I got asked to fill a survey from a competitor of Logos which gather information about a subscription service much like Faithlife Connect (they asked about price point, kinds of materials such as commentary, devotional, etc.)
Me too. But subscriptions (esp. in USD) don't work for me.
Why? Are you referring to the penalty in exchange rate when they charge in USD and the VISA exchange at a poor rate?
What I hope is they can revolutionized subscriptions here given the competition is entering the space.
Eg like Adobe CC where $50 per month includes everything. I think it is a right price point as a consumer to accept if I paid $50 per month, I can access everything in Logos' catalog. Such model (all inclusive) works also for music, but not for movie and TV. I wish some day it will work for Logos.
Instead of a survey I would have liked to receive some information about why this competitor's Bible app is currently unavailable in the app stores (outside the USA).
I generally do not like the subscription model, but if I would ever subscribe I would choose Faithlife.
I sent them a Facebook message yesterday - they said it's not available in Europe currently. They didn't say why, but my guess is that it's to do with GDPR - but they say that they're planning to bring it back "as soon as possible" - are you in Europe as well? In any case, I much prefer Logos and I'm so disappointed with the lack of communication that I don't see myself using their app again.
why this competitor's Bible app is currently unavailable in the app stores (outside the USA)
I don't know which competitor you're referring to, but if it's this one, they have a support article explaining why: https://help.olivetree.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018081272-App-unavailable-in-European-app-stores-
They have a support article explaining why: https://help.olivetree.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018081272-App-unavailable-in-European-app-stores-
They did announce it! I spent forever looking for a post like this! Googled it every way I could think of, looked at Facebook pages, tweeted them without replies... I'd given up on it till yesterday.
They are thinking about offering EVERYTHING they have for $50 a month????? That seems impossible because of licensing fees.
Robert
They are thinking about offering EVERYTHING they have for $50 a month????? That seems impossible because of licensing fees. Robert
Sorry I confused you. No, they asked about price point and kinds of resources, etc.
I was merely my naive imagination that someday Logos could offer $50/month for everything. But I quoted 2 other cases that it might not be entirely impossible. I think it is about if Logos can convince them such a program would make the publisher more, not less, money (in the case of Adobe software and Music subscriptions industry, this is true. But the situation in a Bible resource subscription is more complicated.)
They have a support article explaining why: https://help.olivetree.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018081272-App-unavailable-in-European-app-stores- They did announce it! I spent forever looking for a post like this! Googled it every way I could think of, looked at Facebook pages, tweeted them without replies... I'd given up on it till yesterday.
Thanks Bradley!
FYI the competitor is Olive Tree
Why would anyone want to mention a competitor‘s name explicitly, which is against the forum guidelines? But then since it is a Faithlife staff who first revealed that name that’s no harm done.
FYI it is very difficult to understand what can or cannot be mentioned in the forum because the guidelines are not useful. Sometimes it is ok to break, other times people would accuse you, and times that people complain even if it’s nothing against the guidelines.
Even worse this leads to some “volunteers“ trying to police around, and obviously it won’t be effective for the reasons above.
There's no problem with mentioning competitors. What's not allowed is promoting or linking to competitors.
In this case mentioning is promoting (read the title.)
Not promoting would be to say that company X do not offer subscription service, has no plan to, etc.
But if one say company Y is going to provide something to compete to Logos/Faithlife in some way, then mentioning it is promoting their future service, luring people away from Logos.
Consider a certain person stumble upon this thread, if he knew that competitor he would have already knew, if he doesn't know, and none of the replies mentioned it, then he wouldn't be starting to interest in and comparing Logos' offering to competitor Y's.
See https://community.logos.com/forums/p/11504/90368.aspx#90368 for an example of naming a competitor explicitly, although the intention of that thread is not promoting competitor but suggesting Logos to provide a certain product offered by competitor Z. If one read through the thread, they will see that some people also question if the competitor really can't be named. So the whole problem is really that the forum guidelines are not enforceable due to its ambiguity and generosity.
All is well if no one is policing around, but there's always some people like to volunteer themselves into forum police and arguments started because of that (above thread is also an example of this.)
Just make sure I don't get anyone wrong, I have no problem with the person naming a competitor, I can't care less. What I'm showing is the frustration of the non-uniform standard/culture about what's considered to within guidelines or not. And yes it means I'm hijacking my own thread, where hijacking is not banned at all by the forum guidelines.
Kolen Cheung: I'm in Asia, so it is relatively less affordable due to exchange rate, let alone the overhead card charges.
If one read through the thread, they will see that some people also question if the competitor really can't be named.
I think Terry (if that is who you are referring to) was speaking as we say, ’tongue in cheek’. I don’t think he was serious, in other words. I wouldn’t call his post policing. If one’s native language is not English, it would be easy to misunderstand his attempt at humor.
I wasn't offended in that thread, but clearly someone below (in that thread) does, which is the point...
Exchange rate is just converting one currency to another. Do you mean local, physical books are sold cheaper than in the U.S. according to local economy?
I'm not sure if your country has this kind of credit card—in the U.S. there's certain kind of "travel" Visa card that has generous exchange rate (i.e. better than exchange at bank and no transaction fee.)
But I think in general charging in USD can be a problem for Logos to enter international markets. I used to use my HK credit card to buy Logos resources and they charged USD from my card and they impose additional transaction fee and worse exchange rate. (On the flip side people mentioned many Faithlife ebook is not available internationally so it might be a good thing that at least for Logos resources people can be charged in USD to buy them. May be the 2 has something to do with each other.)
I also heard that there's an Netflix equivalent in India which is very cheap. So may be that's what you're referring to, that subscription fee isn't as expensive as in the U.S. there.
I also don't like subscriptions. If something happened, you can lose everything (under subscriptions.) But in that case one still got to keep what they already bought (or even sell them at loss in financial crisis.) Subscriptions stabilize companies (their future is financially more secured) but customers' future is getting less secured. However, in the case of something like Music subscription, it is financially infeasible for one to have access to such a huge library (almost the whole catalog, 50 million songs.) But for subscription one get to access all of them. So this is my hope that a certain subscription tier can exist for one to access the (almost) whole catalog in Logos.
Terry explicitly says he "made the rule up".
There is no ambiguity about whether you can mention competitors if it's relevant to Logos.
See https://community.logos.com/forums/p/11504/90368.aspx#90368 for an example of naming a competitor explicitly, although the intention of that thread is not promoting competitor but suggesting Logos to provide a certain product offered by competitor Z. If one read through the thread, they will see that some people also question if the competitor really can't be named. So the whole problem is really that the forum guidelines are not enforceable due to its ambiguity and generosity. Terry explicitly says he "made the rule up". There is no ambiguity about whether you can mention competitors if it's relevant to Logos.
Too bad they didn't put it in the guidelines itself. That's another problem of Logos/Faithlife—information buried in different posts. They should have more sticky post like the guidelines, and put more stuffs into the wiki making it a centralized place to host and find information.
And that post is definitely too long to read. Anyway, from my interpretation of the simple wordings of the guidelines, mentioning the name of the competitor in this case is definitely promoting its coming subscription service which competes with Faithlife/Logos.
The making up is referring to calling any such software "the Program Which Must Not Be Named", not "promote or link to competitors".
If you go through that thread you know that people take that (not naming competitors) seriously. And I haven't done that since then.
I don‘t see any competition with FL. You‘re talking about a company that have been unable to handle GDPR for almost 12 months now. Users in Europe have been to unable to get updates or even to be able to install on new hardware. I would think it very unlikely that they will pick up subscribers in Europe.
I think the reason some people felt comfortable naming the competitor is because they don't provide that service yet. They may never do. It's hard to "promote" a product that doesn't exist. But it was a fine line, which is why not everyone disagreed. That's OK, so long as we all do it respectfully.
What I'm showing is the frustration of the non-uniform standard/culture about what's considered to within guidelines or not. And yes it means I'm hijacking my own thread, where hijacking is not banned at all by the forum guidelines.
Faithlife choose to give us guidelines instead of rules. The upside of this is that there's a fair amount of freedom, and hopefully people aren't looking over their shoulder all the time. The downside is that sometimes it's not 100% clear where the boundaries lie, and different people may sometimes have different perspectives. But personally I'd rather have the odd friendly disagreement than have Faithlife deleting posts the moment someone mentioned a competitor.
Please exercise logic, wether you deem it a worth competitor is entirely your subjective judgement. They are competitors in every sense.
Also, see the link Mark quoted above https://community.logos.com/forums/t/20261.aspx which explicitly defined them as one of the competitor.
I really would like to see this forum to really have such freedom and people can talk whatever they want to talk about (as long as it is not insulting others, i.e. as long as they are treating each other as human beings), but the complaint here is really some people start to volunteer and apply their own non-uniform, subjective interpretation of the guidelines to the others.
It is all fine when there's no police, but when there's some and there's no standard, that would only be chaos. Either we completely banned policing (so non-Faithlife staff cannot police any other people to any degree, they can only report abuse), or there are precise and concise guidelines such that there's no ambiguity for anyone to police.
Well, one can go to any of those "policing" posts, and what follows is almost always arguments albeit good intentions. An example would be person A made a joke, person B make a follow-up joke, person C make yet another and now someone start to police claiming it is not appropriate, and the whole thing turn into an argument about who's wrong first, etc. But in fact if the police didn't say anything, the joke would have probably stopped. (People would say there's no sense of humor when such joke is taken as offensive statements.)
By the way, personally I would prefer the abuse button. Give the authority back to the staffs to deal with this. If they don't think that's abuse, no one should police them to stop.
I mean, it's about purchasing power. For an analogy, a Starbucks latte is about 5 USD in the US. It's also about the same price in HK?
For subscription, e.g. monthly 9 USD is 70+ HKD, plus card fees. Would the latte or the subscription be perceived as equally affordable in HK?
As you say, you're fine as long as you can continue your subscription. Once you're out, you don't retain anything. You could see your sunk cost as helping to stabilize FL, I guess.
Anyway, for the current subscription tiers, the resources included aren't the exegetical tools I'd hope for.
....
For the record I don’t like subscriptions and I don’t subscribe much. (I actually have too few subscriptions to admit openly...)
I understand how the cultural difference in the US vs say HK can be different. In the US, people are paying a few hundred US dollars per month for cable TV, internet, and landline phone no. (My landlord paid over USD 300 a month), close to a hundred USD for cellular service. So imagine if there‘s a USD 50 thing that give you “Logos all access”, that would be pretty good deal. In fact the Verbum cloud has a USD 50 per month subscription tier that includes a lot of good stuffs (but not all access. So a Logos all access must be more expensive than that at least for now.)
So imagine even if the Logos all access is like $100 a month, and a certain cable TV service is of the same price. I would choose the former in a heartbeat (if I have to choose one, that is.)
If that becomes available, I probably would not subscribe, at least not every month. But I can see it as very affordable to some people to be able to access everything Logos offers (compare to buying everying, I don’t have a no. but guesstimating it would be close to USD100,000, ie on the order of 80 years if the price point is ~100/month.)
I think the point of a music subscription which gives one all access, or to a lesser extent (because of the more limited selection) Netflix movie subscription is to free oneself to choose something because of the extra cost of that choice. Choice becomes only a matter of need/want. Especially in the case of Logos, one might not know what they want! (Eg Facebook, timeline, etc.)
Now the next problem is to build a computer capable of running Logos with a all resources it has (on the order of 100,000. Just kidding.)
I'd compare costs to the Logos packages - I'm not doing full-time research, to use "all access" in a full way.
A $100/month subscription is about $1,000 a year (assuming current 2 months free).
For Diamond ($3,500), that's 3.5 years. For Collector’s ($10,800), it's about 11 years.
A subscription is less attractive than gradually buying just what I need.
I'd compare costs to the Logos packages - I'm not doing full-time research, to use "all access" in a full way. A $100/month subscription is about $1,000 a year (assuming current 2 months free). For Diamond ($3,500), that's 3.5 years. For Collector’s ($10,800), it's about 11 years. A subscription is less attractive than gradually buying just what I need.
That calculation is more about reflecting what kind of price point would make sense for a "subscription" of the Diamond package.
And I'm not convincing you or me to subscribe. What I'm saying is why there might be a potential market there.
Another question is if the market is big enough to make business sense. The recent advances in Movie/TV/Music subscription is to find the right package to maximize its cents. In the case of Music the sweet spot for the price point is enough to have "all-access" where excluded music is virtually non-existent. Movie less so, but is still sort of like all-access. TV/cable much less so (especially if sports is included), because even $100/month can't give one all-access to everything in the U.S. So in the entertainment industries, there are $10~100 price points with various packages. Then what would be the spectrum of price points for spiritual/religious/biblical industries? Logos' current offering touches $10~50 so at least to them this range is still viable. Can $100 be viable? How about $200? Say the next price point they want to hit is $100, how much resources can they throw at it to make it attractive enough? How close is "all-access" to this?
There's a different subscription that I just found out about, that is less than 10USD/mth, that includes commentaries such as the BECNT and NICNT. It won't be as good as a specialized Bible study software, but in terms of usefulness it's already more useful to me than any of the current Connect tiers... I guess it'll be YMMV, whether a set of resources is sufficient, or whether a truly all-in subscription would be practical.
If we're thinking of the same service, it's a good option for books from Moody, Kregel, Baker and Eerdmans and a few others — but only if all you want to do is read, and you're not interested in searching and all the other tools that Logos provides.
Agreed - the functionality Logos has does represent a significant amount of development, so I'm not expecting equivalent rates for dissimilar capabilities. However FL Connect currently doesn't really have attractive content.
That said, I'm content just buying individual items and slowly building up.
However FL Connect currently doesn't really have attractive content.
For the most part, "Faithlife Connect" isn't about content, but about tools.
Thats a new thought. I didn't get that impression from the Faithlife Connect web pages.
