However, any 'new' customer will not let themselves be trapped. It's happening with Adobe Photoshop and stuff, where they've been skinning their customer base for years, but quite frankly who would now as a new potiential customer decide to shackle themselves to that? I know quite a few people who will use inferior tools JUST so they don't have to hook up to Adobe blood-suck.
Say Adobe Lightroom. Super product, but updates started to slow down and slow down and WOW now look it's all ONLINE baby for a price. I bought all updates until LR6, but now I know it's a lot cheaper to archive my machine with LR6 in a corner and use it for my photo edit than switching to the 'super value online thingy' for $$$/year. I don't use it that much to want that, and next time I want to use it, it actually might be incompatible with /whatever is in my chain of hardware/ anyway.
I'm sad to say Sketchup is doing this, if they had a $100 upgrade price every year or so, I'd pay happily -- however here's lies the other main problem: these companies don't WANT to invest in R&D enough to have a 'valid' reason to have a new major version every 12-18 months, they actually think people will just keep paying.
Well guess what, perhaps some people will, but no NEW people will. In the case of sketchup, whatever the marketing blurbs have spattered about, NOTHING IS NEW for like 10 years, I mean, they try to add 'hooks' here and there, but the main program is exactly the same, same bugs for that long. I suspect the devs who know how to do matrix multiplication have long left after google dumped the product, and they are now left with a handful of webheads.
Do I want to pay for that?
Hmm wait until I clean the coffee off the front my t-shirt.