Ancestry Customers React To Tuesday's Announcement

Post date: Dec 10, 2015 5:24:49 PM

Ancestry customers have been reacting to Tuesday's announcement by Ancestry.com to "retire" Family Tree Maker software, and to say that they are not happy would be an understatement.

Take a look below at the thousands of negative comments on Ancestry's website.

I would estimate that a good portion of the FTM users are more experienced researchers and professional genealogists. These individuals are influencers, directing less experienced users to Ancestry's products and services. These are the people who may be the most upset by this latest announcement, and they are precisely the customers that Ancestry should be careful to keep happy.

My personal feeling is that Kendall Hulet has done a huge disservice to both Ancestry's customers as well as to the company. I suspect that he may be looking at certain statistics and reaching an incorrect conclusion

Yes, there is a decreasing desktop market, and yes, there is also a declining market for traditional desktop software. I also know that Ancestry has also struggled to make the Mac version of FTM to be well behaved, and that it is expensive to support a website, a mobile app, and a desktop software product.

I understand the desire to keep expenses in check, and product lines under control (I actually do have extensive business management and product management experience). That said, there is certain functionality that exists on FTM that does not exist on Ancestry's website or in your mobile app.

The right approach, however, is not to simply turn your back on your loyal customers, and to walk away from one of your products along with its exclusive, and very valuable functionality. Rather, a more prudent approach would be to plan for the migration of this functionality (the value of the product), to a product that will not be sunset. This could be done by transitioning the value to your mobile app, through significantly enhancements to its functionality, and bringing it to the point where it does most (if not all) of what is most important to Ancestry's customers. This approach will enable Ancestry to continue to deliver the same value to its customers while still eliminating the expense of maintaining an additional product line.

If this is, indeed, Ancestry’s plan, then an announcement like Tuesday's, should have included an explanation of such plans so as to avoid unnecessarily upsetting Ancestry's customers.

I frequently get the impression that the people in Product roles at Ancestry have little to no experience with their products as genealogists.

This has been very disappointing news, to say the least.