't represented.  No matter how many line breaks you enter, posts show as a single block of text. I went back and edited my earlier posts using Firefox. 

FYI for Safari users.

Fred Story 

@Pingu said:

With the whole world of computing currently up in the air, with 64bit not yet fully working

This is not true, as far as VSL is concerned. Obviously on OSX this is partially true, but VSL can't be held to account for Apple's failure to deliver.

I wasn't specifically talking about whether VSL is 64bit compatible yet. I was referring to the fact that 64bit options for hardware and software haven't yet settled down - for instance neither Vista nor X64 is a viable operating system for music making as a whole, even though the VIs run on them. As yet it's unclear how things will settle. Clearly there need to be some serious changes to operating systems, drivers, most sequencers, etc. All of which will eventually present a very different environment for the VIs, and there is no guarantee that VSL won't charge us yet again to maintain their compatibility.

Thanks Fred.

 I wondered what was going wrong.

@herb said:

Regarding all requests for a longer upgrade period:

on July 15th the new upgrade price calculating system will be activated, so we can't check automatically the old upgrade prices after July 15th.

Anybody who wants to upgrade, but can't manage it till July 15th, can make a reservation at his distributor or send us an email

sales@vsl.co.at 

 

If we get these reservations before July 15th we can calculate the upgrade prices and make a note to your account, which we will keep for another 3 month.

 

But please note that the free extended offer will defenitely end on July 15th.

 

best

Herb

 The suddenness of the cutoff for upgrades is indeed unsettling. Why the haste? Does VSL need the money that badly that it is willing to cause so much disquiet amongst it's customers? I'd want to know if I was intending to beat the deadline.

I for one will not be bullied into upgrading to a product I don't want just to stay on an upgrade path and protect my "investment." And anyway, I'd be more than a little nervous "investing" in samples locked into a proprietary player when it's made by a company with VSL's track recording of misleading marketing, punative upgrade paths and applaing PR gaffs like this current fiasco.

 I’d respectfully like to make a few suggestions to VSL:

1.    Recognize that your change in policy regarding updates, however necessary it may be, was articulated and presented in a way that has caused a public relations disaster with potential long-term negative impact on your business.
2.    Recognize that the good will of customers who have made significant investments in your products is one of your most important business assets.
3.    Analyze honestly why your announcement has aroused so much upset and opposition even among those customers not personally affected by your announced change in update policy.
4.    Admit that your announced change in update policy is completely inconsistent with the promises you made to customers earlier on.
5.    Recognize that breaking promises, even if it is necessary to do so, will predictably arouse anxiety and distrust among your customers.
6.    Recognize that, so far, your attempts to explain the reasons for changing your update policy have been perceived as murky and unconvincing by your customers.
7.    To change this perception, be open and forthcoming with your customers in explaining why you have found it necessary to change your update policy.
8.    Recognize that defensiveness on your part will only intensify the negative effect on customer loyalty whereas openness may rekindle the sense of collaboration with customers that has been one of the unique characteristics of VSL.  
9.    Work with your customers to find a way around the current impasse.

At the same time, I’d suggest to customers that we all have an interest in the long-term survival of VSL and continued development of its products. Customers need to realize that the entire enterprise VSL has engaged in has a very strong idealistic component. The decision, for example, to offer complete set of articulations for Contrabass Trombone cannot have been rooted in fantasies of mass market appeal. It was, however the right thing to do, in terms of offering a complete orchestral library.

Similarly it was not necessary to develop profoundly thoughtful products such as the VI sample player, VE 2 and VE 3 - - but these products are extremely useful. Why couldn’t Apple, for example, with its infinitely greater financial resources, have offered an improved version of EXS 24 with the ability to easily load and control a large number of multiple articulations on a single MIDI channel? Why also hasn’t Apple also offered its own version FX Teleport? Most likely because it decided that spending the money on developing these features would not generate significant additional return. In other words, "good enough" rather than excellence was the operating mantra.

Customers also need to recognize that market demand for a product of the quality of the VSL libraries and software is extremely limited. To make these libraries is an expensive proposition. It would be great if there were a mass market for them. It would be great if they could be priced so that every school and every student could have access to them - - but the fact is that there is no mass demand for such products. This lack of demand is why the prices are high. There is an inevitable - - and painful - - conflict between the kind of idealism which wants to do the job right and the fact that, without a mass market, the costs of excellence will be such that its selling price will be affordable only to relatively few.

If one looks at the orchestral sample industry as a whole, one finds that it is not a roaring money making success. Garritan, for example, announced the imminent release of its Steinway sample library almost a year before it was actually released - - one suspects that the delay had something to do with having to find funds for completing the work. Dan Dean has a good set of solo woodwind samples featuring eight velocity layers for many articulations, yet it is sold at a bargain basement price - - which one guesses is the only alternative to not selling it at all. Logic 8, on the other hand, comes with an endless number of Apple Loops and a Symphonic “JamPack” - - and this seems to be enough for many Logic users.  

If more people were engaged in seriously making music, rather than in simply “consuming” it on their iPods, things might be different……

 Fred:

Excellent summary!

Thanks. 

The development of wonderful accompanying programs like VI interface, VE and projected MIR from the VSL can be attributed to

a) Artistic/technological vision from the team responsible for this superb overall product which we all have come to admire and in which we all have invested tremendous money purely for the privilege of access to it, and

b) The company's need to stay ahead of the other sprouting companies with which it competes and has to keep abreast of their innovations and offerings; they simply could not remain idle on their laurels for too long.

These are not reasons to "cut" any "slack" to this recent behaviour, since all of these additional products cost (and will cost) us extra money which we should happily pay since their development requires ingenuity, patience, taste, and financial risk. I personally respect these qualities and I always propagandize (as in an earlier post) against piracy of this and all other software, as proof of that respect as well as moral values. In return I expect the same respect, and if not the same moral values, at least the same courtesy from them to us customers. It is true that if the VSL is under financial strain (about which I have grave doubts), they cannot just announce it on this forum or by e-mail. On the other hand, we cannot - even joking - be asked to shoulder any of it, I didn't see any shares of the company being offerred here, did you?

I also believe that comparison to other colossal companies (like Apple, Avid and the like) is nonsensical since there are so many other different parameters to be considered, the simplest of which is that us, as customers, can always re-sell these other companies' products and try to cut our losses somehow. If one regardless wishes to pursue such comparisons, I can accommodate them with an example of my own just in order to answer some poor excuse given here by some people saying that VSL is shifting towards smaller packages of samples due to relative customer  shift:

If Apple suddenly realized a vast number of people and companies were interested almost solely on Mac minis they could decide to drop the Mac Pro line altogether. Even if that meant it was leaving the likes of me in the cold, there is nothing reprehensible about that kind of business decision. Please let VSL come out officially and say that due to such circumstances the bulk offer of libraries will heretofore be discontinued and they will be concentrating on their individual instrument offerings. HOWEVER, since this is a license-based business setup, they should at the same time orgnize honourable and past-expenditure-relevant upgrade paths for their comprehensive users. My suspicion is though (looking at competitors) that big packages will continue to reign supreme, and that we will be asked to succumb to what should be their new advertisement: "Now you are able to buy 1 package for the price of 3! Don't miss out!!"

VSL wished and manage to grab a lot of the lower (financially) end of the market for samples with products such as Horizon, SE, etc. Why punish the higher end? 

This crisis requires a different kind of solution from the management, as I am sure they know their competitors are also monitoring this forum and particularly this post, and perhaps they are now holding meetings discussing how they can take advantage of this. 

I just wanted to add an opinion specific to the Opus/SE users out there:

When VSL switched to the VI and associated dongle, the SE users became limited to a single machine.  You folks with the full libraries got individual licenses for each section, so you could continue to use your PC/Mac farms.  SE users suddenly had their PC farms turned into worthless heaps.  So regardless of limited time to upgrade, the upgrade results in a pretty serious REDUCTION in capability (all that extra processing power can't be used any more).  I don't understand that policy or why folks are OK with it.  Where's the harm in letting us work like we used to?  At least offer additional licenses at a steep discount and let us put that processing power to work!

Now, if I want to use the SE like I used to use Opus 1/2 on two machines, I have to purchase TWO ADDITIONAL SE libraries. So it's even worse than paying for the same samples twice, it's paying for the same samples THREE times...  Yes, we do get extra samples that we didn't have previously (saxes, etc.) but the fact remains that we are, in fact, paying for the same samples again.

But, as has been mentioned elsewhere, only VSL know their market and they are, after all, a business.  So they'll do whatever makes the most money.  My guess is that the posts on this forum represent only a small percentage of their customers, so they're probably not paying much attention...

rgames