One curious thing is always how XenForo started off strong and kind of petered out lately and how IPB is always trying to push the boundaries with a number of different features.
I personally think this has a lot to do with incentives, XenForo largely relies on renewals for income, as-well as new licenses coming in, however renewals, it doesn't really matter how much of an effort they put in, they simply need to put in enough to look like people are still getting some level of value for their money.
As-long as webmasters don't get desperate enough to go somewhere else, they basically have full reins to large hold back on projects which require a high amount of labour, but which ultimately won't yield much. And in fact, it is actually quite difficult to hit any sort of threshold for moving away, as even vB3 which is universally agreed upon to be dated is still a major incumbent.
While with IPB, every milestone, every "part of the suite" is priced independently, which also means that they're rewarded independently and not as a lump sum for just about everything. Also, when you upgrade, it's not just a matter of being ticked up naturally, but more major releases, to my knowledge, are priced differently than your regular run of the mill bug fix support window.
This means that IPB is incentivised to provide a great degree of value for each of their major versions and to presumably do them more frequently, otherwise a webmaster would not be able to justify the cost of upgrading to whatever the newest version of the day happens to be, so while this is a huge pain and generally user hostile, it creates a certain degree of security.
XenForo 2.1 is a significantly better release than 2.0, although I'm unsure as to how much of this is really 2.1 and how much of it is playing catch-up for falling behind a bit too much with 2.0.
Just an interesting observation and an opinion post of sorts, there is probably a lot of theory crafting which I could throw together in my head, but this is kind of intriguing.
I personally think this has a lot to do with incentives, XenForo largely relies on renewals for income, as-well as new licenses coming in, however renewals, it doesn't really matter how much of an effort they put in, they simply need to put in enough to look like people are still getting some level of value for their money.
As-long as webmasters don't get desperate enough to go somewhere else, they basically have full reins to large hold back on projects which require a high amount of labour, but which ultimately won't yield much. And in fact, it is actually quite difficult to hit any sort of threshold for moving away, as even vB3 which is universally agreed upon to be dated is still a major incumbent.
While with IPB, every milestone, every "part of the suite" is priced independently, which also means that they're rewarded independently and not as a lump sum for just about everything. Also, when you upgrade, it's not just a matter of being ticked up naturally, but more major releases, to my knowledge, are priced differently than your regular run of the mill bug fix support window.
This means that IPB is incentivised to provide a great degree of value for each of their major versions and to presumably do them more frequently, otherwise a webmaster would not be able to justify the cost of upgrading to whatever the newest version of the day happens to be, so while this is a huge pain and generally user hostile, it creates a certain degree of security.
XenForo 2.1 is a significantly better release than 2.0, although I'm unsure as to how much of this is really 2.1 and how much of it is playing catch-up for falling behind a bit too much with 2.0.
Just an interesting observation and an opinion post of sorts, there is probably a lot of theory crafting which I could throw together in my head, but this is kind of intriguing.
