researcher

It may be related to the support issues he was having: "Since ULTRA is easy to learn up to an intermediate level, new users almost never need support. Advanced users generate 95% of our support calls. By the end of Q3 2009, it became obvious that our support responsibilities had paralyzed the business side of ULTRA. For the previous couple of years, our jobs had become 90% just answering emails all day, about half of which never even arrived at their destinations due to spam filters. Some of these filters are at the ISP level, over which the user has no control (such as AOL.com who is the very worst offender). Because of this ULTRA had become unprofitable as a business and frankly no fun either. We had also made very little progress with what we really wanted to do: Making ULTRA compatible with Windows 7 ( which was a huge rewrite). Writing our planned improvements to ULTRA, which is a massive list. Pursuing new software product ideas, another massive list." ULTRAFS Site Map ULTRA Support Policiy Change Reaons It then looks like he tried to bring in Melinda L. Brown to free up his time as well. That way he could focus on his other business projects or coding Ultra. "---------(10:54 AM 1/26/2010)---------- In preparation for our ULTRA 11 release. Melinda L. Brown has been hired to work at ULTRA on a full-time basis. Melinda a been assisting Steve Hunter (founder of ULTRA) for many years handling details of his non-ULTRA related business projects. She is a proven talent who will greatly improve the business end of ULTRA. She will now train to become an ULTRA expert exclusively. She will soon begin to assist clients and once she's totally up-to-speed with all the details of the business side of ULTRA, she'll hire/train a PA to assist her further improving our ability to support our software products." http://www.ultrafs.com/inews.txt I guess it didn't work. I wonder if he could have made it work with a different revenue structure. But without annual software updates, and the long term subscribers having bought the lifetime data, he probably wasn't getting much from his user base every year.