Notice to current PMView customers

As you may have noticed we are not offering any kind of upgrades to PMView Pro. Instead, we have lowered the price from $59 to $39.95 ($19.95 for students). The reason for doing this is to keep things simple for both you, our customers, and us. Neither of us need to look back and search for old licenses or keys.

The new purchase gives you a license good for PMView Pro version 3.0 and all subsequent 3.x versions, in practice this means another 2-3 years of free PMView upgrades. The package also includes the full 150-page PMView Pro reference manual and a Getting Started tutorial in PDF format. All this in addition to the on-line help.

Those of you early adopters who purchased a copy of PMView for OS/2 while it was still in beta, may remember that the help file advertized that the registration key would be good for "all versions of PMView up to v1.0 and beyond". The main reason for this was to encourage people to buy an unfinished product with the emphasis that the final v1.0 product would not require any additional registration fees, something which was not obvious back in 1995 when PMView still was at v0.86 after 3 years of development.

v1.00 was finally released in 1997 after almost 5 years of development. The statement offering free upgrades was left in the documentation because at the time the future looked bright for both OS/2 and PMView. With the release of PMView 2000 on 1/5/2000 we terminated this offer by discontinuing PMView v1.x sales and taking out the statement from the help file. At that time the future of OS/2 was uncertain and we realized that we cannot offer free upgrades any more. However, we did honor the lifetime license and gave out free OS/2 updates to all our old customers. At the time we still hoped to be able to give out free upgrades in the future, possibly covered by Windows sales. Because of this, we labelled the free v1.0 upgrades with the name "lifetime license" in order to distinguish them from non-upgrades.

Unfortunately things did not go as planned. What IBM did to OS/2 was totally unforseeable at the time we made the promise of free upgrades in 1992. PMView 2000 never reached sales that even came close to what prior versions had sold. To date, more than 80% of all PMView 2000 for OS/2 licences distributed were handed out free of charge. Our backup plan had also failed as Windows sales were not good enough to cover for the lost OS/2 sales.

PMView 2000 never paid back the time and effort we had put into it. With the development of PMView Pro v3.0 we had to make a choice: Either we charge for the upgrade or we drop development of the OS/2 version. Deciding on this has not been easy. Some of our customers have told us that if we cannot honor the original deal, then it's better to stop development. While we do understand and respect these customers, we have to point out that regardless of what we do, it will be unfair to somebody. If we drop PMView development it will be unfair to the customers that depend on further development and support of PMView.

We hope that you realize the necessity of these changes. We deeply regret that we cannot afford to keep up the promise of free upgrades forever. If you disagree with our new policy, please contact us at support@pmview.com. We will listen to you and let you know what we can do for you.

Note that this change in no way affects your existing licenses and registrations for PMView v1.xx or PMView 2000. Current PMView customers can keep running existing copies of PMView forever and we still offer technical support for these older versions.

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