Companies that give away core technology for "Free" are always plagued with the perceptive one way door that gets created. There is never a good way out of the situation for either party. The company got the benefit of building a client base with low barrier to entry, but then struggles to maintain profitability after their support/ops burden increases. On the other side, the customer bases profitability and business model was hinged on their ability to innovate to reduce their margins, and now are forced to drastically alter their business plans.
The solution here is for citrix to roll back time, launch a new supported product, and then slowly close the faucet of new features going into the free product. They would have then created an opportunity to pitch the new innovations and migrate their existing customer base to the new platform. The only problem with this thinking (besides the time machine), are the competitors that are releasing more innovative products at the same "free" price point.
Companies, please learn from this: Anything given for free has no value until you try to take it away.
The solution here is for citrix to roll back time, launch a new supported product, and then slowly close the faucet of new features going into the free product. They would have then created an opportunity to pitch the new innovations and migrate their existing customer base to the new platform. The only problem with this thinking (besides the time machine), are the competitors that are releasing more innovative products at the same "free" price point.
Companies, please learn from this: Anything given for free has no value until you try to take it away.