New Feature in Logos Now But Not in Verbum Now?

And with that, I have cancelled my subscription.

The "month-long" access is nice to try something out. Let's say I really like a book included and want to buy it. Is it going to cost the full price or will there be a discount for Now customers?

Speaking for myself as a Verbum Now subscriber, I feel a little sad that Logos Now subscribers are getting access to the additional resources, while the Verbum Now folks are not -- even though the subscription prices are identical, and my assumption was that Verbum Now and Logos Now would pretty much be interchangeable, without one necessarily being "better" than the other. 

Either granting same/same access to resources on the Logos/Verbum programs, or selecting different Logos/Verbum resources and then making simultaneous email announcements to the subscribers  might have been a more customer-friendly way to handle this.

Phil Gons (Faithlife) said:

Brian, our plan is for these to be very similar, but custom in a way that's fitting for the audience.

My .02, Faithlife is way overthinking this. Audience preference matters when there is a choice - the Verbum audience has preferred liturgical, biblical choices, catechisms, etc. But why does Logos get Faithlife Today video and Verbum audience gets nothing? If someone with Verbum or Logos wants to turn them off they can. This seems like arbitrary differentiation that only causes confusion to me. That's one example that's in blogs, web pages, etc., yet "You can't get it - sorry". Dumb!

Same opinion here as others on this thread, I happen to own Lexham Bible Guides so it's not an issue to me,  and they are very good - but why they wouldn't be offered to Verbum users is beyond me - there really is not an alternative resource for the Verbum audience or any other. Didn't Logos/FL create the LBG franchise to offer a value add beyond just commentaries? Why wouldn't you want to extend that option to all your audience? What would you prefer Verbum audience to use instead? If you say it's not Catholic so it shouldn't be offered, Verbum base packages have tons of non-Catholic resources in them, if that is considered to be the delineation it is cloudy. 

As a Verbum user I have become more and ore unhappy with the fact that it exists - only because of the arbitrary lines FL establishes that seem to serve no one well.

Don Awalt said:

As a Verbum user I have become more and ore unhappy with the fact that it exists - only because of the arbitrary lines FL establishes that seem to serve no one well.

Faithlife has bent over backwards trying to please Verbum users. Just my 2 cents.

MJ. Smith said:

This time ST I think you are overvaluing your opinion

Maybe Bob ought to fire the whole Verbum team, if they are doing such a lousy job.

Super.Tramp said:

MJ. Smith said:

This time ST I think you are overvaluing your opinion

Maybe Bob ought to fire the whole Verbum team, if they are doing such a lousy job.

MJ. Smith said:

I don't think that the Verbum audience developed as Faithlife expected - the users are a much more diverse than the marketing.

I suspect that you may be correct in the short term. I have thought, maybe hoped even, that Verbum is a long-term endeavor to reach a specific audience. I am not Roman Catholic but accept the church headed from Rome as part of the catholic Church. Having said that I expect that the Verbum brand connotes Roman Catholic. When I see resources that aren't obviously, or obviously aren't, explicitly Roman Catholic included in Verbum branded packages this doesn't change my expectation. This is how I understand Verbum. 

SineNomine said:

Verbum customers are de facto being treated as second class. Given that this has happened before--the ridiculous delays before the creation of the Catholic Products forum when there should have been no delay at all, for example--I strongly suspect that Damian expects and rejects a projected continued pattern of (assumed unintentional) maltreatment of Verbum users. It's not the responsibility of Verbum staff to make sure they keep up with what the Logos staff are offering; it's the fundamental responsibility of Faithlife the company not to stratify its customers, in fact or in appearance and whether by intention or accidentally, along Logos/Verbum lines.

This.

When the disparity is pointed out there is not even the assurance given that the disparity will be corrected. Rather, any correction is but a 'probability' still in discussion. Will Verbum Now users have to wait as long for parity as they had to wait for anything resembling a Verbum sub-forum?

SineNomine said:

... it's the fundamental responsibility of Faithlife the company not to stratify its customers, in fact or in appearance and whether by intention or accidentally, along Logos/Verbum lines.

[*] I somehow missed your post until now.

I agree with the above comment, almost unreservedly. I must acknowledge that there are challenges, though seemingly surmountable, Faithlife is helpless to avoid. I need to consider this prayerfully more often.

Some issues are just decisions not in line with customer's desires - it doesn't really take any more work I would think, to include Faithlife Today in all versions of the desktop software. In fact it seems to me to be a possibility that it took MORE work to exclude it from the code base for Verbum. As others have noted, I too am worried about the stratification that will force me to constantly think about whether i should be on Verbum or Logos. That doesn't help anybody.

In other cases it is a question of resources invested on an initiative, and how fast things can proceed. I think it is valuable for FL to hear that customers are not happy with the progress if that's the case.  Things would progress faster on Verbum if some of the newer initiatives would not have started or went slower. I am regularly amazed with how many thing FL initiates, many of which have value but are still works in progress. That's just the culture of the company and it's not going to change, and at times it serves it very well (I remember push back when it appeared resources were being spent on mobile at the expense of the desktop - now most would say it's great there is mobile support).

 Other times it feels like FL has their own agenda which will take strong precedence over customer needs. (The latest example - I spent a week on the road last week using just the Mac version of 6.2 SR-1, and the number of times I got the "spinning pie plate" was maddening - multiple times a day. A few times I left it, to see if it ever came back - and it just spun for hours while I was gone from the room. I just consider the Mac version substandard only to be used when I have to, and that is a shame. I would love to see Bob sequester himself in a hotel room for a week, where the WiFi is good but not as good as his office, and spend 3-4 hours a day doing actually research with Verbum on a Mac, downloading resources, indexing, searching, etc. He will go crazy.)

That said, it takes a lot of customer voice to convince FL to move a perceived-incomplete function/feature higher up the priority list, and that's very frustrating.