On Aug 17, 2007, at 5:37, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
The balancing act is not to annoy the undecideds overmuch while
pissing off the freeloaders sufficiently.
What is the business case for even caring about the freeloaders?
Seriously. They do not represent lost business. Attempting to piss them
off "sufficiently" loses business. I'd have hoped that this kind of
irrational response to positive externalities would be treated the same
way other unprofessional behavior (like, say, spamming) is.
I'm not saying that Sidetrack is going too far, by the way, I'm just
responding to the hateful idea that "pissing off the freeloaders" is a
desirable goal, or a good business practice.
I use Sidetrack... and I purchased it based on recommendations and a
single trial. I was not aware that it had a persistent nag screen until
this discussion. That would not have made me decline to buy it, and I
don't consider it to be unreasonable. Nor are things like date-limited
trials (mostly: some kinds of software I won't use on a limited trial,
either... simply because it's not worth my time putting data in if I'm
not going to be able to get it out later without heroic measures).
Software that limits itself to N minutes use (apart from games, but I'm
not a gamer), or that puts an unavoidable watermark on the output, or
disables saving, or otherwise makes it impossible to evaluate because
you can't actually do anything but play with it during the trial...
that doesn't "piss me off", per se, but I can't recall the last time I
committed any time to evaluating something like that.
So while Sidetrack isn't doing anything that would keep me from being a
customer, it's certainly possible to go too far down this path, and you
don't actually have to go down it to win most of the potential sales.
Meanwhile the majority of freeloaders aren't actually deterred by this
kind of aggressive crippleware. They just use a cracked copy.
