Thursday, March 23, 2017

Beware of Biblesoft!


I want to post what amounts to a warning about the company Biblesoft. Find them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/biblesoft/

I have used Biblesoft's PC Study Bible since the days of MS DOS and command lines. I always liked it, and the way their whole system worked. Now and then they would come out with a program update, and for a modest fee current users could upgrade just their basic program engine. All the collections you owned, which had often been purchases separately as add-on, could continue to be used.

That was both reasonable and to be expected. In the last year, however, Biblesoft has destroyed its good standing with me by attempting to pull off what seems to something close to a con job on its users. I am very sorry to have to say this.

A little over a year ago I received an email from them saying that they would be coming out with an upgrade in the future. Those who wished to make this coming upgrade needed to upgrade, they said, to the latest program engine. I had the next-to-latest, but I was glad to upgrade. Biblesoft promised the cost of this would apply to their coming new version.

The new version has come out, and Biblesoft has been offering all sorts of additional discounts to get people to upgrade. But it turns out that if you own many of their resources, the least expensive upgrade you can use will cost, even with discounts and credits, about $400. That made the need to upgrade to the latest software engine something of a trick. The ridiculous price of the coming major upgrade was not announced at that time, so if you did that but are not now willing to fork over another $400 "ransom" you completely wasted that money.

This I find to be utterly unacceptable and something akin to highway robbery, of the digital variety. Biblesoft claims that people have problems running their "old" program in windows 10. I have had no problems on two different desktop PCs. They continue to send their ridiculous offers for their over-priced upgrade with the warning that your old version might stop working any day now.

So here is my concluding note to Biblesoft: with this customer of long, long standing, you have blown it. I will not pay you $400 "ransom" to keep using the resources I have purchased from you over the years. If at some point Windows 10 stops running your old program, I will just create a Windows 7 virtual machine on one of my PCs and run your old, good program from that. Other than that, I am done with you and your ill-managed company. Rather than put up pointless "devotional" material on your Facebook page, why not run your company with some Christian integrity?