What's the use of your own corner of the web if you can't complain about something once in a while ....
EndNote is a highly useful piece of software. At $110 for students, it's a bargain when you work out how many hours it saves you.
Ever since they were acquired by Thomson Scientific, EndNote have got into the bad habit of releasing an annual "integer upgrade," that doesn't actually make major changes to the product.
Thus, last year we got Version 7 which had improvements over Version 6 that amounted to ... well, I can't remember and it was only last year. This year we get an upgrade to Version 8 that promises as its most major features (1) Unicode support, (2) unlimited library size, (3) compatibility with Word 2004.
These improvements will be useful to a pretty small group of existing users -- people who use foreign language references and people (research groups?) that have huge bibliographies. But they're not improvements enough for everyone to upgrade in the way that online database integration (EndNote 4 -- see I remember the version number and it was the year 2000), and cite-while-you-write (EndNote 6) were. And I'm stretching when I claim cite-while-you-write to be a major improvement -- I only got EndNote 6 because I upgraded to OS-X.
In the end, the overhyping and misnumbering is a bit silly, but as much of their market is going to continue to be faculty and graduate students they will always have an incentive to keep the entry prices low, as the elasticity of demand for the product is probably high, and there's a constant flow of new people into the pool of potential customers. That limits the potential for the company to try and hold-up existing users and extract revenues out of them.
Posted by robe0419 at December 1, 2004 5:23 PM