What I personally think if any company rises the prices of their products with more then 5% (and this is a whopping 27%):
- they are going bankrupt and need money fast (or recently lost a lot of money on a failed product)
- they have a lunatic in their marketing department / management
- they have a monopoly and like to shake their customers down like the maffia
any or all of the above.
Altium have increased their prices as revenues are stagnant, just like Microsoft (the last 3 years sales revenues has gone backwards) & Apple (the last 2 years sales revenues have gone backwards).
When the technology (software in this case) matures, customers see little reason to upgrade. An example of this is Microsoft Word 2007 & Word 2013. Whilst the later version does a few more things, most customers can do everything they want with the earlier version. The same thing goes for Windows 7 & Windows 8.
Altium is not much different. I own Altium 6.9 (2006/2007 version) & recently completed a contract design using Altium 14. The main thing I noticed is that a couple of screen bugs that p*ssed me off in version 6.9 have been fixed & the screen drivers have been improved somewhat. There are a few new features (which I didn't use or used a bit just because they are there).
Would I pay $3600 (the price quoted about 2 years ago) to upgrade my copy? Nope, because I don't think it is good value (the money comes out of my personal pocket).
The other reason Altium is having a hard time is because of the effects of the GFC & the dumb move to China several years back. There was no way USA military contractors were going to use the later versions of software that were developed in China for fear of backdoor leakage over the net & live net access to their computers via the Altium Component Vault.
Now that Nick Martin has been booted from the company we wait in baited breath for Altium to once again concentrate on their bread & butter Schematic & PCB design software (& stop wasting resources on FPGA design software & nano boards).
So far as I can tell, there has been a little more emphasis on the schematic & pcb side of things, but it has now come at a cost of some $2K more.
As I said before, not many Altium users actually like Altium the Company.