I do sympathize with Xrite, but IMHO, the Xrite marketing guys have apparently not thought it out to its ultimate conclusion. The resistance which impedes Xrite from selling more color measuring instruments and more profile generation software copies is this overall mess that is loosely call "Color management". Get rid of the complexities and pitfalls and many more customers would likely buy instruments and happily control their processes with much greater effectiveness. But right now, every time CM starts to get a little easier, some big change (or screw up) in printer drivers, new OS versions, media inconsistencies, display technologies, etc, etc., and overall lack of industry standardization sends everyone scurrying back to the starting line or trying to find a new "work around". This situation may represent job security for a few gifted color management consultants, but it's hell on the overall adoption rate of color managed workflows in the photographic and printing industries. Meanwhile, "Cloud computing" is rapidly entering the implementation phase which means some bright marketing guys at every company from Microsoft on down are going to propose a whole new paradigm for charging us for software functionality. If, for example, Xrite really wanted to eliminate remote profiling businesses and capture a fee for every custom profile generated they should have simply put their new profiling engine on an Xrite server and handed out a free Ipad app or the like that lets us upload our data from our Xrite color gismos to their secret sauce application in the cloud. A perfect example today is Dragon's Ipad dictation app. It works like a charm, but your iPad isn't doing the speech to text translation. A company controlled and operated server does it, so you have to have an internet connection, and Dragon now has total access to every word you speak. If I were paranoid, I'd really be paranoid about cloud computing. But my point is simple, cloud computing is the perfect way to transition from the current software purchasing model to a new "click charge" model of pricing. Microsoft could charge a small toll fee for every page we author in Word, Dragon for every word we translate, Adobe for every image we edit. But that said, the proponents of the new cloud computing paradigms should be careful what they would wish for. For every power user who used to pay for one copy of Microsoft Word and then authored thousands of pages per year with his single software copy of Word, others of us paid the same fee, and we only write a few pages per year. Thus, cloud computing will allow every software company to track every last ounce of use and charge for it accordingly, but they may just be surprised at how many copies of software they used to sell for which very little work product actually got made with it. Most software companies actively seek to prevent all aspects of pirated software and other forms of abuse that hurts their bottom line, but do these companies have market data on how many legitimate copies are being underutilized by the customer? On this point, I would further add that generic profiles rather than custom profiles are probably Xrite's biggest leak in their boat. Even when they get the big OEM printer and paper companies to pony up 50K or whatever for the right to mass distribute a few dozen profiles, it probably doesn't make up for the revenue that would have come in if custom profiles were being made instead, new Xrite Eula or not.
cheers,
Mark