Has Interspire stopped developing Email Marketer? They wouldn’t admit it even if it were true. I decided to chart some data. I used the forum to chart the release date of every release of the software since March 25th, 2007. I charted every single release and its date. Then I calculated the number of days between each release. From 2007 to 2015 the average number of days between releases was 62.25 days. That doesn’t sound bad on average but when you look a little closer the data tells a different story. Despite the average of 62.25 days in the early days the updates were often coming every 6 to 20 days. The last 3 updates were 339 days, 368 days, and 371 days apart respectively. The below chart reflects the average amount of time between updates in each year over the 8 years we tracked.
So, where does that leave us? Without much hope of ongoing updates I would say. Based on the current trend I would say we should see minor updates about once a year. If you are holding your breath for a certain fix or feature I recommend you hire a developer and work on it yourself.
Yep, I’d agree with you there.
And I’d hazard a guess that there may be some correlation between the dramatic change in update release frequency and the drastic change they made to their pricing (and support) structure, too…
Well this isn’t surprising when you look at the writings on the wall. 2012 was when there were the biggest movements on other fronts. That’s when big commerce really started taking off and they closed the doors on all their other software.
Now Big Commerce is their #1 product by far making them MILLIONS every month. IEM makes them practically nothing in comparison. Even generously let’s say $100,000 a month… which would you put your focus in to?
I think the only reason they haven’t fully shut the doors to IEM is because they have some big companies still using the program – some that might also use Big Commerce and they want to keep them happy on that front. The updates they do maybe require like a week or work tops to render and that’s paid for 1000x over from ongoing IEM earnings.
So going forward expect token releases of IEM maybe once a year to handle the occasional bug being brought up by the few companies still regularly paying the maintenance fee. IEM is dead from a feature development standpoint which is sad.