Bad Practices of Shareware Developers
June 16, 2004 by Dmitry
I usually download and try out every competition application I can find. I do it to learn about something new, something great, something worth implementing in BlogJet. (Hey, Henry Ford did it too - he bought every car from competitors, drove, and even disassemled it!). I do it to make sure that BlogJet is the best blog client ever available.
During one of such Ford's testing I found an unfair and horrible practice that one of our competitors use. I'm going to describe it, but won't call the name of program.
I had my trial period expired, but the program didn't tell me about it. I typed an entry and then posted it. But the program refused to post and told me that I were using an unregistered copy, and that application would terminate. I clicked OK and it asked me to enter my registration data or purchase the program. The only other button available was Quit. When I quit, I lost my post. Hey, in order to not to lose my post, I have to register this program!
That's a bad practice. I decided to write about it not because it was the program of our competitor, but because I found such thing horrible and consider it as some kind of extortion. Okay, it can be an imperfect process of the registration, a bug or something else. But I don't care - I'm just a user of the trial version and I do not want to make a choice between losing data or purchasing the program right now. If trial period expires, I must be told about it!
This is my own opinion, and maybe they already fixed it, but I won't buy from developers that uses such methods to get me purchase their software.
This reminds me about some program (don't remember its name) that encrypts files on your hard drives and asks for purchase to get them decrypted.
My application BlogJet, as well as almost every other shareware program, has a 30-day trial period, and it reminds you about each day of this period. When the evaluation is over, it doesn't allow you to continue using it. But you won't lose your data. If you don't want to buy, but saved drafts of your posts, you can open your drafts with any text editor and copy text to your blog's web interface.
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