I believe Sage have a case of ""Service Envy"". When looking at their portfolio, specifically Sage 100 and 300, they notice that competitors don't give unlimited payroll processing for one annual maintenance fee.
Instead most competitors, such as QuickBooks, upsell their customers to mandatory payroll services which are separate from the annual maintenance on the accounting.
Sage's ""missing piece"" is that they are presumably not filling their Sage 100 user base with new additions at nearly the rate that QuickBooks is. So the loss of any paying maintenance customer due to price hikes does more financial damage to Sage than to Intuit.
This strategy likely boils down a spreadsheet within Sage which predicts:
- Likelihood of churn from existing payroll users
- Likelihood of upselling to Sage Payroll
- Likelihood of adding new name payroll users
- Cost benefit of increased payroll tier revenue vs net churn
Low-level and technical Sage employees still believe that Sage 100's big renaissance is around the corner. At the EVP and higher level I believe there's a much more realistic overview of where Sage 100 (and other non-global) products are headed and the prospects for their growth.
Sage, long term is all about global products.
Local (legacy) products are still around to fund Sage's long-term move to a core set of products as displayed on their UK website:
Sage One
Sage Live
Sage X3
Sage Impact
The risk factor is that the products shown above are not producing material revenues. Sage One is struggling, Sage Live is still mostly a dream, X3 is reportedly holding it's own albeit in a crowded market and Sage Impact is a CPA tool that's probably not going to produce material revenues.
For a brief time, Sage has to try to ride two horses. Keep revenues from their legacy products alive -- and if possible growing. While simultaneously keep building their bridge to the next generation (the global products).
It's a tricky business and certainly not one where success seems assured by any means.