OrchidWiz Being Retired
 

I received an email from Alex and Marianna:

"We want to thank you for a wonderful 17 years. It has been a great journey and we have enjoyed sharing our passion for orchids with you. Though not an easy decision, we have decided to close OrchidWiz on December 31, 2022."

I responded the I understood the desire to retire, and hoped they were magnanimous enough to share it with the AOS.

Would the AOS know what to do with it? I saw that too, heartbroken.

Maybe some horticulture school could make it part of their process???

The part of OW that I use the most is the collection of Baker sheets, so that won't change. But not getting the new crosses will eventually really hurt. Orchidroots is pretty good, but doesn't have nearly the capability for searching on part of a string.

Wow...too sad,

I had just decided to buy a copy too. Sigh!

Well worth buying as they "sunset" ... I wonder if they will drop the price after v. X9.0 comes out since they won't have a full year of updates. I have inquired about licensing, being concerned about how to port to a new computer after they're no longer supporting. (In the past, when I got a new computer and took it off the old one, they handled the license transfer. As long as it is running on the same computer there would be no issue, but I plan on the program lasting a lot longer than my computer hardwar) I was assured that they have recognized the problem and will address it so that it'll continue to work for people who have bought it as long as Windows will support it (which I suspect will be a long time, the Access engine that it uses has been stable through many significant changes to Windows)

But even without updates, the hybrids that are already there (as well as all the species info) will stay valid. The Baker culture sheets for species (4700+ of them) also won't change, and will continue to be useful going forward.

One permanent archive solution when it is retired would be to package it with a standardized Windows virtual machine. In this way the virtualized package could be run on future computers so long as they support virtualization. The authors would maintain a small income stream from selling the archived version.

It would be nice for the OW authors to approach an IT person who could make this happen. Roberta, you understand this stuff - get to work!

Sad news indeed!!! I had planned to upgrade mine last year, didn't get around to it, and discovered last month that the discount price for owners of previous versions has disappeared from the site. Looks like I'll splurge for the full prive version then, to have the most up to date database...

As to portability, I hope they will come up with a solution soon. Does anyone know what the license is tied to? I have a desktop PC and will probably upgrade the motherboard and CPU in a year or two.

This talk of possible difficulties moving OWiz to a new computer could add another layer of complexity for me.
I currently use a HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook which is quite old. It does what I need at the monent but it is getting slow now.
I was looking at getting a new one next year thinking I would be able to just use Owiz on the HP for now and transfer to the new laptop later.