What Ancestry’s “Retirement” of FTM Really Means - Fri, 11 Dec 2015

Unless you’re a genealogist that has your head in the sand the past few days, you would have heard the big news from Tuesday that Ancestry will be “retiring” its very popular Family Tree Maker desktop genealogy software.

Ancestry has always marketed their software as “the #1 selling family history software”. I can easily believe that pronouncement to be true because, firstly, various incarnations of the software have been on the market for decades, and secondly, because it is one of the few genealogy programs you can find on the shelves of your big box stores in the form of an actual physical box.

I remember 20 years ago, a friend of mine who was an ardent genealogist had Family Tree Maker and he loved it. He raved about it every chance he could.

Family Tree Maker indeed was a well liked program and quite advanced for its time. The reviews at GenSoftReviews for Family Tree Maker Up to Version 16 are still very good which, as I write this, rates 4.11 out of 5. That score would be high enough for the program to earn a GenSoftReviews User’s Choice Award if it were still supported by Ancestry.

About 8 years ago, Ancestry knew that their online trees and records were most important and would be the future of the company. They saw that their Family Tree Maker at the time did not have the capabilities necessary to interface with their online subscription service. A rewrite was required.

They started from scratch as they had to. Doing so was absolutely necessary because they needed to move to a modern programming language which would allow communication between the desktop and online. This was the right move.

But they misstepped. They made several huge mistakes. They completely changed the interface of the program, and existing users were miffed. They  eliminated many of the useful functions of the existing program such as the ability to create the book report and users’ complaints went unheeded. Then they had bugs, major bugs, that for many people prevented installation, crashed the program or froze the computer, and sometimes resulted in a catastrophic loss of data.

Ratings at GenSoftReviews clearly illustrate this: 492 reviews of the current version of Family Tree Maker for Windows currently average 1.80 out of 5, where 1 is the lowest rating that can be given. The Mac version does even worse with 121 reviews averaging 1.53 out of 5. Read some of the reviews and prepare to be amazed by the outrage being shown by the Family Tree Maker users.

Ancestry has had 8 years to address complaints. They could have and likely should have, but that wasn’t their goal. They wanted to get the new version to connect with their online family trees and be able to sync the data. Doing so would have allowed them to use sales of their desktop software to promote new subscriptions to their online service. This was what Ancestry was after.

FamilyTreeMaker 2012 added their TreeSync feature but it didn’t sync everything. There were troubles with it. Service packs came out with “improvements to TreeSync reliability and performance” and “stability” and then FTM 2014 was out with an “improved more robust” TreeSync.

Rather than robust, it was “a bust”. They just could not get it to work well enough for the average users to be satisfied with it.

Now two years have gone by since FTM 2014 came out. Ancestry’s attempt to use its industry embedded software to attract users to its subscription service was not working. Ancestry now knows this and is now changing gears. They want more users of their subscription service. That is their bread and butter. So how can they get more users?

Ancestry has seen the success of MyHeritage who have been partnering with software developers including Aldfaer, Genealogie Online, RootsMagic and Family Historian and allow syncing of data and integration of their matching technologies. They’ve seen the work by FamilySearch to develop GEDCOM X and allow and encourage developers to interface with the FamilySearch Family Tree. FamilySearch now has more than 100 different programs and apps available in their FamilySearch App Gallery.

Ancestry now wants to do the same and use the developer community to provide broader access to their online data. They have seen through MyHeritage and FamilySearch that becoming more open does indeed work to expand a user base. Ancestry now knows that by going alone, they will lose.

How do I know this? Because they said so. After the “outpouring” of thousands of comments to Ancestry’s initial announcement, the very next day Ancestry posted more information. They said:

We are exploring possible relationships with other desktop software solutions that would make it possible for their products to integrate with Ancestry. Stay tuned

So don’t be sad those of you who may ultimately lose your Family Tree Maker program. Be happy! You soon will have many ways to access your online Ancestry account, download your data, share your data, sync your data, and be in control of your data.

I think everything I’ve stated above is the direction that genealogy software is going. The MyHeritage, FamilySearch and Ancestry’s of the world will make the data available and allow us to research and share and collaborate with others. Desktop genealogy software will still be necessary to allow us to keep our own personal copy of our data and our research – the data we have personally verified.

I’m looking forward to the next few years. My ideas for Behold will encompass these thoughts. For my own personal research, I absolutely want to interface with the information from these online services and I want my interface to be Behold. So let me also say what Ancestry has said:  Stay tuned.