Why do you close all topics that question your cloud decision? Is that what caring about user feedback looks like?

That’s what I’d like to know.

It makes you look like dictators, not like listeners.

But go ahead and close this topic down, if you can’t handle the negative feedback.

Some of the discussions about cloud did derail somewhat and got a little uncivil (although I can only think of 2 cases where this occurred, mainly the flagged part of this thread). See Medet’s topic.


It’s really, really disappointing to see the response from Linearity to the whole cloud fiasco. At this point (for me personally), I would say that my concern with ever going back to a Linearity product is with the infinitesimal product communications (there are older versions + workarounds now for the technical issue). I wrote a longer response a while ago delving into the issues that I have with the forced cloud rollout.

A   m u l t i t u d e   o f   u s ers (~201 comments) have raised concerns, never actually addressed. The official responses from Linearity, have all been variants of following:

  • We think it’s best for the long-term future of the company and our growth.
  • We need it for Linearity Move and making our (unreleased at time of writing) new products work better with each other.
  • We promise that our cloud is secure, and we pinky-promise to never ever use any your data to train an AI model.

There’s been no other real justifications, despite hundreds of comments on the forum rebuking these arguments. A total of two unique people have been communicating with users, who can promise very little. I know firsthand that you’ve lost about 400 users in the education space. Given this, Linearity, my question is…

Why is this not being addressed by leadership?


An open Q&A, a blog post, anything! I think we all would just like some acknowledgement from the people who actually made this decision.

@Nadya and Medet - thank you for all your work in moderation and keeping things civil. It really is appreciated. @vladimir feel like chiming in?

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Thank you llui85, for this civil and sincere post.

When addressing the above points (again…and if they will be addressed by leadership), the one point around which my (and probably most others who don’t agree with your new direction) in-acceptance circles is:

Why is an option to also offer local storage to those who do not require or want the extended functionality or smoother interoperability/collaboration features, not an option? We were fine with Vectornator, which didn’t offer Motion or Collaboration, because it fulfilled our need for a simple and powerful vector design software beautifully. Why is Linerarity so hell-bent on taking that away from us?

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Hi both and thank you for your valuable input.

Firstly, to @till’s question, we are not deliberately closing Linearity Cloud topics but closing down topics that go into a downward spiral where both myself and our team faced foul language. You can also find our reasoning behind this here as Llui already pointed out. Again as he pointed out, there’s a difference between keeping things civil vs. making allegations.

I understand your frustration and that you are not happy with the decision we have taken. Unfortunately, as my lovely colleague Nadya previously pointed out, we have our final decision and it’s here.

As for the topic being addressed, I have pointed out before that we ran a user survey back in summer and we actually did hold a live q&a session that happened on our main social channels where we addressed questions and comments on this matter. Just because someone from the leadership doesn’t personally respond, this doesn’t mean that it’s not addressed. Me and Nadya are the representatives of the company and you can be assured that the leadership team is aware of the comments and they have been agreeing with the responses we are giving.

We took a company decision that was unfavorable by some members of our community and we are very sorry this had such an effect on you but once again, we do stand by our decision and we do want to carry forward towards our longer term ambitions.

Thank you both!
Medet

It’s your reasoning that I am truly upset about. It makes no rational sense to exclude such a large portion of your loyal customer base, other than having ulterior motives that will be carried out at some point in the future. There is no rational reason to take away local storage if that isn’t part of some sort of future action that you are working on, or are planning to capitalizing on. Call me cynical, but there simply is…no…rational…reason…for…that, if you still allow people to use your cloud and the new exclusive to cloud features.

Why spend time on taking away something that works and that people want and need?
THAT is what needs to be explained to not just me.

Or maybe, give us one or two examples of another software that took away local file storage in favor or their proprietary cloud solution. With millions of developers, surely there must be a few who have taken the same route, if it made sense.

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