Careful you’ll be accused of being a paid advert.
Nah, they couldn’t possibly afford me…
But it is true that it is not a completely fair comparison, the productivity of a software development team (per person) pretty much universally goes down quite a bit as the software gets increasingly complex over time and the team size grows. In other words, it’s easy to be agile and accomplish a lot in a short time when the project is young, and things inevitably get more sluggish later. Still, Zwift could do a lot worse than buy IV (if the founders were interested in selling, that is) and turn it into Zwift 2.0, the look and feel is already awfully Zwifty as it is.
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if we’re talking business, which i really shouldn’t since i’m just “business adjacent” and in a totally different field, but i might as well… it’s probably to the benefit of the entire industry to have high level virtual racing somewhere. as zwift knew, it makes for good advertising. and a growing industry benefits everyone… from what i remember IV and zwift collaborated for performance verification in some capacity during the zwift games already. at least, it was written so in the pdf files somewhere.
i just think zwift don’t really want that responsibility themselves. mywhoosh and iv can, apparently, have that. do i want it myself? nah… i got a lot of respect for the elite guys, they too strong for me though. amateur racers in the community who stress veracity and legitimacy will find value in that too
They are providing performance checking for Zwift at elite level and also talking with mywhoosh.
If you do actually have any interest in what they are doing other than “hot takes” the latest level velo podcast has George on there explaining the ethos etc.
i don’t, but if i gotta come to the zwift forums and listen to guys get salty about my personal lack of interest in iv then you gotta continue to listen to me write about my lack of interest in iv as a compromise. nothing’s free
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George from IV has publicly said he wants IV to be licensed by other platforms to utilize his physics model and race modes. The door is open, Zwift just needs to walk through it.
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indieVelo is 
So is MyWhoosh and always will be
Quick, before your post gets deleted. Have you tried the other platforms? Which one is best at keeping people like you honest about their performance?
But there are some things that almost everybody wants, like the ability to manage the stuff in the garage. Why can’t they do it?
There’s lots of things they don’t seem to be able do and if they can’t they need to to rewrite it from scratch.
If they said we’re working on zwift 2.0 and we’re going to sort this, this and this. I’d be more inclined to pay more.
Let people keep using the old version during the transition.
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The time to start Zwift 2.0 was almost a decade ago. One of the first concerns of the CEO at that time should have been making sure the company had the technical base to serve as a solid foundation to build upon. Instead they took a prototype, maybe even a proof of concept, and kept building upward and upward on a rickety first floor. They put off rearchitecting the app for so long that recreating the existing feature set would be a monumental task. Even in companies with solid engineering management and processes, these sorts of rewrites have a high failure rate. They are also incredibly expensive, and development of the existing application generally goes into hiatus while everyone focuses on the successor. Zwift apparently does not have the money to rewrite the application, and it would be opening the door wide open to the competition to freeze features when those competing apps are starting to come into their own. Zwift has put itself into a tight corner.
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I’ve just logged on and just over 3,000 are using Zwift at this moment. We were peak and it’ll take some immense effort to turn that around.
That’s one thing i prefer about MyWhoosh, the quieter roads
In defence of Zwift it is a really tough call especially given the business environment at the time (cheap money, basically). This drove a growth at all costs mentality - got through the various funding rounds, build subscribers, ignore profit for growth, add more features to attract more subscribers, and repeat until the IPO prospectus shows a huge upside in growth of potential subscribers. And then cash in, leaving a mountain of technical debt for the next lot. But…
Where it went wrong was COVID - this made cheap money a thing of the past, and ironically greatly increased the actual numbers of subscribers, but also plateaued the growth curve (same happened to all the personal fitness companies).
Now the IPO dream is shot for the moment, money is expensive, and growth is very hard (people on average have less disposable income for starters). Then focus must then be on profit over growth.
But remember that technical debt? They must pay that down as well now. It is a particularly nasty situation as it will cost a lot of money to get a good stable foundation to start growing and to justify increased subscription fees. Hard to see the way forward for them: feature freeze to fix the code will risk competitors catching up; adding new features on a poor foundation just increases the tech debt and makes tomorrow worse.
Meanwhile their biggest asset - the subscriber base - they seem to disregard. I cannot believe that anyone in any conversation about the recent XP Level debacles even thought for a moment about what the subscriber would want and need: they have a forum of smart and engaged customers, yet never seem to get their views on what they want from Zwift (beyond the notorious “How much will you pay?” survey).
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Maybe a better bet would of been instead of freezing the price for 7 years, and then coming in with a big hit, raising the price year on year in line with inflation
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It wouldn’t have hit so hard, but it’s really hard to do so retrospectively. Maybe zwift should calculate how much we’ve saved over the last 7 years and charge us extra to make up for it.
But their forums must be really uninteresting, huh?
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It’s nothing to do with volume of users, trying to please everyone is a fool’s errand full stop.
iV has a particular vision and focus, and developments build towards that vision.
Zwift either don’t have a vision, or they have one and choose not to share it, but either way (prioritising) racing developments are clearly not part of it.
There are many reasons to use and even prefer zwift. It’s a great platform and ahead of many others in lots of ways. However if you are interested in racing legitimacy, racing modes, organiser tools, rider physics, agility and rate of development, matchmaking, customisation etc etc, complaining about their non-existence on this forum whilst the competition is already meeting and likely exceeding your requirements is, well, a little bit crazy.
I’ve been accused of being an iV shill above, but sadly the pay packet hasn’t appeared yet. I’ll keep an eye out for the postie. For those that have followed my posts for the last 5 years, you’ll understand why I am so frustrated with Zwift’s position and excited by iV’s. I’m not here to try and convert people, but I have posted here for long enough (check out my post history, forum ‘awards’ (fwiw) etc) trying to help get some movement from Zwift in this area, and I know there are many others with similar sentiment that are interested in what other options are out there, even if they choose not to use them.
Here’s a couple of ZI articles I wrote back in 2020 summarising some of the wants form this crowd. How much improvement have we seen in this area?
https://zwiftinsider.com/what-next/
https://zwiftinsider.com/matchmaking/
https://zwiftinsider.com/fair-racing/
When you take the historical context in to account, it’s quite obvious why some of us are posting as we are in light of the price increase and improving competitive landscape.
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If you post a question/problem on their facebook page you soon get an official answer, oh and they listen to their customers
Not by me, and the wall of text is really lost on me, I prefer Fulgaz out of the alternatives. No group riding, no packs and no racing crowd.
All that matters is my effort on whatever route it is, usually some mountain I’ve ridden IRL. IV and others don’t have that so not interested.
And when you say that we don’t need to know the weight and height of others, you’ve lost me completely.
And then when others say that it doesn’t matter if the rider weight in Zwift is 30kg, I just roll eyes and give up.
There was a big back and forwards where the usual suspects decided it would be fun to say that watts divided by wkg doesn’t mean anything… 
They do the same with whatever community is annoyed about, they say the opposite just to stir things up.