Where Logos is Headed

MJ. Smith said:

. . . For the average parishioner, the basic resources and the free engine should get them in for something close to $100.

I think this is the person that many of us have in mind. In the congregation I attend, most of the members do their daily Bible reading out of a study Bible, and likely supplement it with a devotional of some kind. And that's pretty much it. They may have a Bible dictionary or a one-volume commentary. I'm not going to recommend Logos to any of them - not even the free version. It's just too much and doesn't meet their needs. I'm not criticizing anyone, because I've been that person. But what they really need for the next step in their Bible study is a basic app that gives them access to multiple versions of the Bible, has a convenient basic search function, lets them look up words in a dictionary and concordance, has a basic Bible dictionary, and allows them to read a commentary alongside their Bible when they're ready to step up to that. (To put this in context, I've tried to introduce my college-educated lifetime Christian daily Bible reading spouse to Logos a couple of times over the years, and it's been a complete non-starter.)

There are a number of simple Bible apps out there, and we have several people in the congregation who're using them on their phones. Others are using the Kindle app. And quite honestly, that meets their needs just fine. I can only think of one member of the congregation that I'd recommend Logos to, and that's because he's expressed an interest in preaching when he retires.

The folks I'm talking about are a huge potential market. But in my judgment, reaching them would require either a slimmed down "Logos Lite" that looks much more like a basic Bible app, or a user interface that does a dramatically better job of hiding all the complexity.

Al Het said:

So, I just looked, and no package offers these resources (at least the first 3) for under $1,000. 

That's a good list for a library, and good points.  My 'go to' for software for normal Christians remains Olivetree.  Though, at least for a while, they were having their issues.

I do wonder where 'the Church' is these days (I think Nathan, over at Accordance, also).  Is it mainly devotional+Bible-class?  Or huge churches with a good message each week? I saw an article (true/not) indicating TV church'ing is up.  I also suspect immigrant populations will be a good market, years hence. 

My interest in this thread isn't myself (I like high-end OL).  But if FL is to grow, and after maybe 5 more years of academic expansion, and closing-Bible software apps,  where's the growth (aka payroll money)?  More gadgets isn't going to attract more customers; easier access will.

PL ... I thought same. But scroll down to 'Features' etc

Al Het said:

Vic,

It is always good for a company to re-examine its goals and objectives from time to time, and this statement sounds really great... 

However, this statement strikes me as utterly ridiculous, unless Logos/Faithlife is intending on radically changing what you offer.  This is not a personal criticism of you, or anyone in the company.  However, I think there is a significant and radical difference between the words posted here, and what Faithlife/Logos has been attempting to do for the last 20 years or so.

Logos exists to empower believers everywhere to go deeper in their Bible study...

It has been at least 15 years since I felt I could recommend Logos to people who want to "go deeper in their Bible Study."  I began using Logos back with version 1.  When Libronix came out, it was a huge leap forward in Bible software, and I found it to be pushing the limits of cost and complexity for the average Christian, though it was still accessible.  From there, price and complexity continued to expand at an overwhelming, ever-increasing rate.  15 years ago, people on this forum would say, "Yeah, but this software is primarily for pastors and scholars, and pastors need to be willing to pay a premium, and spend significant time learning how to use the "tools of their trade." 

At that point, I began getting incredulous looks from most non-professional Christians whom I would suggest Logos to.  It was just too expensive.  And, when people did buy it, and were not in a field of work where they used computers every day, most would express to me just how foolish they felt it was to have spent the money they did, for software that was largely useless to them.  Pastors too, if they were from non-technical fields, were significantly frustrated.

"...and we will continue to make Logos available, accessible, and affordable internationally..."

Recommending Logos to missionaries and pastors in other countries was even more futile.  Radically too expensive, and unworkably too complicated for most of them to use. 

And over the last 15 years, the software has only RAPIDLY INCREASED in cost and complexity. 

I believe that for nearly 20 years, the focus for the developers of Logos has been academia first, computer minded pastors second, and really no one else seemed to have a seat at the table.  It was, and continues to be, a great tool for those who spend significant time doing significantly in-depth study, such that it is worth their time to learn the complexity of Logos, and to use what they've learned enough to remember how to use its vast features.

If the goal is to truly "empower Believers everywhere...", then I believe you will need to cut costs radically, and make the program far more intuitive and usable.  And, for that to happen, it would indicate a significant change in direction, indeed.  Right now, I know of very few Christians not in direct ministry who would be willing to pay for Logos, or who have found it useful to them, personally, or in organizing Bible Studies.

For what it's worth.

Very well said Al. I agree with you about 98%. I'm a very long-time user too and have invested 10s of thousands of dollars in Logos. I've shared the program with well over 50 people over the years, including many pastors and seminary students, and have only had two or three people enter into the Logos ecosystem. The reason for not doing so in almost every single case is cost first and complexity second. Obviously, Logos is going after a very small market. Of course, they got you and me.

MJ. Smith said:

Okay, I have another question for several of you. When you help prioritize work on the feedback site, do you vote for the features that would be of use to the entry level user or do you votes for the features you would use yourself?

I vote for features that I think would be helpful to have in Logos, for me and others, and are easy to use. I'm a firm believer that the magnificence of sophisticated and complex software is that it is easy to use.

Pitrell said:

I have also only several times again gone down from the homepage without buying, because it seemed too expensive and not attractive enough for my small purpose.

I feel this is a significant issue. Why buy something that I know will likely get buried in my massive library and soon be forgotten? Sure I can do a lot of technical work with collections and custom searches that will eventually bring some of these briefly to the surface if I have enough persistence and patience to wade through information overload. But how many general users are going to do that?

The webinar a while back on 'hidden gems' is a great example. It was fantastic and yet showed a real challenge. The need to create manual collections to get value out of non-versified commentaries is another example of a bridge too far for many casual users. I'm not claiming to have real answers, but Logos needs to do a lot more to bring out resources from our library if it wants more people to justify spending the amounts many of these packages and resources cost.

Carta is a great example. How awesome would it have been if they somehow integrated them the existing mapping features so the content was readily available without having to do a bunch of digging or manual searching. As it is, I often forget I even bought most of their products. And that's pretty sad considering how much I spent on them and how beautiful they are. Maybe that's my fault for not working harder to set everything up to take advantage of these resources. But then the fact that I need to do so does a good job of highlighting the challenge.

I know there are no easy answers, but I hope these are issues Logos is really thinking through in this new direction.

MJ makes some great concrete suggestions. I suspect I'm not the only one who enjoyed paging through the back charts, tables and other collected/curated content in the back pages of study Bibles. I see interesting books on Bible lists and other things that seem appealing. I haven't bought them knowing they'll likely sit in my library unused unless I specifically pull it up and wade through it. It's certainly doable. But when I have thousands of books of various types to wade through, it's a daunting prospect.

I already own more books than I can ever hope to read or even wade through in most search results. Now I want resources that will be drawn from by features and reports that bring out their value in a time effective way. If I buy a lexicon, it is well integrated and is easily accessed in multiple ways that are reasonably intuitive without me having to do a lot of manual set-up (prioritization not withstanding!) The same needs to be true for maps and other content. I understand by doing more configuration work I will get even more value from resources like this, but some base level start that is provided for me would go a long ways towards making Logos something I would recommend to a more casual user.

If Logos can focus on this one simple question (and we can help chime in here), that might shed a lot of light on the discussions we're having here:

Both Olive Tree and Logos have a "Passage Guide" feature, whereby the app pulls out relevant study info for you for any given Bible passage you're studying.

Why is Olive Tree's so much more intuitive and easy to use, while Logos' seems so daunting and overwhelming, bloated and clunky?

ReformedDoc said:

But these days my focus is the original languages and searches in the other brand's software are way less complex and more intuitive.

I assume that you are referring to Accordance? As a former Bibleworks user … I have tried to move on. I find that neither Acc or L10 is intuitive “for me”. They are both different from what I am accustomed to And thus each presents a learning curve.

Because I have invested in both programs, I hope for both of them to be successful. My impression so far is that L10 is a solid and stable program with superior resources. My experience has so far been limited to windows and iOS. On windows at least, Acc is buggy and prone to crashes. anytime I download or add a new resource it crashes. I have no personal experience with how it handles personal notes and data. But clearly those features are so bad that their forum has numerous threads about syncing problems, data loss and alternative note taking programs.

If you look at new features in v13 the big items were essentially copied from Bibleworks. v14 features include pie charts that look very much like the ones Logos already had. Seems the vision there is to copy what others are doing.

Maybe it is because of my lack of in-depth experience with both programs that I cannot figure out what you are talking about … can you explain a bit more in detail exactly what it is about Acc that is superior to L10 for original languages?

Thanks

Graham Criddle said:

Did you come across https://www.logos.com/product/228264/logos-10-fundamentals ?

If you, maybe, added another Bible to it, it seems to get close to what you are suggesting.

Thanks Graham.  I didn't see that one anywhere on the website. 

As a side note, I think that website is annoyingly difficult as well.  It wasn't easy or obvious from the home page to find the products available to buy, which I think is the whole point of the website.  After a few minutes of looking, I found "Compare base packages."  This "Fundamentals" package wasn't there.

That package is $50.  To bring it up to my base suggestion for people, a person would need to add at least one Bible, one whole Bible commentary, two Bible dictionaries, and I would recommend a Bible encyclopedia.

To add another Bible translation (say, NIV and/or NASB) would be $10, another solid whole Bible commentary, like the Bible Knowledge Commentary is $40, two Bible dictionaries like the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary ($21) and say, The New Bible Dictionary ($31) come to $52. 

So, that would add about $100 to the package.  After spending the initial $50, that is a fairly solid price for the average guy.  If you add the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, that bumps it up another $130, but we could keep that as an add-on.

Of course, after having to find those resources and shelling out the $150, you are still left with a software package that is difficult and cumbersome for them to figure out, a search engine that requires a huge amount of inside knowledge to use well, and lousy maps.

Feels like a lot of complaining here, but I'd sure like to see a very usable package like the one I just put together right here, with a much less cumbersome base software, like you would design for such basic resource use, if your goal is to "empower believers everywhere to go deeper in their Bible study."  If they had what I describe here,with a far more usable software skin, I would gladly recommend people in my congregation pony up for $200-$300.

MJ. Smith said:

I have been arguing this for two decades and have seen significant progress. I have seen significant progress especially in documentation. I have also seen the tension between new ways to achieve functions e.g. the interactive/dataset tie-in, get dropped when the cost of maintaining the interactives across all platforms became prohibitive. Because of its heavy load of legacy functions, things that appear simple e.g. attach notes to footnotes are anything but simple. I am not as impressed by the changes to the search syntax nor by the possibilities opened by AI as you. The topics I have harped on until people are sick and tired of my posts: support for the religious educator, better support for the liturgical churches, very broad selection of resources, accurate documentation ... some of my pet projects have made it through community prioritization and into the product.

Wellll there you go! Just when I thought we were agreeing, you up and take a different route! Sigh!  But here's a problem.... If Logos does pattern after the religious educator, and liturgical churches and such.... I would like that to be a different program and I see the base buyer of that to be demographically small. Logos is better off to appeal to a broader market composed of both worlds... there's more money in the combined market and I think the programmers are up to making the complexity of that program easy to use. Dividing Logos only means more people and more production costs which I don't think Logos wants.

Let's work together with what we have to work with and make what we have better for all. If all us users of the program stick together we can have a much better program which will engulf some of what we all want.

They could always create a "Logos Lite" version of the software, geared towards the more casual user. Meant more for just Bible reading and basic Bible study. Basic searching - search in a Bible or in a book. Compare passages. The Factbook. Maybe a few other things. 

To keep it simple, just make it work the same way the Logos app and the Faithlife app work (or used to work, since they've sunset the Faithlife app). Your license works on both and you could even have both installed at the same time. Only suggestion would to have them "share" a library on the drive - i.e., it's only going to download the books once, not individually for both programs. 

That allows someone who may feel overwhelmed and confused by all the extras to just use it in a more basic format, but then also allows them later to switch to the full experience if they want - it's not a separate product they are using.

It would be a good way of introducing someone to Logos. 

Donnie said:

They could always create a "Logos Lite" version of the software, geared towards the more casual user. Meant more for just Bible reading and basic Bible study. Basic searching - search in a Bible or in a book. Compare passages. The Factbook. Maybe a few other things.

I think they kinda have that already in the mobile software?

I've seen several posts that Logos needs a base version, or that someone didn't know the free / base versions exist. That's why I wrote before that the way the application is presented and marketed is the larger issue, IMO. There ARE free and base versions already, but they're a bit overshadowed by all the offerings on the front page without more direction to those versions as viable, long-term packages of themselves.

If someone gets a sense that they will eventually have to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars just to get value out of the software (which to me, isn't true, but I did get that impression), they're going to look elsewhere. The current "Start small now, go big later" on the home page implies this. But once you have new users onboard who do not necessarily want to purchase more, some who start with the intention to stay small will later realize they'd like to grow their resources more. There are nuances to the marketing that could be adjusted to manage expectations.

I'm not saying the lower-level versions should necessarily remain as they are -- obviously, improvements can be made in various areas. Just continue to make sure users can tailor it to their needs, of course.

Again, I'm just speaking from my own experience, and I have to assume there are others like myself. I did happen to see the free version and tinkered with that for a while thinking I probably wouldn't use it much because it seemed complicated or required for me to add a lot of resources to find value. But after using it for a while I upgraded to the base package and have purchased a few resources. In fact, I enjoy reading on Logos much better than my hard-copy library (except for the typos), so I now actually wish more of my (few) books were available on Logos. I really had no intention of that when I started off with the software, but it's just so nice and easy to read. Hopefully, I will be able to upgrade to the next step at some point, but even if not ... I've built a wish-list of books I'd like to purchase. [:)] But in the meantime, I am making good use of the software through Bible reading, taking notes, performing word search studies and some verse comparisons, along with some commentary and cross references.

I second all of this!

Donovan R. Palmer said:

Bravo! It is refreshing to read vision being cast!

If I may suggest a few things that I hope get some love in the focusing effort.

The Atlas has so, so, so much potential. It was off to a great start in the early days of Logos but is not very compelling. Accordance, though they have not changed their mapping module in many years, is still light years ahead. I use it all the time. Can the Atlas be reimagined in your roadmap of the future?

Similarly with graphics. The graphics viewer seems so clumsy. It would be great to see photos tagged with the map that you could see them in context. Would it be possible to start with a blank piece of paper and redesign something from the ground up?

Last, one of the most exciting things back in version 2 was archeology resources. Can someone build a big bridge back to Biblical Archaeology Review? Having their magazine as part of our journals was awesome. Even to this day, their issues pop up in my cited by tool, giving me fascinating insights into passages of scriptures from recent discoveries. I think I read there is an archeology data set in development and I am really looking forward to this. The connections to things being published on today brings another level of life and excitement to studies.

I suggest these on the basis that visuals has become so much part of our culture. I love the data sets, but would it be possible to work on Logos also being visually impactful when it comes to studies, beyond just a collection of static cards and advertisements? Seeing a picture, a map, a timeline, really adds to the learning process. Maybe the home page should be more geared towards being a launch pad or dashboard of studies to workspaces, graphics, maps, etc?

Keep up the great work! I love the speed, stability and the refinements you have made in version 10.  Logos for Mac has come a very, very long way!