Re "out of the blue", Capture One Pro is released on a 12-18 month release cycle. So expect the next one around winter of 2016 or spring of 2017.
For that to be really useful to avoid the double upgrades that at least three folks on this forum are facing, it would have to be a lot more specific than 12-18 months (when Adobe did this, it was within a week or two each year - you knew EXACTLY when Photoshop was coming).
Capture One's release history is as follows (mostly from Wikipedia).
Version 3: Can't find the actual release date, but it was on 3.6 by late 2004!
Version 4: December 2007: (PRO delayed until October 2008) (AT LEAST 4 years)
Version 5 (almost invisible): October 2009 (two years - one if you count from Pro 4)
Version 6 (first modern C1): December 2010 (one year)
Version 7: November 2012(two years)
Version 8: September 2014(two years)
Version 9: November 2015.(one year)
It does look like it's generally a fall/early winter release, but the number of years is unpredictable, although often two - it looks like it's been on a two year cycle since v4, albeit with a bit of chaos caused by the delay of v4 PRO before the big v6 upgrade. Since it was extensively modernized at v6, it had reliably been two years until v9. Unless you count v4 to v5 using the delayed PRO version of v4, the only paid upgrade in less than two years had been v5 to v6 (and v5 was the very low adoption version, so most people were upgrading from v4 or even v3).
Since C1 Pro 8 had three important free point upgrades (and Phase One had actually posted that they were moving to a model of LESS major upgrades, with more features added in point releases), I had expected v9 in late 2016 at the earliest, with the possibility that v8 would be like v3, hanging around for years, although effectively rewritten through point upgrades! Most C1 users are on v8 now, so we're all being hit with an early paid upgrade, and those of us who bought in when Adobe threatened to dumb down Lightroom are being hit with a paid upgrade in less than two months, and one that could NOT have been predicted.
If we're going to see annual paid upgrades from now on, anyone who ever paid full price for v8 is a chump, because the subscription offers all the upgrades for $99/year, WITHOUT ever having made the initial, larger investment, while ownership means $99/year upgrades DESPITE the initial investment (and owners who bought at the wrong time do far worse than subscribers, effectively being rewarded for their larger initial investment with a surprise early renewal). Even if your v8 release is an upgrade, as mine is, it's at the VERY best equivalent to the subscription - you get a year for $99 - and, if you bought it later than the initial release, you get hit for another $99 sooner than you predicted or would have if you subscribed.
If Phase One had made this clear from the beginning, as Microsoft did when they moved to Office 365 (they continued to offer non-subscription Office, but made it clear that it would always be more expensive unless you cared about keeping old versions), this would have been fine, especially if they had offered some incentive (a free year's subscription, for example), to move to the subscription. Instead, they portrayed it as two models, either of which might work out cheaper, then hit owners with an extra fee after they chose the initially more expensive option. Due to camera compatibility and lens profiles, raw converters are unlikely pieces of software to be able to skip an upgrade entirely (although, at least, C1 isn't reliably taken out by operating system upgrades the way Lightroom is).
don't get me wrong - I like C1 a lot and v9 looks like a great upgrade - I'm just unhappy with how paying for it worked out...
Dan
