Here are the announcements I found:Īncestral Quest (Win & Mac*): Ancestral Quest competitive upgrade for Family Tree Maker Family Historian (Win): Family Historian Welcomes Family Tree Maker Users Heredis (Win & Mac): Important information about genealogy Legacy (Win): How to import Family Tree Maker into Legacy PLUS your questions answered MacFamilyTree (Mac): Family Tree Maker discontinued – Switch to MacFamilyTree and Switch from Family Tree Maker to MacFamilyTree and import your family tree MyHeritage Family Tree Builder (Win & Mac*): FTM Users: Join MyHeritage and get Family Tree Builder with an Unlimited Size Family Site for Free Reunion (Mac): Moving your tree from Family Tree Maker to Reunion RootsMagic (Win & Mac*): Family Tree Maker Upgrade Pretty much every other major desktop genealogy software company has made announcements trying to get disaffected FTM users to switch over to their software. Other companies, of course, are not sitting still. Cleary, people have concerns about how Ancestry is handling the transition. A second follow-up post has generated another 950 comments so far. Their initial blog post announcing the ‘retirement’ of FTM has so far generated over 8500 comments. As a strategic decision, however, I think they made a mistake in not transitioning the features many genealogists rely on in desktop software to their online offering first, features like charts and reports, as well as better backups of data than the GEDCOM available from Ancestry’s online service. It would seem logical then that the transition is strategic, in order to get more people to use their online family tree product, which as part of their overall service, generates much more revenue for them. It’s possible FTM was some kind of loss-leader to get people to sign up to, although it seems odd that they would need to lose money on the program. Other genealogy programs seem to make money. It would seem unusual that the #1 selling program would be discontinued. Ancestry themselves claimed the software was “The #1 Selling Family Tree Program”. It’s certainly an interesting story about Ancestry dropping their desktop genealogy software Family Tree Maker (FTM).
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