Citrix pulls the plug on its User Group Community

Citrix has pulled the plug on its user group. The Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) has operated for eight years. As is often the case with such orgs, it wasn’t an entirely grass roots org. Instead, Citrix funded a commercial service provider to plant the seeds of a community and help it to grow. The service provider hired …

[Yorick Hunt]

User self-help?

Preposterous!

We can't have users helping each other on a community forum, we need to monetise this!

[An_Old_Dog]

Incalculable Benefits

... (meaning, "cannot be calculated", vs "too huge to be calculated") are ignored by bean-counters, because there's no way to put them into a spreadsheet. IBM's SHARE and Digital Equipment's DECUS user groups boosted their sales, because potential users knew they could get help, and the people-to-people interactions raised the members' awareness of how computers could benefit them, and raised enthusiasm for adopting the technology.

Too many company execs want to harness, direct, and control their user groups so that (1) those groups become a channel for marketing messages, and (2) any criticism of the company's products and/or policies can be supressed.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

AI

There was no mention of this new offering being AI driven. Can that be right?

[AustinTX]

Companies that jettison their UG never turn out to be the good guys

We've seen this before. I went through it with Fon.com community forums.

Companies don't just want to protect themselves from the release of sensitive information or surging complaints. Companies want to sidestep their inability or unwillingness to provide what the community wants. They want to declare what users wanted even if, said users wanted no such things. They can't do that with people who aren't under their control.

I can only conclude that some serious, unresolved probems are going down at Citrix, and they are moving to lock it all down. They would rather protect their value by sweeping things under the carpet than spend a little profit on fixing things.

[ecofeco]

Re: Companies that jettison their UG never turn out to be the good guys

All of this. ^^^

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure...

...it's just a holding company to license the product. There haven't really been any new features/products for years now.

The Hypervisor stuff is dead, Netscaler is sort of in development. Everything else is dead but available to renew subscription licensing (remember when you bought a product forever?)