I don't disagree that we have slowed major overhauls of SmarterTools products but its with good reason. To name a few:

 

1) Stability
2) Security
3) Training (our customers and your customers)
 

When we first started SmarterTools, each major release had significant changes! In a few of those releases, we completely re-designed the interface. As our customer base became larger and clients became bigger, our customers expressed concerns relating to the items listed above and worried that by adding new features we sacrificed the core of each product.

 

When a product is being used by millions of people for multiple years, it is difficult to stress test new code to reach the same level of stability and security you had when only a few thousand people are using it.  The variables are too great and the scenarios are so varied. That is why we generally isolate our changes to one, or maybe two, areas: so that we can focus our testing and reach the levels of stability and security customers expect.  In addition, our customers have millions of their own users. That means they can easily be overwhelmed with support issues when we make the smallest of changes.  We try to carefully balance each feature, change, bug fix in every release to minimize that burden.

 

SmarterTrack is an interesting example;  Over the years we have released many majors that have had significant new features.  This has caused SmarterTrack to have a a TON of options in the system administrator area. Recently, we bit the bullet and decided to re-organize the entire system administrator area.  This didn’t necessarily impact end-users but it DID have ramifications for our customers. In the long run our customers appreciate it and see the benefits and increase in speed for some operations, but it was a difficult change, for us and for them as it required re-training on how to get things up and running.

 

That is not to say we couldn’t use some adjustments in our user interface.  We are scheduled to re-evaluate our interface code and its overall performance with the next release.  The last couple of major releases for SmarterMail, in particular, have all been "behind the scenes" in their scope.  We continue to increase the stability, reduce the memory and get more performance out of our products so customers can do more.  We are constantly updating protocols from Microsoft and general RFC’s.  There are TONS of email clients that we are continually testing  so we can make sure we're fully compliant with how they interact through IMAP, POP, and ActiveSync.  There is a lot that goes into EACH and EVERY release to ensure products from 2003 to 2015 are working as expected.  We are also having to make difficult decisions on what technologies to abandon (like Windows 2003) so that we can move our products forward.  Those decisions have their own implications as people are generally averse to change. Maybe not everyone who participates here in the Community, but we have exponentially more customers who do NOT participate here and we have to take them into account as well.

 

However, our ears ARE this Community. (As well as the tickets and phone calls we get.) We literally go through EVERY thread to see what get the most comments and requests. For example, Message Sniffer was one of the more requested integrations, so we did it.  Think about it: we already had an anti-spam add-on from Cyren, so popular opinion is what swayed us to add in a second option -- it certainly wasn't the revenue potential. :)

 

I enjoy the discussion and will try to answer any other questions you may have.