Required Mathcad Maintenance

Does this really warrant a thread?

I HAVE TO pay the same price with our without maintenance, even though I do not consider it necessary.

Well why not take it if it costs the same?

Mike

Matthew,

Let me add my own perspective. I've been a heavy user of Mathcad since 1997. Things have changed greatly since then.

I had single-user licenses until June 2010, when I upgraded to Mathcad 15 and signed up for a node-locked license with annual maintenance.

The node-locked license with annual maintenance allows you to install Mathcad 15 and Mathcad Prime (currently Mathcad Prime 1.0) on a primary machine and a secondary (home) machine. I am currently using both licenses. The primary machine's license is permanent, but the home license will expire after a year if I fail to renew the annual maintenance. I am into my second year of annual maintenance.

PTC issues updates to Mathcad 15 and Mathcad Prime on a periodic basis. If I recall correctly, Mathcad 15 has had three service releases: F000, M050, and M010. I installed M010 a week ago.

Without annual maintenance, you cannot get the service releases. But more importantly, without annual maintenance you have no standing with PTC (that's how I put it -- PTC is not so blunt). If you have any kind of problem, you cannot get support for it.

And I myself have had license file problems. Without paid-up annual maintenance, I could not have gotten any help.

By the way, this forum is certainly a place to complain about licensing issues, but it is not the place to resolve licensing issues. PTC's licensing department is the place, the only place. But if you do not have paid-up annual maintenance, good luck getting in touch with them.

A final note about Mathcad Prime: PTC's vision is that this new product is the future of Mathcad. It behooves anyone who is committed to using Mathcad over the long term (I myself am) to download and work with the new releases of Mathcad Prime as they come out. You get those, too, with annual maintenance.

Roger Mansfield

I, too, have been using Mathcad since the mid-90's or so.

In my experience, I have never had a problem that was so bad that I had to install a service pack to resolve it. Never. Perhaps that speaks to the quality that Mathcad has had over the years, which has, in general been very good.

However, that means that I have had no need for maintenance. Therefore, being forced to buy something that I do not need is something that I find unacceptable. Sorry, that's me. I don't need it. I don't want it, and unless there is a price drop without it, I won't buy.

I appreciate that PTC wants people to be on maintenance. However, I do see that as PTC forcing people who may not otherwise need this agreement to "contribute" to PTC when they otherwise would not. In otherwords, I see this as PTC requiring that I contribute to their revenue stream even though I get no added value.

Also, my primary use of Mathcad has been symbolic math. From what I understand, "Prime" elminates this functionality. I've seen this kind of thing before. Features are removed, and the product is billed as "better." Sorry, for me, symbolics is a must; without it, Mathcad is not of much use to me.

Finally, over the years I have had maybe one or two useage questions. These have always been answered by people in the collaboratory or other forums. So, with kind people answering useage questions, is there a need for maintenance?

Long story short, if the program crashes, then yes, a service pack is needed - though I can see where some users might encounter problems that are far less severe, however, they would like it to work right. But for me, my arm is twisted to buy what I don't want with no discount when I choose not to buy.

So, if PTC refuses to listen to me, that is their choice. I certainly do not consider that good customer relations, and it will likely result in them losing me as a customer.

Sorry, but I don't get it. Many software packages come with maintenance for the first year. It's really no different to buying, for example, a new computer that comes with a one year warranty. You can't tell the computer manufacturer that you don't need the warranty, so please remove it and lower the price. It's an integral part of the product. If you want an extended warranty, that is not part of the product, and you can either buy it or not. The same is true for maintenance after the first year.

The intent here is to INCLUDE the first year of maintenance in the upgrade from a single user license. We took what has been the standard upgrade price of Mathcad for the past several versions (US$325 or US$425, depending on how old your latest version is) and held it at the exact same level. There are long and boring SOX related reasons why we have to spell out our internal cost of maintenance as a separate line item, but the intent is to provide the upgrader with a year of maintenance at no additional cost. In the old Mathsoft days, you'd still be spending $325 or $425 to upgrade.

The biggest benefit of maintenance, even if all the other entitlements aren't of interest to you, is access to major versional releases. Based on our current product calendar, Prime 2.0 is due in January. So upgrading now is like 3-for-1 (15.0, Prime 1.0 and Prime 2.0).

All PTC products come with a standard warranty which is separate from Maintenance. Maintenance is access to additional entitlements above and beyond a warranty period. But the analogy is a good one - if we were to remove the free year of maintenance, the price of the product would not change.