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What Turns You Off About Evaluation Software?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a mid-tier software company (which shall remain nameless, lest I draw attention to myself). Recently we have started making 30 day evaluation versions of our software available for download after prospects register. An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission. We have been surprised to find that not a few registrants don't actually go on to download the software. We make the file size and system requirements clear up front. I would guess some slashdot readers get involved in evaluations. What process do you go through? Why might you stop short of actually downloading the software?"
...those chicks in those X10 camera ads.
If spyware had those chicks flashing on my desktop, I'd let them take all my personal information.
But since that doesn't happen, any evaluational software with spyware in it doesn't turn me on.
I personally just crack the program. No evaluation period for me. :)
If it wants a valid email addy, I forget it and find something else. say no to spam
A large factor in my downloading a piece of evaluation is whether there is a crack available for it. If there isn't a crack then if the evaluation isn't hindered in any way for the amount of time it is allowed to be evaluated would be a factor. Of course, usefulness of the software is a large portion as well. Assuming there is a crack, then if the software is used frequently it would get paid for sometime.
In the words of Veruka, "but I want it NOW!"...
If the link/password/whatever hasn't hit my inbox in a minute or two, I'm probably moving on looking for another thing to try. Welcome to the short attention span decade.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
If I have to wait hours for a 30 day evaluation license, it is in MANY cases easier and faster to find a warez copy and use that for evaluation.
Then I can take the time I need to evaluate the software, which I then either uninstall or ask my software purchasing dude (not sure of the correct english term) to buy for me (believe it or not, its true).
Unless I really need the software I avoid registration processes such as those that you require. I do not like to give out personal informaiton, including e-mail addresses, just evaluate software. Not only am I concerned about spam, I abhor receiving e-mails from the sales staff of the company, especially if I state that I do not want to receive e-mail from the company if that option is available. If you want people to evaluate the software and purchase it after the evaluation period is through, provide a warning at the end of the eval which links the user to the comany website where they can purchase the software. If they truly want to buy it they will. Also, offer a link in the help menu which directs the user to the web storefront where they can buy the software should they decide to do so before the eval period is up.
We surrender.
Greetings, I am a representative of a think-tank in a large country. I am sending out a call to all parties who have been injured by the supporting and using of linux. There are numerous subtle, dangerous, and long-lived side-effects from using linux. I am putting together a portfolio of these deleterious effects. It would be a great help for all if you list here some of the travails you've endured as a result of linux use. But more importantly, we need to hear about how you were tricked into using linux, and were hurt by it. You might think your linux use has been benign, but later you may discover problems.
1. Go to the download form requiring information
2. Enter bogus information, one field at a time until the form validation is satisfied. If an email _is_ required, I always use a one time sneakemail address or something I can kill/trace if there's spam.
3. Read email/dl the software.
Gmanske.
Joel's rule: every barrier to implementation reduces your customer base by 50%
http://www.joelonsoftware.com
Sometimes, you get attached to a program that totally OWNS. Only to get dependant on it, and then not able to cash out the 1200$ for a license.
Try making stuff cheap to own, instead of trying to break their neck and make them dependant on software that costs too much after their "try this crack for free" period.
hrrm.
Well if it's a new program, there won't be any cracks available yet. ;)
But really, when looking at a new program, there are many things that might change my mind. Depending on the size and reputation of your company, your program might look suspiciously like something incorporating spyware. Or, I might go look around and find another program that does what I want better. Or, it might turn out that what I really want to use your program for is only available after I register; or it features and unisghtly watermark, or annoying nag message.
Or I might just change my mind. Or, if I'm running XP (which I'm not, thank God) my whole computer might just explode in shame. :)
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
It's one of those things where you just do it, and then later regret it. "Damn, I shouldn't have given out my address. That was stupid!" And so on. At least, that's what happens to me.
.
By know you may have already realized the long delay to receive username/password is why people don't download. What I have to ask you is WHY, pray tell, it takes so damn long? Do people manually check addresses or something? You have to /usr/lib/sendmail something to the person straightaway!
Might the people be merely requesting a new code to further their 30 day trial? Your software might have precautions against this, but on a Mac I know how easy it is to simply delete a preference file (ircle developers: please pretend you didn't read this).
You could have already thought of this, but that's just the first thing that popped into my mind. They don't download the software because they already have the software. They just need a new code.
1) Collect e-mail address then say "will mail username, passwd". If they had said it upfront and if it was immediate, it would be much more friendlier. :-)
2) Install spy-ware without public notice.
3) Infect registry(for M$), store/replace files in strange non-obvious places.
4) Difficult to uninstall.
5) Send info about user without permission.
6) Source not available.
I will simply not register to try something out. Its a whole lot easier to say 'screw this' and search through courcefoge to find something that will do the same job, no questions asked.
...since I use Cowboy Neal's email address for all registration forms.
Are you doing this by hand or something?
That sounds like more than enough time for your prospects to find and download your competitor's products.
Really, when stuff like that takes too long, I spot it in my inbox later, but think "Oh, that, well, I don't really need it now."
Just yesterday I was going to try out some software and I went through the registration using my usual info (Joe@yahoo.com, 1313 Mockingbird Lane....) And realized that they were going to email the password to me. I didn't bother downloading for obvious reasons, and I would not send my real info for a trial because frankly I did not know the company enough to trust them with that info. If you want to let people try out your software, let them try it out without any registration codes. Smart people trust no one, especially midsized software companies.
Sound waves should be free!
Often times, the reason I fail to download the final version is because I have gotten all the use I could want out of the evaluation. The reason for this comes from a variety of reasons: limited time of utility, change in work duties, and so forth. I'm not sure that there exists a good solution to this problem for the vendor, except perhaps that the final product be made available quicker and easier for the common user, possibly providing it to the user before the duration of the limited use if over.
I find that I like to sign up for things and hope.. that some time in the future I find time to trial it.
Unfortunatly unless you want to send someone over to help with my work load.. you can't do anything about it.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I do not like to give my e-mail address to companies, because I do not want spam. If I have to give my address to download software, I will likely not give it, or will give an incorrect address.
If it took a few hours to get a code, I would simply find somewhere else to download the version from.
What is causing the delay? Are you manually auth. requests?
I would find a better way to give a passcode, and also send a reminder e-mail a few days later.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Im thinking, like me, if I see the speed is to slow I won't even bother. I'll spend the time to get it from someone else, which is usually less than 5 minutes. If you software is around 100+ megs, and you're on a medium to slow server..you are just wasting your time and possibly profits.
Typically, I just don't like to wait. When I'm looking for something, more than likely I need it at that time. And if you can't give it to me, there's usually some other place I can get it. Why would it possibly take a matter of hours to get the user requesting the software their username and password? That is probably what is killing you. Surely there is a way to make it live. I cannot imagine why it would take you a matter of hours to just generate that user a username and password..
Who the fuck is this fag named Joel? I can find his rules after spending at least 30 seconds on his stupid website.
All I see is some blowhard pontificating about software development or something equally useless. He really should switch to Hindi, because development is just shit work better left to Indians that will write VB and HTML for pennies per hour.
I will never return to Joel's worthless website.
Anonymous Coward's Rule: If I can't find what I want in 30 seconds I'll go to Google.
I just don't do this anymore. Much easier to get a version with all necessary serial numbers and whatever included from edonkey or usenet.
Don't require registration. Don't ask intrusive questions. It is not good for your company if the legit evaluation copy is harder to obtain than the warez version.
Do you believe in death after life?
Uhmmm isn't it obvious?
For more SPAM we get 30 days to try software that might or might not break our system.
You do the math.
They just want a new reg key so they can get another 30 days free.
registration sucks. I usually never mess with products that force me to give real information in order to test it out. From what I have found consumer products just generate some extra spam in your inbox, it's the damn coporate products(high dollar stuff) that gets really annoying. I really don't need some saleman e-mailing me every single day for a month just because I wanted to try out his java database driver!!
.. when you didn't tell me what company you work for? like i'm supposed to sort through all these emails for eval software and guess which one is for your company?
When I can't find a crack for it...
Is when I can't find a serial/patch on any cracks sites.
I like petting kittens.
...I *always* back out of a download of 'evaluation' software when I discover that no one has written a crack for it yet. So there, write a crack along with your 'evaluation' software and watch the downloads increase.
The simplest reason is the users have found something else in the mean time. It is particularly true if your product is mainstream (eg virus scanner, compression program, image viewer and the like).
Say, they are looking for jp2 viewer, they will go for shareware first, then evaluation ware. If nothing is found, go for evaluation ware that need registration. As long as they find something okay, they will stop searching. (Of course, if your software is unique, and some customers really need that, then they will wait.... Maybe more common in some sector of the research community. Not so in the commerical world.)
The better approach is to allow the user to download first. When they want to evaluate more advanced function of the software, pop up a window to lure them to register. If you really want to validate their email address in advance, please use automatic mail reply and ensure the avg time taken in within 5 mins rather than a few hours...
Why might you stop short of actually downloading the software?
Why do you think the people gave you their real email address in the first place?
I'd say most of the non-downloaders simply didn't give you their real email address.
When I'm looking to download a program for some reason I first try to find a link to an actual file that I can get. If some place has a registration process that I have to go through, I'll probably just move on to some place that doesn't have a process.
If all else fails and I have to fill out some form, I gurantee you the form is going to be full of bogus data just so I can get to the link and the e-mail address I use is probably going to either be vulgar or will be something like you@yourcompany.com. (So make a note - These forms are STUPID and USELESS. STOP using them!)
If I absolutely must use a valid e-mail address to get some kind of password or unlock key (and finding a warez copy has failed) then I'll use one of several hotmail or yahoo e-mail addresses that I keep around just for this purpose.
And finally if I don't receive the password or unlock key to that e-mail address within the time it takes me to walk to the fridge and grab another soda and come back, chances are I will never end up going on to the link because I never check those bogus e-mail accounts on a regular basis. And by the time I go back and check it again for some other reason, I will have forgotten about that companies software program anyway.
Ah, thinly disguised market research...
The coolest voice ever.
Call me a troll, but whenever I have to register to download software or to read something online I turn away from it. That's why I don't read those /.linked NY Times articles and that's why I don't use "services" like gamespy. There are very few exceptions (truly outstanding software or some forums), but in general, I never register.
It's not because I'm too lazy or because I don't like that particular company, it's simply because I think that registration thing is wrong and I don't want to support it. Imho more people would buy your software if you let them download the shareware for free (free=no registration). Remember: You want to sell something, not the other way round...
I don't mind giving out my email address to companies when I download software. I figure they are doing me a service by allowing me to download a free trial in the first place. Plus, hearing from companies about updates might make me want to purchase the product, i.e. it shows they are still supporting it, fixing bugs, making add-ons, etc. I have never really had a problem unsubscribing from the mailing list of a company with an opt-in policy, and I set up a free email account for things like this so it does clutter my inbox at work. I downloaded and purchased Canvas in this manner, and I was glad, because they emailed me to let me know I was entitled to a free upgrade to the latest version that came out a few weeks later.
On a slightly different note, if I am in a hurry to do something I need to get software to do (a web editor for example), I sometimes download several similar programs and try them all. So if I found one that worked right away, I wouldn't bother downloading one that sent a password several hours later. But in situations like that, I am just looking for a free trial and have no intention of ever purchasing the product anyway. Perhaps a delayed email/password system limits the downloads to the serious potential customers.
I would never download a software if i have to register
... On commercial Software you have to pay for a fix. What a robbery ! I prefer to stay with Open Software, and try to contribute as much i can.
it. Indeed, i never do so, even if i payd for it. I'm receiving more that enough SPAM by now. I don't even register to read Newspapers online which sometimes are linked to slashdot articles. Thats to anoying. Why should i do such stupidity ??
Why passwords if in the end anything is crackable ???!!
...and usually commercial software have the most anying bugs. If some Open Software has a bug, most probably next week its fixed. Then i do apt-get install
Bye.
I want it now.... unless it's for my job, and then it doesnt matter what I want, we have to go by standards, and spending an extra $500 to use the "industry standard" is alright with them
if I have to sign up for stuff, then I expect an email RIGHT away... if I don't get it within 5 minutes, I'm off searching again until I find somewhere where I can get what I want...
I often find that thirty days is simply not long enough to evaluate a product. The world of software development is frequently a turbulent one and priorities can shift from one day to the next.
A good example is something that happened recently. We had a memory leak and I was asked to figure it out. I said that a profiler would be an excellent tool to have so I downloaded evals of a couple of popular products. Before I could get to any evaluation we sorted the problem out using other means.
The tools we used we crude and even though the immediate problem was solved, I still wanted something more sophisticated. I moved on to other more pressing issues and when I finally had a quiet moment to install and play with the profilers, I realized my thirty days was gone.
I think sales departments assume that developers live in a very linear world. That we:
1.) Isolate the need for a product.
2.) Collect relevant information.
3.) Download demos
4.) Conduct a formal evaluation
5.) Based on the merits, make a decision.
This is not the world I live in.
Besides, I think Microsoft just bought that company yesterday.
:^)
Oh the shame.
Once upon a time, I evaluated some software under a similar plan. I naively put my real phone number on the registration form. A salesman called me and asked a few questions. I answered them but asked him to call my boss instead because I had no authority to make purchasing decisions. He called me back a few weeks later to find out if we were going to purchase. I reminded him to ask my boss.
A year later the same guy called me again, and I asked him to put me on the "no call" list. When he failed to understand this, I got angry. This exchange guaranteed, first, that I would not recommend his company's product to my boss, and second, that I would never give my real phone number for any other evaluation license.
The key is to keep the person's interest in your product. When they are visiting your site, they are all hyped up about this potentially great product and so they are eager to try it. But the problem is people have short attention spans. You need to catch them in the moment where they are most focused on working with your product.
You can't wait hours to send them a username and password, that whole system should be automated to send it to them immediately. Get them while they are interested in your service. I run a service [proboards.com] where someone signs up at our site, and we send them their login information. If we waited hours to send them their login info, they wouldn't be interested in what we have to offer and would have moved on to a competitor by then.
A while back a company was giving free demo CDs to companies that could use their software. I think it was The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, a CAD tutor program. The CDs had things written all over them like "please make unauthorized copies" and the like. I think that vast amounts of people at a giant of a company I know of at least tried the demo. So basically, make it as easy as possible to get the demo, put a link straight to the demo on your page, and put the EULA in the installation so they don't have to swim through that to get to the download. Easy == good.
No potential customer gives a flying fizuck about you wanting marketing info.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
I think you'd get better luck if you showed the download info right after the user submits the info. I bet it's the delay that doing it. You're probably getting blocked by people spam filters etc...
make it free.
Often, the Pointy Haired Boss (PHB) has an urgent need for me to evaluate some Left-Handed Swivelhopper, so I sign up for the eval. By the time I'm ready to try it out, the urgent need has changed, I'm chasing Object-Oriented Dooverlackies.
I've often downloaded large files (>100MB even), then lost interest or found another way to solve my problem. Oops - I think I just admitted that I even change my own priorities! Oh well......
The largest reason for people to purchase anything is impulse. The novelity of the moment causes people to spend money they usually wouldn't spend.
When you do not give people instant gratification, they simply lose interest.
Better yet, let them use the software for 30 days, and after a week they'll never use the software again.
Evaluation periods just don't work.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
I have whims.
Sometimes I just get bored of an idea and can't be arsed.
ie.-
I think 'I wanna have a look at music editing programs under linux'...
start to download Jazz++, and halfway though the dl just think 'fsck it.'
I don't care enough to go thru the hassle of compiling it etc, and I really want to go to bed.
It really doesnt matter that much. I'd get bored of it very quickly.
Speaking of which i really can't be arsed to finish this post. So I'll just kinda leave it on a cliffhanger. G'night, everybody.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
More often then not when I need a piece of software that has an evaluation version, that software is for a fairly small price (<$1000), and for a fairly urgent need (i.e. debugging some piece of code, defragmenting a hard drive). Sometimes it is for a less pressing need (a new source code control system), but always, when I download an eval version, it is because I am in the process of research.
Now, often times I'll come across something that seems ideal, only to find later that I've found an even better tool. In your company's case, I think it entirely possible that somebody has signed up for the eval to see if it might fit their needs, but while they are waiting for the username/password to arrive, they find something that fits their needs even better. Or perhaps a few hours is too long for them to wait?
Anyway, I rather suspect that between the time they order the eval, and the time they get the username/password, they've found some other solution to their problem.
Impossible = A fun challenge
I just downloaded a trial-ware app the other day, and the company in question also wanted my email address, physical address, who I worked for, etc. All of the form items were required. I said, "bullshit," and did a Google search for the program - a minute later I was installing it.
So here's a question back: Why are you requiring people to register in the first place? Not knowing you or your business, I'd make two guesses:
- You're hoping to prevent your trialware being "pirated" or cracked, perhaps by keying each copy uniquely so you can identify the source of a cracked version.
- To collect information so you can market to me later, or sell my personal information to some other company.
Frankly, I think they're both stupid reasons. First, you can't prevent a determined person from cracking your software, or getting a cracked copy if he/she wants it. Second, if you'r eethical and up-front about using the information for marketing purposes then most people will just opt-out.Unless you've got a better reason, think hard about why you're making it more difficult for people to get your software - and why you weren't clueful enough to figure out people wouldn't register in the first place.
Lastly - hours?? That's one of the great things about online software distribution - you can have it right now. Unless I were convinced you were truly the only source in the world, I wouldn't even consider waiting that long.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
The biggest turn off is having to pay for the software once the evaluation period has expired!
AntiChristX
Daring to remain below 5 karma indefinitely
FORCING registration is a bad thing.
No one wants to be told they HAVE to
do something.
Make the product USABLE immediately
upon download, and then self-destruct
after 30 days. And don't use that
McAffee annoyance routine to harass
them until they buy a registration key.
If you want useful marketing information
from them gather it AFTER they evaluate it,
never before. High-presure sales never made
anyone happy except the boss/owner who hired
the salesman.
Think of it like this...when you go to buy
a car do you want to be forced into providing
all of your demographic data and then be told
to come back in a few hours to take a
test drive of the vehicle you were looking at?
HELL NO! You want the idiot salesman to leave
you alone...let you browse the lot...find a
car you like and then give you the keys and let
you tear around town testing the car out...
Then if you decide to buy you are more than
happy to provide your demographic data...
And if you don't like it you have lost nothing
more than your time browsing and test-driving.
use the 'KISS' principal..."keep it simple stupid"
--Huck
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
That stops me short lots o times! :-)
When I try to download eval software, 99% of the time its because I need it now, not in a few hours. If you don't send out that confirmation e-mail right away and there are competitors' software availible instantly, I'll just go with their software. Its that simple.
I found the 30 days usually ran out or got close to it before trying to use it. Now if it were 30 days from first usage it might be something else entirely.
For a while I did try doing what you are talking about. I would store the password for the day I got the time to evaluate the software and then download it. Most of the time I forgot about it.
However, our method is the reverse of yours. You can download all the binaries whenever you want, any time, all the time. Transfer interrputed? Go ahead, download again. Downloaded it, but lost it? Download again. Got corrupted? Download again. These are the real things, not crippled evaluation versions.
What we do is liberally give out demo licenses via email, that expires after a short time. Provided you're not an asshole, you can renew your demo licenses.
Of course, the downside to this it could be cracked and warez'd out. I don't know the company stance and don't pretend to speak for it, but I don't care. Piracy is part of doing business in software, and the less you piss off your customers, IMHO, the better. So, while I don't like people pirating our software, I'm still against the recent stupid-ass (c'mon, you all know the words!) laws that seem to have festered recently in this area.
Perhaps this works better, I don't know why. Maybe it's psychological: people download the binary first and then feel they need to try it out to justify the time spent. Or something like that.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Well, lets see..
1.) I'm going to look for an Open Source package that meets my need first.
2.) I'm going to consider writing my own software or extending an existing OSS package before buying a proprietary software license.
3.) Registration is bad. Your company has no need for my personal information or e-mail unless I specifically require services that could benefit from this--like perhaps tech support after a customer decides to buy.
4.) I'm not even going to consider your product if your company does not support the free operating systems I use.
5.) I'm not even going to consider your product if your company is run by greedy bastards who treat customers like criminals or never give back to any open source projects they may employ.
6.) Even if you stay proprietary, source code would be nice because I inherently don't trust the security of binaries on my networks. Disassembly is a much harder method of security auditing if the need presents itself or clients require.
It somewhat reminds me of the statistics that people talk about with buying stuff online. If someone gets an invalid page or has to wait more than a couple of seconds you probably lost the sale I think the same applies for demos in which you have to jump through many hoops.
The best demos and often the products I buy are those that are hassle free (no registration crap), have 90 or 120 day trial periods, and often have the documentation online in PDF format or something close. To me this means the company cares about the customer and if I am going to drop some coin that's important to me. I want service after the sale and it seems more than not the people who are helpful like that before the sale are helpful after the sale.
(plink, plink)
When I was using W--dows, I had a discipline for acquiring software:
1) Get the version number
2) Search the crack sites and Serials 2002
3) If that fails, search the cracks/serials IRC channels
4) If there are only cracks for older versions, then use FTP search etc to find slightly older versions for which cracks or serials work
5) If that fails, try Gnutella/Morpheus etc
6) If that fails, try the clean warez sites
7) If that fails, try the dirty warez sites
8) If that fails, and I'm getting stuck in warez site porn loops, fire up SoftIce or Win32DASM and try to crack it myself
9) During the above sequence, search for equivalent software for which warez/cracks are available
10) If all of the above fail, then download the software and install it with an installation monitor (a program which logs all registry changes and file additions/mods). Use this information to write a 'loader' (a program which fools the prog into thinking that every time it loads, the trial has just started).
11) But if the product is 'crippleware' (important features disabled), then download the program and post requests to crack/warez newsgroups, message boards, IRC channels, and wait 2-3 months till crack becomes available.
12) If the prog 'phones home' to verify registration, I use AtGuard to block the connection, taking care to block IE as well (which many crap shareware progs use as a firewall backdoor).
13) If the prog is 'ad-ware', then I get great pleasure from logging the adserver hosts and putting them in my w--dows 'hosts' file, or blocking them at the firewall.
I have a collection of over 5 gigs of pirated software, including prime stuff like Win2k, Office 2k etc, right through to minor apps.
At various times, I've run warez sites on the web, freenet, IRC, gnutella and morpheus, and freely shared with others what I've taken.
But I got sick of the whole thing, and totally sick of the stupid limitations and weaknesses of w--dows.
I'm now happily using linux full time, and only boot my w--dows partition once in a blue moon when I need to run a certain app which is windows only and uses drivers (can't run under wine, vmware etc), and for which there is no good Linux equivalent.
I'm thoroughly sick of the whole shareware/nagware/crippleware shit, fed up with the whole w--dows scumware scam prison, and if I can't find a good prog for free on apt or freshmeat, then (with rarest exceptions) I can't be bothered. I write my own.
You may detest me as a pirate and 'thief'.
But I feel I've been in total integrity with this.
Because the whole concept of shareware is the first step on the road towards subscription-only software (pay per use or pay per month), thin-client 'webware' running on corporate-controlled servers, all the way to proprietary closed protocols which take over the internet and force everyone through pay-per-packet internet tollgates and ultimately drive open source software off the net.
So to the dear correspondent who is asking why people don't download shareware, I would suggest that you immediately release your software under the GPL or LGPL, and revise your business plan to find alternative ways of generating revenue from your software.
What I can't stand is most of the features have been turned off making the software almost useless. 30 days is fine with me but have a 30 day time bomb and turn off features. Make the software fully functional. I've been burned so many times that unless I really need the software, I won't download a trial version.
But I run Win9x and SoftIce with Evauluation warez as an ongoing asm tutorial
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Most people fill out registrations with BS, I know I do. With the ones that require and email I use a temporary email account. Once I get the registration, I delete the email account. No spam thank you.
Then there's the software itself. Time limited trials are no good. Most people won't get too involved with the software if they know it's going to suddenly stop working one day. Either offer a slimmed down version with no time limit, or a slimmed down version with no time limit and a full version with a time limit so the user has a choice. You might be suprised at what most people are going to choose.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
plz do my market reserch 4 me. thanx!
A lot of people don't like giving their email addresses in order to get stuff. That is presumably not the problem you're having, though, because it's unlikely that people will put in a fake email address to which the information on how to get the software will be sent. If something asks for an email address to send information to, I either go away or I give a real one, because I don't get anything by giving a fake one. (I may give a fake one if it just wants an email address but I'm not expecting anything I want to be sent to it). Likewise, if I'm annoyed enough that something is asking for an email address gratuitously to not want to deal with the site, I'm not going to give an email address.
On the other hand, if I'm expecting information by email in response to a web request, I expect to get a response in a minute. It's not like sending me email is at all complicated. If it takes longer than that, I'm going to look for an alternative. If the site takes a few hours, I've probably already started using a different program, and I'm not interested in the one I found at first.
They ALREADY HAVE the software!
I have a domain of my own with a catchall. I use this to get a new copy of the VMWare licence all the time. It's automated, so unless they block my domain, I've got free VMWare for life!
I will simply skip your software if I need to wait for an e-mail from you for a download key. There is no software I'm looking for on the web that I'm willing to waste my time for like that. I was looking for upload components for IIS the other day.. It's for a product I'm developing, and it must be redistributable royalty-free. I found a good component, downloaded it.. but was really turned off by the licensing options. Basically they said, "We only license this per-server. There are no site licenses, no redistributable licenses. We used to have site licenses, but once yours expires you need to buy a new license for every server." So, licensing is a huge turn-off for some eval software.
Basically, if I'm looking for a software component on the web it can't be too important. I don't exactly hunt around for full-scale accounting packages from companies I've never heard of. Chances are, your software just isn't important enough to justify making users jump through hoops to download it.
Why do you need my information anyway? I don't want you to call me.. frequently there is no checkbox where you can say, don't bother me at the office. I just don't see a reason why companies need a complete database of everyone who has tried their software.
if i can't get it when i am at the site i leave to find it elsewhere, and i probably delete the email thinking its spam.
The Truth: There is no string:)
... the list is:
1) I have to wait for a userid/password or something similar (I'll go download another eval somewhere else that does the same function - very little software is unique or required to be only from one company these days.)
2) Spyware.
3) Long forms to fill out, see #1.
4) Having to put my email address in when i want to download the software.
5) Having the site redirect me to fileplanet.
Shadus
Make it possible to use download accelerators like Gozilla. I have occasionally wanted to download a demo of something, only to find that because of the way the download page is structured, Gozilla can't kick in and take control of the download. When this happens, and if the file is large, I'll just give up rather than take the chance the download will be interrupted.
So, whose marketing department do you work for, again?...
"This looks interesting, I'll just try their free evaluation version..."
"Ugh... they want my email address... Yeah, you send your spam to nobody@notme.com"
"Damn it, these spammy bastards mail you the access codes. [sigh] Okay, here's my real address..."
"A FEW MORE HOURS?!"
"Okay, Kazaa, where's the full version?"
If you were offering your software for the explicit purpose of letting people try your software, you wouldn't be asking for an email address. You have alterior motives that involve your marketing department, or other undisclosed motives. Why else would you ask for an email address?
I find it refreshing that people didn't submit to your terms. Nice to see people rejecting the concept that one must submit an email address to all who ask.
I don't download and try evaluation software unless I really intend to buy it. And I SELDOM buy linux software. One of the reasons I run linux is because of all the free software. So, the software has to be REALLY good if I am going to put it on my system AND pay for it.
Another reason I don't usually download trial software is no matter how you remove it (even dpkg --purge packagename), bits and pieces will be left behind. I know, I know! With a 20 gig hard drive, bits and pieces will have to build up for quite awhile to amount to anything worth mentioning. But it just BUGS me knowing that they are there.
1) If you need my email address, I don't need your software. (and if I do need your software, I'll enter support@microsoft.com)
2) Most utilities and apps are more trouble than they're worth. Particularly if we are talking about Windows software, it seems popular for 'programmers' to make a big deal out of their little program, writing all over the registry and putting files who knows where (which should not leave the program's own directory). Most of these save their registry settings "just in case" its reinstalled and don't fully uninstall themselves.
As far as Unix programs, chances are there's a better and free implimentation at Freshmeat. Make it GPL.
3) With Windows shareware/demoware in general, it's just a pain to deal with the cute little "register me" BS like popup windows, program start delays, time limits, "enter your registration number," etc. If I like the program, I'll register it, but annoying me every time I use the program just associates being annoyed with using that program.
Psychology 101 will show companies why that is a bad thing.
Just my $0.02
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
But most likely, they found another solution, or lost interest in the hour it took you to send them a password.
- Eric, My web site
- Eric, InvisibleRobot.com
quite subtle and well done. and the first i ever saw i think. a new kind of troll.
however not good enough, this made it all too obvious: and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission
keep it simple.
The time it takes to learn a new piece of software is an investment. I don't really feel like spending the time learning something, then spending MORE if I like it. Granted, the developer doesn't get anything if I invest that time... UNLESS: I invest the time and find I like this particular UNLIMITED SHAREWARE APPLICATION and send the $15 'recommended' fee the developer asked for. Which I have in many cases.
Better than 30day trial is nag-ware type thing. How many people registered ACDSee just to get rid of that? It's AWSOME software, that's why you do it.
(ramble off)
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Step 1: See an interesting product online ...
Step 2: Fill out reg. page, using fake info / your email addy (@hotmail.com @excite.com, etc) that you registered just to get spam sent to it.
Step 3: Check email immediately, only to realize that you didn't get the link yet.
Step 4: Go do other stuff
... (a few days/weeks pass)
Step 5: See the email in your spam inbox, if you can find it.
Step 6: Realize that you don't really need it that badly / have found something else.
Step 7: Repeat Step 4
Seriously though
I'm only half joking: If people are bothering registering to get emailed a username/password that activates a 30 day trial, then they're probably re-activating something they installed months back, like say XML Spy, and with an infinite number of email addresses....
>> An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission.
A FEW HOURS later? Ahh, there lies the rub.
For me, if I can't download something when I'm actually looking at software to forefill my needs, I move on. I'm even willing to fill in a form using one of many web email accounts. If the software is worth buying, and no other free software solution can help, I'll purchase it.
That for me is doing business in this information age. Time is money for me at work. If you can't supply when I need it, there's got to be other options.
Your product has an unknown value and usabilty to customers, they don't know how it works and how it performs. If you make it hard to download (waiting for a emailed password IS HARD) THEY WILL EXTRAPOLATE that your software is similar to the download process. If you wnat people to try something, price isn't the only factor time and convience is also a big deal. Just let them download the software directly, and let that be that.
I hate spam. If I have to download it for some reason, I use a 'prophylactic' email account.
I hate timed evaluations. My experience has been that I may start evaluating, get pulled in tomorrow to work on something else, and not get back to the evaluation until the key has expired. Then I have to go through it all again. What a drag. I would much, much rather get a somewhat crippled version (e.g., can only make 3 connections or whatever) that still demonstrates the power than a timed version.
I like to be able to hack on stuff at home without violating licenses. This is another reason I like unlimited but crippled versions that are adequate for home experimentation.
Besides all the high-falutin' principles that make free software better, the reality is that free software is better because you can just work with it and not have to screw around with annoying paperwork, etc.
1. I hate to register. Got that. HATE! If I like your product, I'll buy it and you get my money. You do not get my personal info to sell to some shady spam or telemarketing company. I find out your doing this, I stop buying your products and services and tell all my friends and clients to do the same. I have no problems whatsoever with spending some of my time and resources to put a dent in the business of a spam-serving company.
2. I don't give my email address to anyone for anything. For your purposes, I shouldn't even have an email address, but if I absolutely have to give one, I setup a temporary hotmail account and use that. But after I have the info I need for it, I never use it again. So any spam or product updates you might want to sell me will go completely unread.
3. I don't use adware. My computer is not a billboard for you to make money advertising to me with banners that I don't pay attention to and don't even remember 10 seconds after I close the app. If your product is something I like, I'll happily pay for it. If you try to make it "free" by packaging it with flashing banners that give me seizures and migraines, I'll find something else.
4. Don't harrass me about newer versions. If I don't have a reason to upgrade an older version of your product to the newer version, I'm going to keep using the older version. Yes, I know there's a new version. I don't care. If the older version of your product still works for me, I'm not going to upgrade. Deal with it. If you keep flooding me with requests to upgrade, I will discontinue using your product and find something else.
5. Don't create any shortcuts on my desktop for programs or services I didn't download or install or even ask about. If you put an shortcut for "Bonzi Buddy" or "Gator" or some other product or website on my computer, I will uninstall your software and find something else.
6. Above all, respect my privacy. Don't try to monitor me with spyware or try to obtain some marketing/research info about how I use your program. I use it. That should be good enough. If I learn that your product is uploading any data about what I do with it, when and how often I use it, etc..., I will discontinue using it, find something else, and advise all my friends and clients to do the same.
unless there's a crack for it first...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
What Turns You Off About Evaluation Software?
You've got a real problem when evaluation software turns you on...
OOOOH, baby... 30 day trial... hot!
Today, I received a spam asking how I was enjoying it even though I clicked the 'don't do anything with my email address' button.
Today, I vowed never to even consider purchasing from the company that makes QuickDNS.
I had a sucky sig.
What your experiencing may not be a bad thing. If the software your producing is designed for business users then your probably just filtering out a lot of the home users or people looking for a software to complete a one time task. Most businesses don't have a problem filling out an information form if they are truthfully interested. Now if you believe people can't understand the full value of your product without downloading it and using it, you should look at starting online public demos where people can anonomously view your product in action. Your current method is common for most business applications. The only thing you may want to try is to shorten the time it takes for the key to arrive. If your product is geared towards home users your best bet is do away with the information form and let people download the demo with a key ingredient disabled to make it unusable. A good example of this would be adobe illustrator. You can do everything in the demo you can do in the full version except save. Thus people can use the product and see what it can do but not benefit your product without paying for it. 30 day expirations are useless for home users for a couple of reasons. First if it's a good peice of software someone will hack the demo and turn it into a full version. A good example of this is take a look at how many hacks are out there for macromedia software to turn it into the full version. Second most home users want the software for a short term issue. An example would be when I needed a peice of software to ghost a drive. I downloaded it, used it for what I needed it for and deleted it. Third is depending on how you write the demo and how smart the user is they can uninstall and reinstall every 30 days.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
The less information that has to be provided to receive the evaluation copy the better. Since you would like to be able to contact folks at a later date for sales purposes, a simple, succinct statement indicating that their e-mail addresses and/or phone number won't be provided to any 3rd parties and that they'll receive a minimal amount of unsolicited contacts would allay most folks' fears, I would imagine.
Often technical folks, particularly who work at large (i.e., beaurocratic) organizations, are either crunched for time or go through a lengthy process between the time they decide to investigate an evaluation copy and the time they actually evaluate the evaluation copy. I have more than once downloaded a 30-day evaluation only to have 30 days go by before I truly have the time to evaluate it. I would allow a user to download an evaluation copy more than once with the same username/password (perhaps you could limit it to 3 downloads) and/or extend the evaluation period to 60 or 90 days. I would send a minimally intrusive e-mail after 30 days asking whether they have had a chance to evaluate the copy, asking if they have any comments, and/or asking if they need a brief (e.g., additional 30 day) extension of the evaluation period. If they have not downloaded the evaluation, it may serve as a gentle reminder.
Hope this helps
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Are these people who didn't FINISH downloading?
If you have slow[ish] servers, I know I'd abort the download if it'd take me more than a few minutes.
The way I see it, if a company can't support everyone at their web site, the probably don't have the resources to support all their customers after the sale.
-twb
Have you excluded the users who list hahahahaha@microsoft.com , spam@spam.spam, and so on as their email addresses?
1- Do ANYTHING that prevents me from downloading, installing, and using it immediately.
2- Require any sort of registration, especially when it requires a real email address. I don't want you to contact me, and if you don't want to contact me without approval, than you do not need my email address.
3- Limit your more useful and necessary features. Think about it.
I work for a company that bases a lot on the idea of time limited and shareware concepts. However, we don't go through the hassle - and believe me, it is a hassle to the end user - of telling them they have to wait for a 'key' in order to download the software they want to try. Just make the software available up front, in a time limited fashion, so they don't get bored with waiting for a link in their email. It's easiest to assume that if they're looking to download the software, they don't want to do it in a few hours, they want to do it immediately.
_________ James Addison http://www.pjsoft.ca
The kind of shareware I hate is the kind I cant find a crack for. =)
if you really want to know, put a tracking tag on each page of the registration process, give each user a unique cookie and see what page they bail out on...
where the hell have you been, sir ?
-A Gay C-
- People give false email addresses so they won't be hounded, without the username and password they can't download
- People don't wan't to wait two hours for a username, if they don't get the information within 10 minutes, they find something else that does the same job
That's why not all your registrations are downloaded. AstrogenI know, for me at least, if something asks for an e-mail address, I usually fill it in with asdf@asdf.com By the way, if you haven't already done so, check out asdf.com... its one of the weirdest sites i've seen. very interesting
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
If this is a commercial/corporate grate evaluation you want them to do 30 days is not enough. We generally ask for 180 days to do our trial.
How good will the support be, if it takes hours just to download it? I mean, I always want to know that the support will be quick and timely. Taking hours to send download info just leaves a bad impression immediately. Why would I try software from an operation that I'm already weary of. I'd rather find something else. What really sucks though (Windows issue only) is the fact that Symantec now charges $20 for a 30 day demo of pcAnywhere. This was the first I've ever heard of this. Who wouldn't find VNC after a google search.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
I'm just a lowly biology grad student. :-P
In a nutshell... you must make it less of a hassle to purchase your software than it is to crack or find a serial.
Case in point: i have a friend who tried for two weeks (every single day!) to buy Macromedia's Flash, but couldn't do so.. was during the FlashMX debacle. Tried repeatedly, eventually ra out of patience. He bought it recently, but in his shoes I wouldn't have done the same.
Obviously, there comes a point when sales are lost due to ridiculous imposition on the customer... considering that software is easy to procure for free, one might expect a higher level of service.
An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission.
As so many others have mentionend, a "few hours" is a very long time. Perhaps not only because people have a short attention span, but because people, the potential costumers, are comparison shopping, and the delay meant that they went elsewere.
I don't know what software your company is making, but lets assume it is something for the desktop user, a piece of software that may have advanteges over the competition, but nevertheless may be easely substituted with something from a competing company. Eg. a small photo editing app.
Somewhere, a proud owner of a new digital camera, wants that kind of software; he goes searching on the web, looks at screenshoots, featurelists and prices, and decides that 3 products looks promising: two of the products are instantly downloaded and tried out, but your app, requires not only a long registration formular, but induces a surpricing two hour waiting period, in which your potential costumer, not only have tried your competitions apps, but may have actually bought them.
Think about going down "Main Street", shopping for a pair of shoes; In one shop, when asking for trying out a pair of shoes, the expedient hands you a two page formular, asking among other things, your phone number, age and job status.
After spending 20 minutes filling it out, you are then told to come back in a couple of hours.
You then go elsewhere.
Lets assume, that your software is somewhat more expensive, and not an "impulse" buy. Perhaps an unique app, that will help people design better, and faster "foo". Surely, professionals may be more patient. But no, that work dead afternoon, where you potential costumer is searching the web for tools that may make him more productive, may be followed up by 5 hectic days. So if you don't engage your potential costumer when he has time, you can loose an oppertunity.
Same thing with the trial period; if your software cost serious money, it probably requieres several hours to test. Most professionals have way too little time at their disposal, they may only have some short timeslots availeably during a week, for testing something new. 30 days may pass quickly, so bump the trial period to 60 days (like eg. IBM does).
In short, make your product as easely availably as possible.
gives me enough time to find something else, then I just don't bother downloading. Then there are the times I just don't recognize the e-mail.
Its not a free eval if I have to give you my email and register for something.
Put your timeout's to lock me out min 60 days.
Make sure there are accurate docs online.
After that leave me alone.
I'm going solely by the things I've heard and basic human nature of piracy. I would guess that if the person likes it they might spread it illeagaly. They think this user name and password would be traceable to them. All of the sudden you get 5 dozen copies regisering in with the same name/password combo. You know you have some piracy. It can be traced to the originator and thus another lawsuit is brought about. Again this is all in theory, but I think it fits the basic persona of a pirate.
Here's how it goes: I sit reading Slashdot, furrowing my brow feriously. A problem arises or my boss gets a fantastically [stupid] idea. I curse the gods of mediocrity that prevent me from rising any higher in the IT field, then I bust into monkey action... I need software to get a job done, the boss refuses to pay money for the correct solution, it's time to find some evaluation crap, rig something up, and let the boss worry about it when the license expires and my rigged solution isn't legal anymore.
1) I chart out my ideas, go over my available tools (not many, or I wouldn't be in this position), and figure out what parts I'll need from the outside.
2) I go to the outside. Software repositories, google, a few monkey message boards, the usual.
3) I download everything that looks close.
4) I install each program, one by one, and try to cram it into my preplanned solution.
5) I pick my favorites, modify my solution to their inevitable flaws (they're free = sub-perfect), and start on the three-crates-and-a-banana testing phase.
6)I'm a monkey, so I just bang the crates into each other until the banana falls down.
7) You e-mail the fake address I gave you back in step 3 because I'm angry and don't give a f--- about your information database.
8) Magically, the e-mail makes it to me anyway. If it doesn't get filtered, I delete it anyhow because I'm already at least in the testing stage.
Monkey power, baby. I'm who you're selling to. If you're going to make any money, it's because I tell the boss in a month that I refuse to let us use your tool because it's illegal. The only way I'm going to do that is if I don't hate you, and your product works.
Making me register makes me hate you. Worse, it gives your competitors a fat lead into my mindspace; and I'm lazy, so I'm not about to change my views when you come begging.
Monkey power.
. . . . . . . [awg] http://acidwriting.org
You may be losing registrants because they never intended to sign up. They might just be smart alecs trying to fill up someone else's email with junk.
When I was a co-op I remember some of the engineers filling out those card packs of product ads (basically paper spam) for other engineers to just as a joke. For example, they would write 'Byron' instead of Bryan for one guy 's name then he would get loads of sales calls all day because they thought they had a warm lead and they always addressed him wrong. It was funny to everyone but him.
If it's a trial piece of software, that I'm likely not going to keep around, I don't want to install it. Installing most programs spews files all over the place that the uninstall script often doesn't clean all up.
I will often go through the motions of getting a trial piece of software just in the faint hope of it being a stand alone executeable. (Although this is almost never the case with large software)
I hate even more is when you have some software that you have purchased and the company wants to you register it in X days or it will not work anymore. That's awful, don't make me feel like warez scum. I'm still waiting for an auth code for Bias' Peak LE that I sent in a couple of days ago.
The reason people are prob. not going ahead and downloading is that it takes several hours to get the userid and password. I do alot of download/install of evaluation software, and it must be a bam-bam-bam sequence for me. Find it - download it - run it. Just that fast. By the time they get to the next step, they've already gone on to something else.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
We spent a *lot* of time looking at why it works, and why it doesn't. Here are the top results that may help you.
1. She needs to know what's happening.
-- Explain why you need her email.
-- Say you never send spam. Then don't.
-- Tell her your company's privacy policy.
2. She needs it to be easy
-- Make HTML forms trivially short.
-- Don't use "Missing Info" warnings.
-- Let her optionally skip registration.
3. She needs fast results.
-- Send the email immediately (try qmail).
-- Let her download *before* she gets mail.
-- Detect bounces *before* she leaves your site. Hope that helps. Cheers, Joel Parker Henderson
So, my recommendation: automate your process so that the user can download the software *immediately* (or at least, within a few minutes of completing the registration information). That should help.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Doesn't this violate the GPL?
You've seen these before:
"This message will go away in 10..9..8..7.."
Oh yeah, making me wait every time I want to jump in and try out your software is a *really* smart idea.
I agree with this post.
The absolute worst company in the world at evaluation errors is Real. "FREE DOWNLOAD!" links to the online ordering site. "GET REAL ONE FOR FREE!" links to the online ordering site. "DOWNLOAD REAL TRIAL TODAY!" leads to the online ordering site. But anyway..
2 46&mode=thread) and fill in the goddam form again, especially since I don't want the spam, so it's back off to google to find an alternative..
once I find the tiny "evaluation" link on a page, and filled in the form with "bob@bob.com", and then on the next page it tells me it has sent me a username/pass/link for the download, I give up. Ain't no way I'm going to press that BACK button (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/17/0237
> If you're serious about trying out the software and would seriously consider purchasing it, giving them an e-mail so a representative can contact you for support makes sense.
No, it doesn't. If I'm looking for a solution, I might try a ton of demos until I find the right one. I don't want to be hounded by all of the ones I discounted as crap.
It's like shopping at JC Penney or Sears and the salespeople hound you EVERY 3 MINUTES. Thanks, but I already know how to shop and you just turned me off to your store.
Here's a shocking idea - How about if I need help I'll ask?
but I'm saying it again:
Nothing is more irritating than having to enter an email address, username and password. I can't count the number of times I've permanently chosen the competition to a product just because they insist on getting contact information that, despite their promises, ends up getting my precious email address on "penile enlargement spammer lists".
Symantec, Real and Mcaffee, amongst others, probably have at least two dozen or so bug@off.com email entries from me. Those three can take their crappy VBOX software that doesn't remove itself properly, doesn't document what changes it makes to the system, and stays stored and taking up place in a fairly obscure system folder and shove it.
Enough already, gimme 90 days, if I like it, I'll buy it. Leave me the hell alone otherwise and stop trying to get free marketing information from me.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Is your documentation available to see prior to having to register?
What irks me is companies who require you to register just to see the documentation, let alone download an evaluation. In the majority of cases after having registered and got access to the documentation, you find the system is crap anyway and don't bother downloading it. Then you find later that you have to tell them to stop sending you their promotional spam.
2. Registration. It's one thing to enter my name and email address, but I don't know if I want to create a login account to your site. Is it worth that extra step?
3. Download speed. If my location has a decent internet connection and I'm only getting 5-10 KB/sec, then large files are out of the question. If that download is at non-peak hours (and the site isn't Slashdotted) and the download speed is still unreasonable, I'll probably try other software sources first.
4. Free "developer" copies. Some people out there are going to call me a "Slashdot freebie-seeker", but free limited-implementation copies are to your company's advantage.
If "developers" (including sysadmins, DBAs, and less-technical users like artists) are able to use the software at home, they're more likely to recommend it. Depending on the software, your company "loses" money in the short term, but can make it up with big contracts (assuming that's a viable sales path). Also, making the product available at the user-level helps both the publisher and job-seekers. If your software is "in demand", unemployed IT workers (like myself) can download it, become famliar, and add that skill to the resume. On the other hand, if there are significant barriers to getting and using your software -- limited time trial, overly crippled features, or requiring the purchase of a license -- you're limiting your market. The law of supply and demand kicks in: the fewer developers there are, the more they cost an employer; raising the TCO of your product is not a strong marketing point.
I don't even send in registration cards anymore on the commercial software I buy, so why do you need to know my e-mail address?
Sending in registration cards in the past resulted in my name getting circulated to all sorts of different companies who bombard me with junk mail that I do not want nor am I interested in.
Giving you my e-mail poses the exact same problem, only spamming is cheaper and easier than sending snail mail.
If I don't download the trial version, that usually means I found it free on KaZaA or something like it. :-)
There is a certain video editing application for Windows that has a feature I need (direct VOB editing), a feature that I haven't found in any other editing app, proprietary or otherwise, on any of the platforms I use (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows). I will not, however, even bother to evaluate it because the download instructions make it clear that to use it beyond the 30 days, I will have to email in a number calculated by the demo and get a registration number back (thus locking the registration to my current hardware).
Moral of the Story: Everything counts when you make a decision to download and run a demo, even terms of sale that don't apply unless you decide to buy.
This is the recession. And the boom is not coming back anytime soon. Forget about CTO's and COO's buying software without thinking about its price. That time it was a lot of wasting of investor's money. Now it's barely possible.
Well, you may improve your chances if you would try to play the game based on "soft" money. but in this case you don't even have to show any evaluation - show how much CTO or COO will have of comissions and the deal will be done. It was true at the boom time. it is true at the recession time. That's the way to make a profit! Or to go to jail :)
i train, you should be giving me your software in the hopes that i will like it and get other people addicted to it. Thank you IntelliJ
I don't know why everyone acts like filling out registration forms is such a problem. I got this great program called "Gator" which does it for me. And it was free!!(Actually I'm not even sure how it got on my computer). Anyhow, it know everthing about me after i used it once and now it fills out all my web forms for me. U can't beat that with a stick! I gotta get back to looking for a new WebShots desktop...adios
No Sig For You
Could be that the user simply gets confused and can't figure out how to proceed. I do design and programming for a living and am never suprised at what some users find difficult.
Well, for one thing, the most important thing, is that its NOT FREE. You have to pay for it eventually.
Another thing, is why should I spend my time working with a buggy piece of software when there's probably a better, more stable, faster, FREER alternative somewhere?
Unless its really cool -- i.e., 3DOSX, FSV -- I don't spend time with evaluation-ware.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Much of the time, I find that while I really want to test software, there just isn't the time to do it.
I dont go around building things from beta software, but it seems that we (my company) wait until products and tools are proven by others.
Again, its not that I dont want to test, but my timeline for eval is so short, and I have so few others in my team that want to take time, that it just isnt convenient. Welcome to world of telecom.
Recently, we did set up an test OpenNMS server - because we got sick of the limitations imposed by our HPOV admin...
But, I usually stop short when I see 15-day limit or something like that. Yeah, you can tweak the registry among other tricks to bypass the day limit. But, I want something I can use. Tease me a little so that I want to pay for the best version of the product. This has never worked with me with, for example, RealPlayer. But, I've bought plenty of other software.
Another good trick is with software like GoldWave, where you get 150 actions on a sound file, before it craps out.
Well, that's my 2 pence.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
If I really want the evaluation I just enter a bogus addy or us some web account that i log into now and then and delete the whole lot. It is amazing the crap that shows up there and the quantity. These damn emails addys travel, because one list own gives two friends your address then they give it to two freinds and so on and so on. Eventually the accounts blow up because the quantity gets so huge it usually gets shut down.
How would you like it if you went into a store and asked to try on some shoes and they say you have to give them your phone number and go home to wait for a call first. Ya right.
Often, when I look for a software solution, I do a web search and grab the top 10-20 links that look like they might solve my problem. After downloading about 5 potential solutions, I try them out and see if they do what I want. If an immediate download isn't available and I have to wait, I'm spending that lag time looking at the other products I was able to get faster. And if one of them happens to do what I want, I'm done looking. I think it's as simple as that.
A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
In the time between requesting a trial and you sending me my reg codes, I've probably found a free (one kind or the other) piece of software to do the same job, that's why it's not downloaded!
Just to have a big old whinge, shareware is SOOOO expensive. Most pieces of software that perform a very VERY simple task (the sort of thing that could be accomplished with a couple of BASH commands in Unix, like periodically FTPing to a server to retreive files for instance), cost, like US$50 instead of the US$5 that they are worth! And you wonder why such a massive cracking / serial scene exists. Trying to make unfair profits off the fact that Windows is lacking in features, and difficult for the end-user to develop their own software in.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
They have a great paint program that's maybe one version behind photoshop, for a fraction of the price. They let you download a fully functional (for 60 days) evaluation version of their software.
I used their paint shop pro for the full 60 days for incidental work i had to do- and when the day came I really needed Photo software, I found the evaluation had expired.
I'm sure I could have found a hack, but by that time I had decided it was worth the money, so I went down to staples and bought the well-documented retail box version. Had they implented any "features" along the way that had interefered with a good, long eval period, I probably would have looked elsewhere.
SO here's jascs formula:
1. Make good software.
2. Make a fully featured but Generously time limited evaluation version available for No-Hassle download.
3. Wait and get the money from hooked & happy customers.
By the way, the boxed set was cheaper to buy at $80 (Staples) than to download from Jasc ($99) or order from jasc ($109)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you have sold software before then you know how much it's going to sell. Providing a trial period is good, and those that need the software will try it and buy it.
If I'm looking for a piece of software that I don't know where to get, however, it usually means that I need it for some short term use now and not an hour from now, nor am I willing to give out my email for something I may never use again by someone I don't want to hear from.
You have set some fairly low jumps in the path of users who want to use your product. If you are aiming for customers who need your product and are willing to pay for it, then those jumps are not large. If you want everyone who sees your site to download your trialware, then you'd better eliminate those jumps.
You could do so by giving people a choice. Instead of saying, "If you want to use our software without paying, you must do steps one two and three." you could say something like, "We want to get our software into your hands. We know you'll find it useful. You can download the slightly crippled, time limited version right now and start using it immediately, or you can download the full version that's limited to a longer period of time if you register with your email address. The registration key will be sent immediately, and you should be able to use your software in under ten minutes (unless you use AOL - their mail sucks - it could take ten hours)."
The cold hard reality is that your software is going to be used without people paying for it. You can put jumps in the way that are annoying, but it's up to you to find the right balance of annoyance versus purchases. The more annoying the trialware is, the less likely I'll get it even if it's better than a less annoying piece of software (that may even cost more)
Clickbook is an example of this. I would like to have a product like clickbook, but their particular cripple scheme (last I tried it) was so absurdly annoying to me personally that I couldn't bring myself to pay for what appeared to be a decent product. It was like they wrapped it in a cardboard box and left it out on the sidwalk for me to use - only it was chained to the sidewalk and I had to sign away some info to bring it and the sidewalk home so I could try it out.
You want to have your product seen in the best light possible. That means some may walk away without paying. The balance is non-trivial, and it is a business decision - not one which should be made up by a discussion list like this one.
But it's your business - you get to gamble. Enjoy it while it lasts!
-Adam
The one thing that stops me from registering any shareware (apps or games) is the price. I don't wanna flame, but I thought the whole fscking point of cutting out the middleman was to lower the price of your software, while keeping a larger amount for yourself.
Case in point: Avernum. They've been going some good advertising for that game, and I'm really interested, but there's no way I'm going to pay 25 bucks for it when I see games RETAILING on store shelves for $10 to $20 all the time. And $40 for Opera? Yeesh. Blah blah I'm a cheap bastard yadda yadda, but I still wanna know where all that purchase price is going if there's no big monolithic publisher involved. Nobody's buying? Try lowering your price to increase volume. I know I'd pay five bucks for either of these programs right now if I could. But no, they have to play hard-to-get. Well fine, two can play at that game.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Google can search 'em! And whenever you have a problem, where do you usually go first? Google... Plus it's more community oriented. Lookit how BEA has tons of CSRs trolling the weblogic newsgroups. It's great. WebGain (TOPLink) has private newsgroups and there's NOTHING on google about toplink that's very valuable...
Do it for da shorties
Simple. I don't run evaluation/demo software on my work systems, only on a temporary testbed and the 2 systems aren't even physically close to each other. If you want me to run around like a chicken without a head checking my email for this crap and that crap, then screw your software.
A lot of people seem to be harping about registering to download something.
When I eval stuff for work (software developer), I don't mind at all registering my work info. It's the same way with conferences - I'm happy to give out my info.
Why? In general I find that companies trying to sell to other companies are not nearly as bad about spam as Fred's House 'O Cheap DVD's. Besides, it's my work mail account - who cares what happens to that.
So registration is not the problem as I see it. As others have said, you need to let the users download it whenever they like - look at just about any big chunck of enterprise software, they all have full versions you can DL. Then you need to send out a key, pronto! And make it easy. I've seen plenty of software where I downloaded it by then by the time I got the key I was doing something else and forgot the whole thing, or the key was such a PITA to get I just dropped the whole thing.
If you are worried about someone downloading it and making copies - fold up shop and shut down the company. You're going to be dissapointed if you expect anything less than everyone on earth having a fully enabled copy hours after the first regitsered user fires it up. Learn to live with that, then charge a fair price and people WILL pay you - remember, it's not even thier own money they are using so they are probably included to give you some! Plus, companies like nothing more than paying for support contracts even when they are not needed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Example.
TogetherJ has a 30 day evaluation period. How in the hell do you expect me to learn how to utilize all of it's features, and actually apply them to a "round-trip" development cycle, in 30 days?
total bs
Did I mention that I am also legally insane?
And I always buy software - especially if it makes vague promises and uses terms like "solution" and "ROI".
I work for a small software company, and I was involved in the decision to require potential customers to fill out a form before they could download our software. Originally, we allowed users to download our software with a simple click on a link -- no registration required. Those who "advised" our company pushed for us to add the registration forms, and to save the information into a database. Our forms validate the contact information -- just basic stuff, like checking for numbers in the phone number field. However, we require a valid email address, since we mail a URL for downloading to the email address entered. We also have a short survey form with questions about what product enhancements would interest the potential customer.
Why did we decide to require the registration? I think the primary reason is that the sales team felt it gave them more control. When we had no registration forms, we could only know how many times the software was downloaded. (Although, actually, at the time we could only get that information via the log files of the web server -- not the most convenient way to do it.) We couldn't even know very basic information like how many people downloaded the software. We couldn't tell if 50 people downloaded, or if one person downloaded 50 times. (Yes, sometimes one person does download more than once.) Now, when we have the registration forms, we feel that we have a lot more information. Yes, there are many who enter garbage in all the fields. And yes, there are those who use the obvious throw-away email addresses. But we assume them to be not very serious prospective customers. Conversely, there are those who enter very accurate information, and we assume them to be much better sales prospects. The serious entries are valuable to us, as they give us a picture of who our potential customers are.
You have to understand that the sales team like to feel in control. When you just put your product out there and wait for people to contact you, it is difficult to cope. The information collected through the download forms takes away some of the uncertainty, and you sleep a lot better at night. If the information is positive, you sleep better for the obvious reason. If the information is negative, you can get everyone off their duffs and start making the necessary changes sooner rather than later. Some of the people respond to our email by telling us that they decided to use a competitor's product. That kind of information is gold to us! If we had not collected a valid email address, we would have never gotten that information.
In case you were wondering, we send follow up emails within a week or two. After that, if you have no desire to speak with our sales team, you never hear from us again.
To discuss a little more the decision process... I was against requiring potential customers to fill out a form. I argued about how it would turn off a lot of people. Apparently I was quite right that it pisses people off to have to give their email address. In the end, I acquiesced, reasoning that they are getting something for free, so they should be willing to give up something. But being tuned in to peoples' concerns about spam, I thought it was absolutely essential that we be very honest about how their email address would be used.
I've just read 200+ posts from other whiny /.ers stating "if I have to wait more than 2.3 seconds, I'll bail", or "you don't need my e-mail address."
I, however, like to at least pretend that I live in the real world; I realise that you're trying to make a profit. You have a sales channel. You have marketing. You also have software I'm interested in.
So yes - I'll wait for the e-mailed registration keys. I'll give you the marketing info you want - even though, with the drivel that others here speak, you'd be hard pressed to glean any sensible information out of it.
Just make the software good.
(Posted Anonymously because I really believe there'd be retribution from the abovementioned whiners)
On to the gritty details ... their software is fully functional ... you can even make copies of it, and you don't have to register/purchase it.
HOWEVER, (and this is the part the author of the question will be interested in) in the end-of-year payroll and other modules, there are some NON obvious and bug-prone steps that occur. This wasn't designed on purpose like this, but it would actually reduce revenues if they fixed the problems.
NOTE: I do NOT work for GPS/MS ... so please don't give ME grief about the practice.
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Number 1: It's been said time and again, but registration. There are a million reasons why a company wants to have this, and I see these posts from people saying that I have no position to compain. I have EVERY reason to compain. I am a potential customer. And I don't want you to know anything about me until I buy your software. That's what I would prefer.
If I'm made to type in an e-mail address to download, I type in a bogus address. If I need to get a key or anything else from my e-mail, I've just been sent the message that the software company does'nt want my business. This has happened more then once, and I've gone somewhere else. If I like your software, and I give you my or my companies credit card number, you get to know who I am. Not before.
2. Full featured software. If I bother to download your evaulation, I expect to be able to use it. When I can't save my work, or find that an important feature is turned off, or I have some stupid 10 minut time limit, the software gets deleted.
3. Installation. I can tell right away how much I'd like or not like a peice of software by installation. Paste icons all over my desktop without asking? You've annoyed me. Put yourself in my startup, even though it's not needed? You're gone. Bundle yourself with spyware? You're gone.
4. Remind me, clearly, when the evaulation period is getting to the end. 'You have 5 days left in your evaulation period' when I start the program up. I can think of many times when I've found a peice of software I like, forget to purchase it, forget to get approval for the purchase. I find another way to get something done, and I'll just forget about it. If I were a more orginized person, I'd keep tabs of those things, but I'm not.
The Internet is generally stupid
What turns me off are 30-40 MB downloads on a dial up connection.
It's nice to see that slashdot has been reduced to a free market-research/focus group service.
I must respectfully disagree that the above is Offtopic, as it is a direct reply to the parent post. Thank you for your time and attention.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
How is this news worthy or even f-n news for that matter. Maybe slashdot just isn't the place for me to be getting my daily dose of geek news any more. Hey here is a better story than this one. What other tech savvy news sites are out there? Odd how as I'm posting this I'm starring at an add for visualstudio.net. Not that that in itself is bad, they have to pay the bills somehow , but I do find the irony in it rather amusing.
More than once I have been very interested in purchasing a piece of software for where I work. However , it always comes to the point that, what I ask my company to buy, I will not be able to afford at home. So it comes to the point that I'd rather not invest my time learning to use a piece of software , only not to be able to use it at home. So I stick to free aoftware, or software , such as Oracle which you can download free of charge for personal use. Same reason I stick with Linux when I can or Solaris when I can't.
This is the reason I decided not to use TogetherJ for example.
In your setup where I have to register and wait for a username/password to be e-mailed to me before I can download the software, the usual reason I never download it is that I had to wait for the username/password to be e-mailed to me. There's always some lag, from a few minutes to a day, and even if it's just a few minutes I can't sit there fetching and refetching my mail until the message arrives. So instead I go off to do other things until one of my hourly mail runs picks up the message and I check my inbox and notice it. The problem is I usually notice it in the middle of the workday, and I've got Yet Another Bug to fix right now, so I file the message in a folder to get to later. By the time I get free time, I've forgotten about it. I'll notice it when I do my daily check of things I have to deal with, but if it's not high-priority that I get that piece of software up and running (and eval software is rarely high priority) then I'll put it off again, and probably forget about it again. Usually by the time I get around to going back for the download, the username has expired and I can't get at the software. At which point I shrug and go on to one of the fifteen other jobs in my inbox.
If you want people to get the software, make it downloadable now. Mail them a key to activate it if you have to, but let them get the package when they're at your site and ready to get it.
Oh, and as for thinking that people who put in bogus e-mail addresses aren't good prospects, let me give you a clue: anybody who has any idea what they're doing these days never gives out their real e-mail address to anybody until they know who they're dealing with and are ready to buy from them. You're filing your most technically competent prospects, the ones who'll be making the recommendations to the CTOs about which products will actually do what they want, in the "bad prospect" file.
If I go to the trouble of filling out a form, I want to evaluate the software. a few hours later I've gone on to other things, perhaps including finding other alternatives. You need (IMHO) to make the username/pwd available immediately to up your download count.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
With a few hours delay, you lose a customer. If you competitor gets an eval that works in front of the customer first, and they are hurried to make a decision and buy now, you lose. Even if not that, the mere fact there is a delay in getting a simple username/password out by email gives a perception that technical support is going to suck really bad. Again, you lose.
Prime mission numero uno is to get rid of that few hours delay. Generate that username and password immediately, and mail it out right now. Accept no excuses from the programming people. If the product is any good, they can make a simple username/password mailback script.
A lot of other people have given good advice about making a better impression on the customer, but clearly if they have already given you their email, they were good to go this far. You lost them somewhere between giving the email address and mailing back the password. A few hours is a long time to wait and a big opportunity to lose a customer. Fix the long wait and don't make any excuses for it. And make sure much of the other advice is followed to help increase your responses. Make sure you a very clear about your policy on handling the email address. If you want to use it for mailing anything more than the username/password it is submitted for, given them the opportunity to OPT-IN to get announcements, separately for this product, and other products. And promise clearly on the web site to never give the email to any other business, not even partners.
And make sure your mail server hasn't been blacklisted for spam. if your company did any mass mailings of anything beyond an opt-IN mailing list, it probably did get blacklisted. See, doing that means you lose customers.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Did you go to the site?
Did you click the download link?
I was able to download several ports of this project with one click.
I'm inclined towards questioning *most* evaluation processes required for evaluation versions. Because while they're great engines for populating databases, they're not particullarly good at getting hot or warm leads for sales folks. So, I'm not sure from a practical sense what they accomplish.
As a decision making entity in a company, I know I go through a process of weighting the need for the product verses the data collected from registering.
If its a product I'm interested in evaluating as a future need or direction, I'd rather not get put on spam lists or get a call from a sales rep - I'm simply interested in evaluating technology and storing it for future reference. So if email address or phone number is required, I'll typically pass.
If its a product that fulfills an immediate need then I'd like the eval version, but alos want to talk to some real person, and will sometimes call directly. Usually the registration for a 'eval version' simply adds me to some spam lists I'm not interested in, but often will not answer the questions I need to actually know.
After the second time ANY program has made me wait 10+ seconds to use it, no matter how invaluable and ingenious that program was, it was immediately going into the trash! It didn't matter if, on a multi-threaded OS, I could switch over and use another app instead of waiting. It's the software companies' privilege that users would even bother with their software. If they take advantage of it, they can kiss their company good bye.
Who moved my sig?
- Timeliness
- When I am searching for a software product it's not a leisure activity, rather it's usually directly related to my job and I 'm looking for a solution
- now (a lot of contracts depend on finding existing sofware to handle certain features off the bat as a base). When I have to wait more than a few minutes for the registration key (yes, I use a real, albeit HoTMaiL, address) I go to the next resource.
- Internal Server Error, or [ODBC Error], etc
- I can't believe how many times I've gone through the torturous sign-up process only to find an error in the download process. Perhaps your potential clients are getting an error -- or, perhaps some other inconvenience? This happened to me more than once at Sun.com.
My searching usually begins with CPAN (the crown jewel of Perl), freshmeat.net (very relevant), sourceforge (third, because there are SO MANY empty shell projects), Google. Once I get to Google I begin to look for non-open source projects.For example, I spent a long time looking for a decent in-the-browser page editor for hosting clients to edit their pages online. I looked for a long time, actually not starting out in the open source realm for some reason, and tried many of the low-cost closed source page editor solutions (mainly perl based). Most were simply some form of "here's a TEXTAREA field with the page code; have fun". The few attempts at a WYSIWYG editor, in the commercial offerings I found, were laughable. But then I found Richtext Editor on sourceforge. WOW! This is the slickest in-page editor I've seen to date. Yeah, it has a ways to go, but provides an incredible headstart to getting there. Will I contribute back my changes? Of course -- that's the way you "pay" open source projects. Love it. It only works with IE 5+ - for now (and 92% of thise visting our sites use IE 5+).
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
yes you did. I install an average of two pieces of eval apps a day because I'm a network administrator and I have to hunt for useful programs. if i have to wait a few hours for an application which has some competition, i will go for the competition.
if you want people to see the power of your software, yet have to buy the rest of it, disable file saving and advanced functions, and by all means deliver it to his harddisk as soon as possible.
The worst part about evaluation software, is that it is evaluation software.
It could be worse... it could be free.
-=-=- I don't suck... you blow. -=-=-
Waiting a few hours before getting the download is IMO the major issue here. Get your response time down to a few minutes and you'll be in business.
OK I'm posting this AC in case the good people at Roxio are reading.
Ok peeps..I use Mac OS X and since my firewire CD burner didn't come with any software I can use, I had to go find a cracked version of Roxio Toast Titanium to use it immediately...
And Toast is a great program. Since I've been using it so much and haven't bought it, I figured I would go order it online. I figured "jeez, it's great software, and I would happily pay them for their work" except for the one thing that I found out...
They charge people $89 for it!!! I was ready to put forth $50 of my hard-earned money. And the only software I've paid for in the last 7 years is Mac OS X.
Nealy $100 to use the $300 cd burner I bought?? No thanks, I'll continue using the cracked version, thanks.
And guess why? Theyre cheap thieves. Wrong.
I'd rather commit this crime and make my life easy than type in my email address and offer my neck for your slashing. just remove the registeration and let em download it from cnet, tucows anywhere. if they like it they can click a link in the help->about button that will take em to the creditcard and other registeration crap. Now honestly and truely tell me what is wrong with THIS scheme?
I loathe any evaluation type software, especially that which has some timer/trial date period before it forces you to register/buy the product. And I especially detest it when it embeds itself into the registry (specifically speaking of Windows platforms) and even after uninstalling, it still isn't completely wiped off my HD. It still shows but yet when I try to remove programs/uninstall, I get an error message ...
Some tips for aspiring developers to break free of the not-so-surprising (at least to me) pattern of timid experimenters and reluctant trial end users.
AZspot
Oh yeah.. needing my email address and phone number is ABSOLUTELY rediculous.
If I have a 30 day eval, and I use the software, I'll pay for it. No reason to spam me or call me.
Oh yeah, one way to really do the registration form wrong, take a look at commerce.ssh.com. You'll see it takes too freaking long to fill out.
An important point often missed by distributors of evaluation software is that it is NOT the same as FREE software, and should not be promoted as such. Tang is not orange juice. A free copy of crippleware or expireware is not the same as freeware.
I have no problem with people not giving away software for free, but I have a big problem with them pretending they are, just to get their foot in my door. In my mind it's in the same league as telemarketers who start out telling you they are conducting a survey. I have bought plenty of software after downloading the eval version, but NEVER after being tricked into downloading the eval copy in the guise of freeware.
For me, if it takes hours to get the user/password, that is just unacceptable.
:)
For me and most of the people that I'm around, cable modem is the norm. So the idea of having to wait hours for a username/password, is like the idea of a 3k web page taking hours to load. If I'm on the prowl for something, I want it now!
I prefer not giving email anyways, but if I must, I always give a hotmail account that I then go and clear the 2mbs of spam from
OLIVER
Better VDF than VD...check it out: Data Access
Having to hunt around on the 'net for a crack! Seriously, if it's worth having, I will buy it, as long as doing so is easier than obtaining a cracked version...so make that part as painless as possible and we'll get along just fine.
Filling out those "forms" doesn't really bug me too much (except that bloody CNET wants us to fill out bloody forms now just to download freeware!), as I fill them all out pretty much the same:
Name: Homer Simpson
Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC.
Country: Azerbajan
Zip: 90210
Year of birth: 1900
...and so on. You get the idea.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Let 'em download the software first, then register it. And for cryin' out loud, don't make 'em wait to get the registration key. It should arrive by email in the next few minutes. At least that's the way the city folks do it.
I haven't run into anybody who sent the authorization two hours later, but I probably only get around to trying about 20% of the demos I download.
Why?
My links menu is so full I don't want to link to something, now unless I know it's useful. When I trip across what looks like an interesting demo, I DL it while I have the page in front of me and then never actually have the time to try it out. The other thing that happens is I start running the program and realize it is going to take me a huge amount of time to Grok it out without documentation; so, I give up and keep using what I've already got...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
I think the upshot of this entire thread is that you should have the developers create the marketing concepts behind the evals, and the marketing wankers should work on tic-tac-toe strategies until the orders come in.
The TinWeasle: "Worming Out of Culpability since 1978" - Opinions expressed are mine alone, yadda, yadda, yadda
it ain't free. If it don't come on my SUSE/Red Hat/Slackware distribution, or is available on sourceforge, then why bother?
You are in a dying business model.
Information is power. He who controls the information has the power.
What is happening in the open source world is a democratization of information. This is happening on a fundamental level. Outside of the US, this is happening on a widespread basis. This is why although the BSD licenses would be preferable for businesses, Linux will overtake BSD rather rapidly. And crush Microsoft. There is just too much momentum on a worldwide basis to stop it.
The longer you and your company take to realize this, the more likely you will join the ranks of Foxpro, Fortran, Java, and other languages/applications that are closed source, and were once the flash in the pan of their time.
Instead of wasting precious time trying to determine why a user stopped a download, spend your time figuring out a business model that can leverage open source. Only the businesses that do that will survive in the long term. Others will fade into obscurity.
yush
But as a developer, it is very intriguing to know who, where, why, ... is evaluating my software.
At the end, it is plain that user have to have great desire for particular software if he is willing to pay or to give some data for just evaluating the software. And that is not common. So your experience is little surprise.
IIRC yesterday there was some article about giving something absolutely for free in order to drive sales. So for your company it would be good to:
hany
The people you are using are the idiots that always want something for nothing. They realise that they may have to *shock horror* pay for something and bug out.
I always give my e-mail for such registrations as often you get a mail to say the company will discount the software if you buy now (I have saved a fortune on XWin32 and F-Secure SSH this way.
My access sometimes goes flaky so lose my connection, have to go back, request a password again and then try the download again; of course I usually have to use multiple e-mail addresses otherwise my repeated requests get denied and many sites make it difficult to just go straight back to the download page.
I also hate having to wait around, sometimes for days, to get the necessary password for the software. Generally if I went out to look for something, then I need it yesterday and can't afford to sit around twiddling my thumbs for days.
Are you planning a visit to the planet Earth any time soon?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
What turns most people off is the "quest for more emails"... the second I see a page which says "type in your real name & email and we'll get back to you" I get real suspicious and just go somewhere else. Everyone is sick of spam. Everyone fears that one day the database with all "potential" users will be sold/stolen... and then used =) Guess the same was said times & times again... but it's the truth
You said "An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission". The combination of these is your problem in my book.
If I have to get sent an email with a download location, it annoys me. I want to download it then and there, not 6 hours later. Also, if I try to download it on a friday, so I can take it home to play with on the weekend, not having the URL appear for a few hours really annoys me.
I'd suggest ditching the emailing of the download url. If you must email something, email the registration key, and do it right away (like Real do for their server evaluations). That way, users can get the file then and there, and have their licence key arrive by email by the time the download has finished.
Oh, and warn them when they're entering their email address that they'll need to get sent a license key via email. It'll reduce the number of times Bill Gates (billg@microsoft.com) downloads your software if people realise they really do need you guys to have their email address, as opposed to just an email address!
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
the only time i'm waiting is if i already bought the software and i need techie help
if i don't need technical ass-istance from you and/or your site, i'm going somewhere else if you make me wait
Its simple. The evaluation key has expired and people re-register to get a new key!
Duh!
Ben
if i have to enter an email address to download software i go immediately to my mailbox and refresh for a minute til the email arrives, i download and we're all happy. if i dont get the email within 45 seconds to a minute at most i forget it and go on usually not to come back and look for it again.
All in all, I've bought Opera, Forte Agent, Windows Commander, VMWare and Eudora.
They were hellishly expensive, but they beat the crap out of any other products that are free.
The ADS and pop-ups don't bother me, I bought them because they deserved it!
Whereas what bothers me about the totally free products: They don't quite seem to be mature, stable, reliable, fast.
I don't like the presumption of this article to force the opinion that Evaluation is bad. Please phrase the article to actually draw prositive responses as well.
Tut. Tut.
I am often caught out registering for some eval software, then not downloading.
Why?
Simple - the JERKS who run those sites leave out one extremely important thing that many people around the world need to know:
What size is the download file?
I am sick of looking into promising software, only to find that it is ten times larger than I imagined, or than my phone line bandwidth can handle(effectively 33.4Kbps, despite the so-called 56Kbps modem).
Not everybody in the world has 1.5Mbps ADSL.
If only they would indicate up front what the download size was, I could make an informed choice about downloading.
I am anarch of all I survey.
You'd think people in the business of writing software would be able to figure out how to generate a key and password and send it to you instantly.
It's PROPRIETARY !!!!!!
Its the calls, the endless calls.
I hate people ringing me up trying to sell me stuff. If I tried an evalutaion and wanted it or had any q's *I'd* contact *them*.
Now, I don't go near any evalutaion s/w for that very reason.
Given the example, the only reasons I would not go on to download the software (when everything has been made clear up front), is if I hear of any problems with the software, or find something else that does the job, or my need no longer exists... Of course, if things haven't been made clear up front, then that might be a factor... Although, if you really want to know the biggest reason why I wouldn't take an evaluation of a piece of software, then it would be when they want a credit card number up front, and you have to actively go and cancel payment before they take it (ala GoToMyPC) As far as I am concerned, a company has *no* business knowing my payment details until I am ready to pay for it... why should a 'free' trial be at my own risk?
First, 30 days is ways too short for a big company to efficiently evaluate a product.
So, the method:
1.go to yahoo
2.create an email account
3.note it on a post-it
4.go fill the form
5.download the software
6.receive your key on yahoo
7.trash the post-it
after the (short) evaluation period:
steps 1. 2. 3. 4. 6 and 7. from previous method
-> no download
CQFD
"We have been surprised to find that not a few registrants don't actually go on to download the software."
"not a few"... what is wrong with "many" or "quite a few". I've never seen anyone write like this, it sounds stupid, like you are som foreigner who can't speak the language.
.tar.gz and make. That's the only way for me.
What? Did you say run an arbitrary binary?
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Instead of discussing the details I will give the example of company which - in my opinion - does it well. Perforce (http://www.perforce.com) sells version controlling software.
Anyone can download their software and documentation (without registration, passwords, mail etc). The downloaded version has the complete feature set but is limited to 2 concurrent users. When I buy the software, I just get the license and feed it to the software (without reinstallation, data migration etc). I have not yet made my organization to buy it (this is large investment) but I experimented a lot with this software, got to know it and I advocate it both in my firm and externally (as you can see here). And I think, we will finally buy it - sooner or later.
What's the main point? Let the people just download the file, install and operate it without registration. Limit its usage somehow but leave enough for the tool to be usable.
And the second good example. Oracle allows anyone to download complete distribution and documentation of their database - and even allow using it for development for free. Thanks to it, they gather customers which pay for using their database with the software we wrote...
anything more complicated than
apt-get install
is a turn off.
There will be a freely redistributable demo, that anyone can download and redistribute on CD's, ftp or web sites, etc. As long as you don't modify it (to protect customers from vandalism). The installer can use a checksum to ensure you're installing a valid distribution.
The demo lets you play the game for five minutes or so, then resets the game at the end of the time limit. You can play as many free time limited demo games as you like, but no longer than five minutes each. The save function is disabled in the demo, but you can load and play any game or scenario.
You can easily buy a license over the web, by secure http, with a credit card. The form asks you to enter the hostname of your linux box, and a valid email address, the name on the credit card, as well as the usual credit card verification information.
If the credit card transaction goes through, then it immediately emails a license key to your email address, and you can use it to unlock a game in progress.
Emailing the key instead of showing it on the web page ensures that the email address is valid, for protection against credit card fraud. Is that too much to ask? There's no need to enter your email address or even register to play the demo. It's just necessary if you decide to actually buy a license.
The license is valid for one person at one hostname. So the license key is a hash of your name, email address and hostname. You have to enter your key, name, email address and hostname to unlock it. So if you give out your key, you also have to give out that other information too. I hope this will prevent the most rampant piracy.
It's certainly possible to defeat this scheme, or simply hack the code. But my goal is not to make piracy 100% impossible, just inconvenient. While making registration cheap and easy enough that people will decide to pay for the product.
Are there any problems with this approach? How could it be improved or simplified? (I'm not interested in arguing about why I'm not giving it away for free.)
Spam, what else.
What I really hate about many software companies is that they don't publish their prices on the site. If I want to know what it costs I have to talk to some sales person. This makes the process of evaluating software an unnecessary hassle. I want to know up front what software costs.
I am not talking about large infrastructure implementations and such. I can imagine that in these cases pricing is dependent on many factors which make it impossible to give a price quote up front.
There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't
Holy crap! There are a lot of half-assed adminstrators on slashdot. First clue: Don't install evaluation software on productions systems! Evaluate ths software on a lab system. Dumbfuck.
Maybe your "download" button uses Javascript, which I have turned off to prevent popups. Maybe the URL for downloads goes thru port 81 and my proxy won't go there. Maybe you've come up with some other way to make downloads fail for someone who isn't sitting in front of your computer.
Maybe I don't live in the US, but you made "State" a required field. Maybe when I went back to fill in the required fields you made me fill it out all over again. Maybe in spite of filling out all the fields you still insist something is missing. Maybe the checkbox for "yes, please sell my address to spammers" can't be unchecked.
Maybe by now I've decided I'll live without it, or write it myself.
If I install a bit of trialware, for example off the front of a magazine or even downloaded, I don't trust it to completely go away when I uninstall it.
And I don't like it when there are issues upgrading from trailware to the full product.
...that in the past i've downloaded trial ware that i basically couldn't really afford to buy anyway. Loved it. And then 30 days later, despite much messing about with registry (ach, so i am l8mer as well as broke) it disappears for good.
Thats why i don't bother anymore - heartbreak!
But of greater relevance; how does the rate of trial downloading actually relate to your sales rate? Arguably, the trial software is now more accurately hitting your targeted market rather than curious kids etc...at least you are saving in bandwidth. I'd take the time to look at the sales rate before panicing over a lack of take up.
One thing that turns me off about 30-day evaluations is that most products nowadays are too complicated to evaluate within this timeframe unless you devote all your time to the evaluation process. This applies especially to development tools.
The answer is simple. No-one wants to spend 2 hours downloading and installing something, just to have to:
- have it fail due to time expired during a big demo
- have to go through the same procedure again next month
- find out it has expired before it is even installed (I often download LONG before I install).
You are selling to companies, right? Well, *TRUST THEM*. No-one except for one-man companies will risk *criminal prosecution* on behalf of their company. Many companies are very paranoid about this anyway - the have regualr audits of PCs, and warnings near photocopiers, and MP3 network bans etc.
*TRUST THEM*.
Give them a full version with no time crippling code in there. If it is used they will buy it. If they are pirates, they will disable the time lock anyway or get a piarate from the net. You wont make money from those type, so ignore them.
If you want to cripple software, there is only one way to do it. Have the registration key include the company name, and have the top level menu state somewhere prominent "This software registed to XYZ". No companu in its right mind will use software registered to another company in this way. Use this to stop piracy - not dongles, not time locks etc.
So forget the 30 day ban. Give them a full version, perhaps with a size limit (10 database table etc. that sort of thing) - but even this is a problem, since they be doing performance evaluations. If you go this route, be flexible. Allow them a full version if you get the programmers name and phone number. I often insist on full evalution copies, stating that I'm the one making the decision, and if *I* like it, the company buys it. Companies then keep my happy and send me the full software. I ignore any software weith restrictions. A few weeks later they phone me and ask "Are you using it?" I either them it wasn't appropriate or that, yes, purchase order being done right now - thanks for the evalution. I am not going to lie to anyone on the phone on behalf of my company - and any boss worth having would not ask you to either. So there is no risk (in 99% of cases) that a programmer is using the software but claims not to be.
*Applause*. Thank you, thank you.
I run zone alarm. I don't want my info going out unless I say it can. If you run a "download installer", I have no clue what that program is sending back to you. So I will refuse to download it. (an example is quicktime)
If you have a file that you download that consists of a self-extracting install (installshield or whatever), then I'll download it. The first time it attempts to connect to the net, I'll simply tell zonealarm to not allow it to connect, and tell it to never ask again. Same when I run your program.
If the program refuses to run w/o phoning home, I'll e-mail a note to a friend who does spyware sniffing to have him either validate that it does contain spyware, or not. And if not, I'll stick it under a microscope and hack it to disable phoning home. THEN I will run it and test it out.
And, for the record, YES, I do register my shareware, and YES, I DO actually use trial periods as a trial period... and when I do buy stuff that had a trial period, and wanted to phone home, I'll tell the vendor that I will only make the purchase if he can garentee in writing that the software won't phone home.
That's my $.02
That attitude is why you will never sell me your software. I'm not getting something for free - I'm giving you the opportunity to sell me your software. Why should I give you valuable information up front as well? You seem to have forgotten who is serving who here. The above reply is the most important comment I've read so far on the whole discussion. I think this is the key - view the evaluation as an advertisement, not as a freebie.
Here's a great example -- what is this stupid "confirm" thing and why does it not work right? (Not to mention asking for Male/Female -- probably so they can sell my address to pr0n spammers.) I put in all my info, it tells me I have to confirm, so I hit confirm and nothing happens. NOTHING! I hit register again, and it tells me I need to confirm. Often, there is no working link to let someone know the page is broken. Do I ever return?
NOPE!
Don't keep your source to yourself. Give away the source so that I can tinker with it. Let me give it to my friends. Let me sell it as well.
You will make more money from support from the proprietary software - believe me.
Thanks.
Richard Stallman.
(BTW - I'm now in your business, as your main competitor, I'm selling support on a modified version of your software - this one runs on GNU/Linux and has VB removed and replaced with Lisp)
Do NOT use a adress like joe@yah00, make up an invalid one like JOE@JOE.JOEJOE. The real joe will not apreciate what you're doing, dude!
What kills me about so many software sites is that the software that they are trying to promote is so poorly explained. I may get it in my head that I want to try something that might make me some money. Oh, but that is another rant "software should be worth more than it costs". Don't assume that because everyone at your company knows what your product is good for. And 30 days make the impossible assumption that I want to stop and dedicate my energies to your product right NOW. If I need something I am going to buy it outright. If I am trialing something that means that I don't need it but, I might want it. So give me some time to figure out how to use it and deploy it. Short evaluations mean that while I am looking at a several hour download I have to contemplate whether or not I really want to dedicate the time it is going to take to figure out its immediate usefullness. Then the phone rings and I realize I dont have time for this and move on.
Hi, I like how omnigroup lets you try out their software. No registration, instant download, you can get a trial version as often as you like (its only valid for one day). Look at their store to see what I mean.
Totally hassle free. If you need the software, you'll buy it (eventually).
CU
Christian
We had an IT auditor in from our corporate offices last year, and he wanted to check several user's machines. One of the ones he checked was someone I had warned (being in charge of our Apache proxy server) about browsing porn about 6 months before (I was trying to be nice... we were having performance issues, I had been looking at the logs... saw several people and basically told them "don't do that... HR hasn't asked us to report anything offensive.. YET. consider it a friendly warning."). The auditor looked at the person's history in NetScape.. two weeks later, the employee was 'terminated'.
Suddenly (although we had recommended it a year before, and they didn't want to spend the money), there was money to spend on software to limit peoples access to 'objectionable' material. I downloaded several eval packages, installed one to check out... and HR promptly came back with "we don't have time to evaluate software, just buy whatever you have installed". Bam, $10k spent. The software *does* work fine... but there were many cheaper alternatives out there that would've worked.
'no time to evaluate'.
I'll tell you whats *MORE* annoying... I recently had to download a package to implement disk quota's on our Win2k server, just as a test to eval it and make sure it would work. I also had a lot of other 'high priority' projects going on, so it took me like a week and 1/2 to actually get the time to install it and play with it for a few hours... but, EVERY SINGLE DAY after I downloaded it, the salesperson was emailing me asking me how the eval was going.
Sorry, but after years of budget cuts and downsizing, we are stretched very thin (backup? cross training? think again). Sometimes I download the eval because the boss gave me the project, just so I can say I did *something* and then when the boss asks the next week I can say "well, I've spent a lot of time on projects A, B, and C, which are 'priority'... I've got the software but just haven't had the time to look at it yet... whats my priority?" (to which, of course, it winds up that *everything* is a priority, as usual). we've had an open req to hire someone for coming up on 6 months now, and they keep putting it on 'hold' -- we try to do our best to push the "we don't have time for everything, fill the open req and we'd have another body to help cover the load".
Also, don't presume that some other person in the department downloaded the eval with a 30-day key, which then expired... and that I'm just registering to get another key so we get another 30 days to look at it. On the proxy software, it was like two weeks into the eval before I actually *had* the time to customize the "blocked" pages and to give a quick little demo to HR. Then, of course, I was an "expert" on the software (total time actually playing with it at that point, maybe 4-5 hours).
Whenever I go to the point of registering as if I were planning on buying or trying a piece of software and yet I don't actually carry through it means that the vendor didn't have all the information I needed available on the website. Quite often I'll register with a fake email address to check and see what the pricing schemes look like, what it will cost to ship a product, or just to see if I can glean any extra information from the website after registering.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Okay, okay, okay. We all know that registration and giving out your goddamn email address turns all of you
</rant>
BTW, if you expect users to wait for a login to arrive in their email, then you shouldn't be surprised that many of them don't bother with the download. And, on top of that, you shouldn't be surprised to discover that, of those who do download the software, a good portion will not bother installing it anyway (it's free! I'll download it! Done. Aw fuckit).
As an 'about to give up' shareware programmer I'd say forget about the free downloads. Make 'em pay up front and you'll know that they'll install it. Offer them an MONEY BACK GUARENTEE and have one of 'dem statistical accountancy types figure out how much will actually be reclaimed.
What really burns my ass, as a shareware programmer (who also does open source linux kernel programming BTW), is the fucking attitude of these cheap bastard /. types who send me email, critisize my placement of a button in a dialog box, demand a never ending stream of features and then bitch about the fact that it's shareware. I'd be a fucking millionaire if I had a dollar for every time I heard one of these cheap bastards say, "add this feature and I'll register your software, otherwise forget it". This is why your business model will never work. When I started the business as shareware, I and other shareware programmers, thought we were being altruistic by offering the ability to try before you buy (I started doing this in the late 80's under Windoze 3.1).
Well, good luck, and a big FUCK YOU to all the cheap bastards.
A little late in the process, but MOD ME UP ya bunch of cheap bastards.
:wq
How can I sell more products? Why are my customers fleeing before they ever use my product? Can you please get your enormous crowd of readers to tell me how I can sell more products to them?
I wonder what the responses to this question would be worth to a marketing department...
Badgers? Badgers! We don't need no stinkin' Badgers!
- Nags. If you want permission to pester our readers, forget it. You're out.
- Intrusive Adware. If the ads can't easily be ignored, we find something else. Discreet ads are generally OK.
- Crippleware. If you can't give a healthy dose of features in the trial version, forget it.
- Time limits. Marking this as Shareware is stupid, though. It's a Demo, period.
- Registration. While an annoyance, we make it sure that even our readers can figure it out. No problem for a serious application.
We trust serious SW companies not to release the address list to spammers. Call us optimistic, (we areIn case anyone here does shareware: We see lots of nice little shareware utilities riddled with nags and cripples. Sometimes we have a little talk with the author and convince him that he's much better off with no nags and 6-digit distributions than vice versa.
A serious user will, IMO, not be turned off by being requested to register for the download. I believe you're mainly missing out the folks that wouldn't purchase the application anyway, and this even saves you bandwith.
-Henrik
Hi. I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Go to a site like WinZip
They know how to relese evaluation copies!
Frequently, when I am going to evaluate software, two things are occuring.
First, since there is rarely only one software company creating a solution for any given problem, I will go to Google and download all (or at least a bunch) of software evals for the given solution. It may take me a long time to work through all of them.
Second, if the eval is for a project, I will often download the software when the project is first mentioned or assigned, but there will be plenty of time to get around to the nitty gritty of evaluation. In the meantime, other projects will get near crunch time, and most of my focus will be devoted to the other projects. When I finally get back to the eval (which is typically near its deadline), many of the eval programs will have timed-out.
It is sad to say, but between these two problems, many programs do not get a fair review.
> username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission
If I have an immediate need for software, I'm not going to wait a few hours. I'll have found your competitor's software by that time. If it's not available now, it's not available. Get real!
The question was asked: "Why would you stop short or actually downloading the software?"
;)
Here's a clue: They got it somwehere other than your site!
Truly useful software, reguardless of source, will find itself plastered all over the 'net. Ask youself this: When was the last time I downloaded WinZip from NikoMak? (Just as an example.)
What you might want to ask (and I do mean Ask) is where the client managed to get their copy. After all, Evaluation versions fall into the Shareware category, and get traded like yesterdays' Magic Cards. Anyone that wants it just asks a friend that has it to e-mail/P2P it to them, and there you go.
One piece of Encouraging news for you:
People are going through the motions of registering, despite getting the software elsewhere. This is a HUGE compliment! That, and think of the Bandwidth your company is saving in Not having all those downloads comming off their site!
I'm probably comming off as very snotty here. Sorry. Not Enough Caffene in my system as yet.
As for what ticks me off: Adware. Icon "Infestation". Unwanted TSR installation. Oh, and having my precious resources leeched away by some minor program. Last, but not least would be Memory Leakage and/or poorly written code that ends up acting much like a virus.
I think I've ranted enough now.
For business, the reasons are numerous. First, we can only buy from certain vendors easily. I would really like to get Jasc's Image Robot [I hope this isn't accidentally your company] but our vendor doesn't stock it so I'll do without until I can complain in an I-told-you-so manner that I love so much ... oops ... too much information, eh?
Second, I often find that I can't demonstrate the workflow I'm trying to prove with the demo. Sometimes this is a problem with crippleware and sometimes with it being hard to implement. Image Robot, for instance, looks like it'll do what I need but I haven't bothered to implement a full flow because it would be hard.
Third and so on--things other people have already mentioned. Changing priorities and the like, loss of interest, loss of job, etc.
As for software for personal use:
First, the off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis is very important. Often I'll want a piece of software for just one little thing so even $30 might be too high for that purpose. Similarly I may only need it once.
Second, time and interest change. I may have enough time to download and install some demo, but I might not ever get back to checking it. If I go to run it and it's expired, oh well. Sometimes I just lose interest too.
I've got another specific example--Ultralingua Collegiate Dictionary I want an electronic dictionary to give me all the features I already have in American Heritage but will run on OSX [there, I let the cat out of the bag ... I'm a Mac guy.] I already own American Heritage and really love the Word Hunter [definition searching utility] feature. Ultralingua, while slick, fast, and OSX-aware doesn't do that so I'm just not interested. I'll wait for Houghton Mifflin to pop out another version and buy that. So ... I downloaded the demo and didn't buy the product.
Finally, and in both personal and business, software with bugs will stop me from buying. It's very odd ... if you are kind enough to allow people to try-before-buying, they'll be critical of crashes and bugs that they'd just begrudgingly work around if they just bought the stupid software without trying it. The trick is that you never release a beta as a demo. Betas are betas and should be full-blown and come with a big benefit to the user for being your tester. Demos are bug-free and designed to say that you're a competent company. Nobody likes testing software for nothing ... just ask any Windows user ;-) [ok, ok ... or Mac user or Palm user or anything user]
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Why is it that for quite a large number of "Evaluation Registrations" when one enters some yahoo or hotmail address specifically created for this purpose, the amount of spam climbs astronomically a short while after having being dumb enough to enter one's email address during the registration?
Pissed off sales staff? Companies hoping for a quick buck? I don't know. I do know that this is one of the reasons that I like OSS - no one comes round to pester me with unwanted questions , in general the OSS crowd take my privacy seriously instead of treating me with contempt, in general they provide screenshots(this is such a huge factor it cannot be streesed enough), and it is very pleasing to be able to mail a developer personally thanking him for his hard work and to get a mail back where the guy shows his appreciation.
You have all of their information from the registration process. Why ask us? Call them and find out.
I have skipped a download or two .. because of time issues .. I run across a app which could be useful .. I need to reg and get a 30 day window .. I look at my schedual and say "this will be at anopther version level by the time I can get to it .. I'll snag it later .."
/don
-m
Most people willing to try new software don't want to have to wait a "few hours" for a confirmation and download link. It's all about instant gratification. Us computer nerds hate to wait. What stops your company from sending a confirmation immediately after someone signs up?
--Always, I mean never..., No I mean always check your references.--
Try this, it works beautifully:
Cashier: ...And can I have your last name please?
You: No.
See how easy that is? Even if you need to pay with a check or card, if you don't want them to put your name in their database, they'll respect that.
I don't know if the article subject's software is consumer, professional, complex, etc but 30 days sounds like just barely long enough for even many consumer evaluation scenarios, and not nearly long enough for significant business evaluation.
Unless software evaluation is part of both your job description and part of your performance review process, it is dead last on the list of things to do.
Which means in my typical week I might be able to fit in maybe 4 hours of evaluation time. In 30 calendar days that's maybe the equivilent of about 10 serious hours looking at something. It could be more or less depending on need and time, but it doesn't feel like very much, especially if the package is very complex and requires either a lot of learning, configuration, long run time or extensive usage to properly evaluate it. And this isn't even counting actually testing the thing in some formal manner.
90 days sounds much, much more realistic and I would hope that with proper contacts that an open-ended evaluation might be possible as well.
Think for example of an SNMP package -- configuration and info gathering could take a long time. Analysis of what it does is time-based -- you need to run the thing for a month to gather enough data to see if the package is telling you anything meaningful. This whole process could take 2 months, longer if the evaluation and usage takes multiple people.
Once you "register" for the "free" download, you receive a barrage of "announcements" from the vendor.
Point: I am EVALUATING the product. That does not mean that I want to buy the product or does not even indicate if the product is appropriate for my uses. I get so tired of the perpetual followups and emails (sometimes for years afterwards) from the evaluations. Frnakly, most software is simply not worht the time.
(Oh, adding the "Sorry, we practice good spam prevention techniques and will gladly remove you from our list" is not acceptable. Don't send me the email in the first place.)
I don't want to spend time downloading anything that I can't get the source to and isn't free. Not $0, but I want to be able to edit anything about it, and give it to my friends and stuff. If it isn't GPL I don't want it!
The GPL makes software more like your mom. Free and open to all.
The thing that turns me off about evaluation software is having to buy it. I usually go find the crack or the serial number and enjoy the program for free.
Just this past week, we replaced our "freeware" product with a 30-day demo. The key reason for this decision is that the 30-day demo comes with full support. The freeware version did not come with full support in case something in the software blew up during normal usage. This was a blessing for the technicians who provided the support because too much time was being spent on the phone with the "freeloaders" in giving them the support which was not granted to them.
I don't download shareware because I can only use it for 30 days or whatever. nag screens. evilness. there's a reason why I use linux. since it seems your company is nowhere close to making the source open, you might consider giving away a stripped down version of whatever software you're selling.
1) Registration. I NEVER give out my phone or real email, relying on disposable email addys if needed. I made the mistake of giving the Cold Fusion folks my phone once... 25 calls and two months later I know I will NEVER do business with them thanks to their harrassement.
2) You really think people are going to wait for their download. I won't even wait for a slow page, what makes you think I will wait 2 or more hours just to get the link? They are all competitive markets, so there is always something else available to check out or try out.
3) Do you know of a single protection scheme that actually works. By letting your software out there in fully functional form, only requiring somekind of unlock 'key' that is acquired supposedly after purchase, you are loosing tall dollars. I have never understood why a company would do this... it is so easy to unlock all software that comes in full eval form. Crippleware is better IMHO, even though it doesn't show off the full functionality.
(1) Most trial packages will install cleanly, but uninstall is often a nightmare. This is a bigger issue with Windows that other operating systems, but uninstalls are never to be taken lightly.
(2) The stability of Windows is inversely proportional to the number of packages installed. Uninstalling doesn't help the stability issue.
(3) Some of the setup procedures prompt for way too much personal contact information. The last thing I want is to get plugged into someone's perpetual telemarketing machine. I have seen this happen often enough to the point where I don't bother with trial versions of software.
(4) I have seen too many examples of trial versions that had undocumented limitations in a addition to the 30-day limit.
(5) Since you only get 30 days, it makes sense to wait until you actually have time to evaluate the package. If I install the software and then get busy with other things, the 30 days runs out, and I still get stuck with the problems as noted in (1) and (2) above.
(6) For any given application, I look for open source software first. I can evaluate indefinitely. If it's lousy I throw it away. If it works I keep it running. Either way, I pay nothing and there are no annoying telemarketing salesmen to deal with!
There are many occasions that I have filled out a form to register for evaluation software, only to have the script tell me that my download information will be sent to me. Dangit I want to be able to evaluate it NOW! What turns me off of eval software downloads? Mostly the registration crap. So heres some tips. 1) Dont you dare keep calling me. Once or twice is fine, after that you will get blacklisted. Simple, your software doesn't do anything that darned special. Nobodies does. And I will go to someone that doesn't annoy me. 2) Dont do the bait and switch crap. I am not buying blankets or booze in Tijuana, and I am not buying a car from some loser salesman, set the price and put it upfront. None of these flaky pricing games. Again, you tick me off I am going somewhere else. 3) Don't get your shorts in a bunch. I have other work to do beside evaluate your software. I AM THE CUSTOMER! We work on MY timetable not yours. (You quota software guys reading this?). 4) No 30 days is NOT enough time to fully evaluate your product. Again, I have other work that is critical to our company, give me the time I need to check this thing out fully. 5) No, a simple download of one license of your product is not worth $300.00. Give me something tangible for the money. In particular, if your product is over $100.00 per seat I expect paper documentation and an installation CD. 6) If I think that your product is close, but not close enough to fill my need. Give me a way to tell you how I feel it falls short so that you can either show me where I goofed using it, or you can have the authors fix it as well. Of course you are always able to tell me simply that your product won't do what I want and we can be done. Okay so I got wordy. I honestly hope this helps...
If it is not free for non-commercial use then forget it. How are you to evaluate software under a time constaint?? Free for non-commercial use is a big boon for the vendor. They get thousands of people to evaluate it, plus they get a trained work force for the companies they represent at no extra cost. This is totally a no-brainer. To bad the majority of commercial software companies think with their wallets and no their ... Sell more software make it free to the public. Especially Colleges and Universities who train the admins of the future!!!
Its simple really. If someone wants to preview your software, then usually they have a need for it NOW. if you show up a few **hours** later with a userid/pd, then they have already moved on to another piece of software that they could start using immediately.
Speed up the userid to a few minutes and you'll see more people d/l the software.
From a person who owns a business who sells software i can tell you that yes you need forms. But you dont need to require EVERY SINGLE peice of info. In fact i require non info, but if you have to send a reg key you need to require a email address at the very least.
And yes the whiners here will say, but i dont want to spend 5 seconds filling out my email. Well guess what. Software companies are in the mood to make $$$. Dont make money and you wont see that software there in a year. Crack it and you wont see that software there in a year.
The computer business is the only place where theft is legal, or at the very least not chased. When you grow up and get a real job in a fortune 500 company you learn that licensing makes sense because without it, you would all still be playing with 1970 software.
Its a simple fact, this is a business and thinking its a playground is just a teenage view of the world you work in.
And that's the bottom line. If I want to try out a new piece of software, the company that created it has about 4 minutes from the moment my peabrain cranium decides to download it to get it to me and have it installed.
/dev/null in the .forward.
I am lazy and yet impatient. If a web site takes more than 5 seconds before I can tell that it's doing anything, I try to reload it and I give it another 5-10 seconds. If it still doesn't work, I go somewhere else. Precious seconds of my life are ticking away staring at a computer screen.
So if I want to download and try out some software, I want to get it to my machine now and use it now and if anybody asks for my email address, they get a garbage one. I'm the sys admin for a mail server, I just set up new addresses and give them out and put
I don't want people holding my personal information. I don't want people sending me email or hassling me. I just want to download and try out some friggin piece of software and I haven't found anything yet that's worth more than about 5 minutes of effort to get. If the normal legal channels of obtaining an evaluation copy are annoying in even the slightest way I'll just go find somebody with an illegal copy and try theirs.
Now, I'm not a total cretin. If the software does something useful that I like and I find after a few months that I'm still using it, I'll register it. I've paid for ZMud, Music Match, PhotoShop - I have money to spend on good software, and I'm willing to spend it.
But not after 30 days. Not even 45. I'll plays with a piece of software for a few months off and on just because it's new software. It takes me about 3-6 months to decide that yes, I do use this thing a lot and I'll probably continue to do so, it's stable, I understand and like all the features, and I'm willing to part with $15 to $50 or $150 to stay honest.
However, if the evaluation copy expires after 30 days, I won't buy it. If major features are disabled, I don't buy it. That's like letting me test drive a car as long as I never check the radio, air conditioning, whipers, look in the trunk, or take it out on the highway. Garbage. I want to see what all it can do and I want to see if it's done well.
And like I said, I need more than a month or two to decide a piece of software will fit my needs. Three-four months would be nice, I usually takes a solid six months to make a purchasing decision on software unless I have excellent word-of-mouth assurances on it. This is just my paranoia as a consumer. It took me a year to decide on a new car, it took me 8 months to buy a new TV, and I've been shopping for a new desktop PC since last summer.
I'm happy to spend my dollars if I'm sure that I'm getting the value I want for my cash. I imagine most people are similarly paranoid about getting screwed over, although possibly not miserly as I am.
But regardless, that's why I don't often go on to download evaluation software. If I see "Give us your email address," forget it. Same if I see '30 day evaluation' copy. I know I'll use it for 30 days and then quit using it.
I don't want free software (well, I do, but I know that's generally unrealistic) - I just want quality software and personally it takes me more than 4 weeks to decide that something is good. I can decide in 15 minutes that it's a piece of shit, but to decide it's worth paying for? Give me a few months.
It takes you hours to send an email back that could easily be generated in seconds with a username and password?
It's pretty obvious to me exactly what the problem is here. Who wants to wait several hours for you to get around to sending them an email with a username and password to download your product. I sure as hell don't want to, especially if there is a competitor's product available without such a beauracratic red-tape wait.
Your company is a little clueless when it comes to customer service, eh?
It's my strong belief that software should be able to be put on a disk, stuck in a drawer for 5 years, watch the company die, wait another 5, then still work. The problem is that companies have the "we'll be around forever" idea that just doesn't work.
Also, what brand of dog food I use is NOT important for you to know. Let me try the software, and if I wanna pay for it you'll have my billing information shortly. And yes, I do pay for shareware (Nero, Musicmatch Jukebox, mIRC, Opera...). They got my info after I decided to buy.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Make it easier to thief is what many seem to want. If you're going to thief stuff (like shareware/trialware) at least be frickin' honest about it. So far I see people trying to justify themselves when they know damn well that the software will be on their systems for months or years before they think about registering, if ever. ..That is if they haven't run a crack on it yet, or explained it away by saying "I only use it occasionally" and "I can't afford it". Those of you who are playing this game aren't fooling anyone here.
Recently we have started making 30 day evaluation versions of our software available
.031415926
Ok, First of all, 30 day evaluation is OK, but 60-90 would be better. However, I know you're trying to make a sale, so ok, 30 day evaluation. But the real question is, is the software crippled in ANY way?! If it is, then you're going to loose some people. When I evaluate a piece of software, I need to see EVERYTHING, otherwise, what kind of evaluation is it REALLY??
An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission.
MISTAKE! I think a few people have commented on this one. A FEW HOURS?!?! If I'm looking for something, then I most likely NEED IT RIGHT NOW! Think about it, what are these people going to do while they wait for your username and password? They're going to continue searching for similar software, in other words, YOUR COMPETITORS! Make the registration stuff required before they download, but make the download available IMMEDIATELY after they register. DON'T MAKE THEM WAIT!
Just to recap, if it's evaluation, make sure they can FULLY evaluate the software if you really want to win them over. Make it REALLY EASY to obtain the evaluation software.
There's my
I don't enter an email address because many company's give out your email address to other company's. Often it's not made clear that you need a valid email address and that the password will be sent to your email address until after you have entered an address and submitted the form. In this case I may use an old address I don't check or even an invalid address so that I don't get spammed.
What are the conditions under which the evaluation software is released, and when do you discover what they are?
Frequently I find that I get all to way to reading the license before I decide not to download something. Sometimes it's because the demo seems too crippled to be useful. Sometimes it's because the evaluation time is too short. I don't spend my days evaluating your software. A 30 day evaluation license can easily turn into a few hours to evaluate something. And it depends on what the software is. Some software is only useful at certain times.
If the software won't let me save files, then it must be something that I can thoroughly evaluate in one session. If it features reports, then it had better be able to generate the reports (nothing wrong with an "Evaluation Use Only" in large skeletal letters being embedded in the background, though).
Too often the demo-ware is so crippled that it's useless for all purposes. I frequently won't even install it from CDs that came with my system. Not because I know that it's bad, but because such a large percentage of the demoware that I've installed has been so much worse than useless. But I do still go looking.
Another thing that can happen is that the price is hidden until the very last minute. That can easily cause me to just abandon processing, but I can easily imagine someone who felt angrier filling in bogus information. (Note I said angrier. I am always at least irritated at companies that make you jump through hoops to find out what their prices are.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You probabely asked for an email adress early on, before You told them that they will get the username and password sent through email. They just entered bogus adresses hoping that they can directly download the file off the web in one of the next screens. This was possible for StarOffice 5.2 for example.
Check those unanswered emails for adresses like:
No@spam.net, fxxkspammers@yourxxxx.de
This wasn't so hard, was it?
Being yet another far-too-busy person, I often find that when I download time-limited eval software, I use it briefly and then have to go do something else. "I'll check that out some more later when I have a chance", I think.
Of course, "later when I have a chance" never comes. So I end up with all kinds of time-expired eval software scattered around my machine. I find that I want to really do a lot of work with software before I can tell if it's worth my spending money on. I don't usually have time in a given 30 day period to do thatm, believe it or not (and if 25 days have passed since I last used it, I'm not going to start evaluating something that's just going to break in a week).
I much prefer using a "lite" version of something freely to see if maybe I want to upgrade to a "pro" version that costs money.
So now I don't bother to download time-limited software, because I know I'll never have a chance to evaluate 95+% of it!
Cheers,
Carl
..."a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission." A few hours after submission? Seriously, that's probably your biggest problem.
/. rants about not wanting to input one's email address, most people will give that up if they feel they are going to get something of value in return. However, one of the beauties of the web is that it's instantaneous. If you make people wait hours to download trial software, especially after they've given you all their info, you will lose them.
Despite the
By the time their email from you arrives, they have gone to your competitors sites, downloaded their software trials and have forgotten all about you.
We're busy people and shit happens. If I install a 30 day eval and run it the first day and then not look at it again untill a month and a half later, I am not done an evaluation but there I am uninstalling the software.
IBM has a limited evaluation edition of Visual Age for Java that limited you to 500(?) classes. That's a reasonable limit and enough "usage" for a thorough evaluation.
30 - days that you actually start the program would be fine.
lunky> c++; lunky> do{;}
Sheesh. If I want to download a piece of software I want it now, not when you feel like sending me a registration code.
Non sequitor - you are assuming that if you didn't pay for something, you must have stolen it. I have many things I didn't pay for; I've never paid for sunshine, for oxygen, for my dogs (rescued mutts)...more relevantly, I've never paid for the Pythagorean Theorm, the Four Noble Truths, or the value of pi to ten significant digits.
Who said it was? Theft of service is a real thing, when it deprives others of that service. Copying, however, deprives no one of anything.
A century ago, if you copied a poem out of a book no one would mind. Today, if you copy a song off of a copy-protected CD, the DCMA stormtroopers may come after you.
Who said theft and murder on the high seas was ok?
Oh! You meant making copies without a permission slip. That's something that's here to stay, love it or lump it. It's time to accept that reality and move on to the question of how, given that, creators of interesting strings of bits can still get paid (and thus keep eating in order to create more interesting bit strings). Neither theft nor piracy has anything to do with it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
When I'm looking around for software to try out I'm usually on a schedule, or need something right away. By the time your hours-late email shows up I've already continued searching for other similar software, downloaded your competitors versions, and tried them out. If one of them fits my requirements why would I bother downloading yours hours after the fact?
3.1: Network installers; Often times I want to try software on my home PC that has a far slower network connection that my office desktop. Also, I dont want your software to initiate any network connections for me.
Just provide one compressed installer/archive or you're gone.
Quite often I've registered just to get a key, when I've lost or forgotten our company evaluation key, or when a friend gave me a link to software on his server he wanted me to try out.
Release it under the GPL. You'll save yourself the headaches of registration, and by allowing people to have the source, you will end up with a way better product.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
I have the right to know what they need it for. How many web pages asking for a valid email have you seen that tell you what they will do with it?
Asking for me to provide a valid email address, my home address, and my company's name on the page before they force me to create an "account" with a user id and password, before they take me to a download page that tells me that the real download address will be sent to my email address doesn't really give me that warm fuzzy feeling.
I'm one of those who registers for evaluation downloads fairly regularly, but never get the software. Why? Because of our company's firewall policies, that's why. No FTP. If you want me to download your stuff after I register, make sure I have a choice of both FTP and HTTP downloads. If you're not bright enough to do that much, then your software probably isn't too good and I won't bemoan the fact that I didn't get to try it out.
The funniest thing, is I can't even download a new version of our firewall software because their default settings block me out of their FTP site. Morons.
For home, I don't like to get on people's SPAM lists, so I either don't download the eval copy or I give fake information. If the product really is as good as it says it is, I'll buy it when I can afford it and need it.
For work, evaluations are sometimes speculative -- we don't know for certain that we want a product until someone has had time to play with one a bit to see what it could do for us (the sales literature usualy overstates things a tad). In the past, I've been peppered with sales calls from sales people who wanted to make a sale to me, which I find very annoying if it was a speculative evaluation. Therefore, I only give true information if I'm the one making the purchasing decision and I know for sure we will be purchasing something. Otherwise I make up fake information and figure if we're interested, we'll call them when we are ready. The only exception to this is if the company claims they won't send email to me or call me or sell/share/give-away my information, AND if the company is one I believe will actually keep their word and won't change their mind.
I'm frequently asked to look at and evaluate various pieces of software. Usually, this is in preparation for organization-wide deployment and support.
However, <em>that's not my job</em>. It's a tiny little part of it. The server's broken, a user needs to have his machine fixed, and I need to evaluate your software. Guess which one goes to the bottom of my priority list.
When I actually have time to do evaluations, I work on two levels at once. I'm busy reading trade magazines, web sites, and usenet to <em>find</em> products, and as soon as I find one, I download it. I usually get an hour or two at a time to do this before something else grabs my attention, so unless your key arrives within 5 minutes, I've found another product to download and test. I don't get back to the evals for days at a time. If your registration process made me wait for more than a few minutes, I figure that I can wait a while to test the product, so it could be a few weeks before I finish gathering all of your competitors' products to testing and deploying yours.
If one of your fucking salesweasels has the nerve to call me the next day, you go to the bottom of the list. I'll happily tell the weasels that by making me wait for a registration key, they made me put off testing your product for a few weeks. If you call again, I mention that we include "harassing sales calls" in the "Service and Support" part of the evaluation, and every sales call reduces that company's score.
Test time. I have to dig through my email to find the key. Great. It's a 30 day key, and I downloaded your stuff 25 days ago. It'd better wow me in the next hour, since I probably won't have time for another look before the key expires. If I've heard so much as a peep from your sales people (i.e. the usual every-other-day "Didja try it yet? Do you like it? Huh? Huh?" bit), I'm not going to call and ask for a new key. I'm going to give it a zero for functionality ("Can't test it. Bad key.")and give your company a zero for service and support (for annoying me) and encourage my boss to go with a less annoying competitor.
Want to impress me? Do the following:
-Don't make me wait for a key
-If you must make me wait, give me a reasonably long time to test. Go ahead and lock the product to my domain or a small number of users if you want. Use the wait time to give me a custom demo copy.
-In your registration form, provide a "have one of your sales associates give me a call" checkbox, and <em>honor it</em>.
-Send follow-up literature by mail, and <em>make it useful</em>. I have half an hour to read it (well, I'll go back and read all of it if you're one of our top choices, but until then...). Glossy pictures of somebody else's server room and more than one buzzword per sentence won't impress me. Specs, limitations, and pricing will. Understand that in some organizations, the managers actually listen to the techies.
-Ask when we plan on deploying. If the answer is 6+ months, don't call me next week asking what I thought of your product. Call me in 3 months and ask if I had any problems.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
This might be a redundant post, but I don't think the point can be made clearly enough:
As an developer and an IT professional who evaluates plenty of software each year for purchase, my biggest turn-off is companies that force you to register your name, company info, email address, and get a username/password etc simply to download some lime-limited evaluation copy.
I very much dislike giving out personal information. I also dislike having to spend the time to fill out forms that violate my privacy. Finally, I dislike being burdened with YET ANOTHER username/password pair that I will never remember.
I never give accurate information on these forms, and the email address I use is always a one-off throw-away account.
Unless the product is obviously compelling, I don't bother with it if there is some awful registration process like the above. Even if the product is obviously compelling, I will check out all the competitors that don't have an annoying registration evaluation process first.
I have even recommended products for purchase (that were for our purposes equally good) based on whether or not they had an annoyed registration process for the eval software.
-OT
I don't pay for useful software. Only gaming. Hah.
... incessant followup calls from sales droids.
If I like the product, I'll call THEM. If I don't, no amount of pleading will change my mind.
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
...I ain't gonna waste my time downloading the shareware version. I'll just find a copy on a warez site somewhere where all I have to do is click on it. :)
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
I can't speak for others, but this is probably why I didn't download your software:
1. User comes to IS (me) and asks for software that does whatever. They ususally need it yesterday.
2. I search Google, Dave Central maybe, relevant newsgroups, talk to peers, look at reviews if they are available.
3. I register for eval copies of software (maybe yours) and download what I can.
4. I look them over with users, decide one is good enough, purchase a copy of software, go on to other tasks.
5. I get email from your company with user/pass for evaluation.
Yes, when it is non-mission-critical stuff, decisions may be made that quickly.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Many have mentioned the major, obvious problem with demoware. If you can find a fix for them, you will be miles ahead of the competition, namely:
30 days is not enough time (I do use my computer for other things, you know).
Uninstall is a nightmare. It should be seamless and leave no traces at all. No, not even a file that says I d/l'ed a demo once. If I feel I have to reinstall to evaluate 30 more days, you shouldn't stop me.
Give me a save-disabled demo and I will give you an install-disabled customer. Nice try, see ya later.
One problem for me, that I haven't seen mentioned yet, is what do you do with the files you created? A lot of SW appropriate for a demo is complicated and if it has any power at all, hopefully you will create something useful with it. Then what?
I would like it if after the demo expired, I could still somehow use a file I created. Why would I use "real" data to generate a file that can't be opened ever again?
Now, you may think that's stupid, that you have no intention of allowing users to use your demo product to create a file that can be viewed (but not modified) or exported after the demo expires.
But, I can assure you that an orphaned file demo guarantees I won't even attempt to explore your product's features. It may be the greatest thing around, but I'm never going deep enough to find out, and you will have lost a sale to a customer who needs your stuff but doesn't know it.
I think it's also important to realise what the process involves. You have me interested enough to jump through a few hoops. Anybody in sales & marketing will tell you that it's very expensive to get there with a customer.
Now (after I agree to a trial), I have a real-world experience with your product and your company. What happens next determines whether the sale goes through or you have to spend the major portion of your marketing budget to get to the same place with another customer. So work with me on this, okay?
If the bean counters balk at that much power in your demos, you should consider offering a working previous version to evaluators, or offer a "lite" version. If I can use it, I will upgrade sooner or later, and your installed base grows. Last time I checked, that's the secret to getting market dominance.
If I'm looking for a solution, give me enough info up front to make the first-pass decision. Pricing and licensing are essential.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Hmm.. I hate to tell you man, but this one isn't too aweful hard to figure out. Obviously if they're not downloading -- but still bothering to register, they're not downloading for a reason. What could that be ? PerHAPS the fact that they've ALREADY downloaded it once before, and now are supplying fake information for a 2nd (3rd, 4th, or more) password and username so they can "re-evaluate"
"When I eval stuff for work (software developer), I don't mind at all registering my work info. It's the same way with conferences - I'm happy to give out my info."
Good point, I wouldn't mind giving out your work info either. So, what was that e-mail addess?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
If you are selling software to be used in a professional business environment (or moreso in an educational or government institution), then piracy is less of a concern to your company. I've worked at a number of private businesses and none of them have condoned employees pirating software. The motivation for this is that in the event that they get caught, a business stands to lose a great deal more than if they'd just ponied up the dough for licenses.
Here's an example. Recently, I downloaded an evaluation copy of Rhino's object rendering software. I have yet to install this copy, because it comes with a limited trial period and I haven't had the time yet to give it a true trial by fire. Anyway, since downloading, I have recieved numerous emails asking me how I like it. Well, if I buy it, then they'll know, else please leave me alone. I had to go through a long reg process, but the pics on the website looked good, so I figured I'd go through the garbage. Now, if you've used Rhino, then you know that this is pretty heavy-handed software we're talking about; its not Microsoft Paint. A serious user would have to take time to learn how to use it, or even take a course on the software.
The point is, why should I have to be bothered by emails and long reg processes? This software is for pros. Pro shops are going to buy it legitimately, because piracy is not worth the risk in the legitimate business world (and in the illegitimate business world, they'll crack your eval copy if it is in any way possible). If home users download this software, and they decide to pirate it, then what does Rhino lose? The home pirates aren't going to buy the software anyway, because it is quite expensive, and pirates don't buy software, they steal it. The crackers who grab this software will welcome the challenge of cracking it, and they may be successful at doing so. So, what happens if somebody cracks or pirates this software for their own home use? Well, they'll play around with the software, and some of them may be interested enough to actually learn how to use the software. The end result is, Rhino didn't acutally lose any revenue, but they did gain people who could use a legitimate copy of their software in a business setting. They gained a user, and when it comes to specialized pro-grade software, it is important for a company to have people trained in its use.
I may use my hotmail address to retrieve the password..but my hotmail is full of spam I've received from signing up for other trials etc. Therefore, I may not actually receive the password or be able to find it in all the other spam.. OR...
If I *do* receive the password, I decide not to download because, knowing it's a trial version and I'll need to remove it from my system at some point, I decide it's too much trouble to remove later on.
Generally, if I'm downloading s/w, it's either something free that I can keep or I'll research it first and just go out and buy the whole shebang.
"What is originality? Undetected plagiarism." - William Ralph (Dean Inge)
I'm looking at CAD and milling software right now. I've looked at a variety of software and have settled on what CAD software I want but I'm still uncertain about the milling software. The reason has everything to do with the nature of what I've downloaded so far.
Rhino's CAD software comes fully functional for 25 saves. That is, it does absolutely everything the purchased software does but you're limited to 25 saves. You can check out how every function works, find the bugs and see if there's a reasonable work around and in general, have an excellent idea of whether or not the software does what you need it to do. Rhino's a definite buy for me.
Contrast that to the milling software. Now I have my sample Rhino file and I want to feed it to the milling software. How easy is it to do that, how good is the cnc code coming out the other end? I don't know. Every single piece of milling demo software I've found so far either turns out to be a quicktime movie showing me how they intend it to be used or the software is limited to using some demo files they've provided. That's worth squat as a demo. It doesn't tell me if the software will work the way I want it to work or if there are show stopper bugs in the feature sets I'm likely to use. I don't for a second doubt that the demo's will be gee-whiz, whiz-bang, ain't-it-cool. But what I really want to know is will it really work?
I'm not too eager to lay out $500-1000 for software that the developer isn't comfortable letting me test-drive at 90 mph on 45 mph curves.
So want a successful demo program? Copy Rhino's.
After I've decided I don't need the software, and removed it, I've seen some trialware not uninstall completely, preventing another trial version from working.
username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission
That's your problem!
I only download evaluation software that I need to complete a particular task (for example, if I have to telnet to a server I go out and search for a telnet client.) So I go on the net searching for a program I need. When I find a piece of software that does what I need, I stop searching. After all, it is only evaluation software so quality doesn't really matter as long as it does what I need. The problem your having is people are searching the net for a pice of software that does what they need it to. They find yours and register expecting the u:p to come any minute. After five minutes they get tired of waiting and decide to search some more while they wait for your email. Often times they find some other piece of software that they can dl immediately and hence they no longer need yours. So a few hours after they have gotten what they need already, your email shows up saying that they can now download your evaluation software. Why download something else when they already have gotten what they needed?
It is not just about putting evaluation software out there on the net. You have to be able to make getting that piece of software as quick and easy as possible. We are spoiled by the web; we want things now, not a few hours from now. If you can't provide that software fast enough then, no matter what the quality of your software is, we'll go out and get what we need somewhere else.
When your starving to death and given a choice between eating maggots immediately or having to wait two hours for a steak, you'll eat maggots now rather than steak later.
Why oh why do I need to register with anyone to EVALUATE software? When I am evaluating software, I am usually evaluating between 5 and 10 software packages at a time. I end up only purchasing ONE. Why do the other 9 companies need to have my info? If I didn't want their product, why would I want them contacting me in the future?
By the way, hours in internet time is like decades in real time. Your e-mail responses should go out within 2 minutes.
-ted
Make it easier to use the eval. Instant download that's unlocked by a key e-mailed to the customer. Make the e-mail automated and instantaneous - if hours go by, the customer might be evaluating a competitor's product.
Non-disclosure agreements
"An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission" [emphasis added]
Unless what you're selling is the one and only tool on the market which does the job it does, in "a few hours" I've found three other products which do what your thing does and I'm busily evaluating them instead. And one of them did the job I need it to. And I've forgotten you even exist.
Unless you really do have a stranglehold on a niche, go have a look around at how your competition deal with evaluation downloads. If some of them are making it even one step eaiser to test their junk, you can bet you're losing sales to them.
Survival of the fittest, if the download is any good and i can get anywhere with it then i might come back if i can't then i won't, so don't make me enter rubbish into your database.
The evaluation period should depend on how long you think people will need to make a serious evaluation of your software. This should inspire the company to make it easier to use and thus you can issue shorter evaluations. Feedback loops.
As a friend of mine say Its one damn thing before another not after!
Its one damn thing before another. (Dick Bird 1999)
Most companies that ask for contact information hound the crap out of you at some later date. Equally annoying are those companies that make you call them to get a price. Unless I really, really, really need a specific piece of software, I don't follow it up if a price isn't listed. If they require an e-mail address, I either don't download it, enter a false address, or if I am feeling mean, enter the name and e-mail address of a co-worker so that they get the phone calls. Man, do I have a funny story about once instance of a salesperson calling a co-worker I did that to....
I bet the reason you failed math is that you couldn't tell the difference between math and logic. 8)
Virg
Anyone out there have a hack for sendmail that will simply blackhole mail bound for a given address? Just drop the connection when the offending RCPT command is received?
/dev/null as the pathname of the mailbox...
If you want to key on sender address or domain, the "access" database can contain a REJECT or DISCARD entry. (With DISCARD, it will seem to be accepted but get silently discarded.)
To blackhole all inbound email to a given address, the simplest solution is simply to alias that address to "/dev/null". If it starts with a "/", sendmail will use the *file* mailer, which will append the message to the file like it does with a normal Unix mailbox. Of course, with
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
would be used to pass you a registration code and that you would have to jump thru yet more hoops.
I've given fake data because I thought that this page was just a portal
and that the next click would be the download page.
When I download software for eval it depends on the amount of information collected. If I have to give much more than my name, company name and email I don't download it. I figure that if I purchase the software then I'll give more detailed information at that time.
/me
An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission.
I once saw a rundown of how many people actually took advantage of mail-in rebates. An obscene percentage simply forgot about it after getting home. The rebate folks are banking on people thinking they are getting a great deal, then forgetting about it later. However, people's lack of attention span is working against you. Give them the ability to download it five minutes from now, rather than two hours from now, and you'll probably get a higher download rate, though not necessarily a higher sales rate.
Those "few hours" are plenty of time for a customer, who wants to get cracking, to go evaluate some other product. IMO, you shouldn't make the customer change gears - if they ask for the software now, give it to them now. Some folks will still not bother to download the software (too much trouble), but if you don't leave their mind for a while and try to come back later, I'll but you get more downloads.
Generally, evaluation software installs all sort of crap into your registry (assuming it's a M$ Windowz box). Look throught your registry after "uninstalling" some evaluation software, you'll find that 99% of the time there are still entries there. There's nothing I hate more than getting "Microsofted" like that. Also, you can usually find some kind of freeware to get the job done.
Myself, I would find another package to do the job within a few hours and would no longer need to download a package that made me go though too much trouble to get a password and username.
But then the spam started. And I realized that commercial software in general is the opposite of what I usually need. If I want something that's just plain fast, the commercial software is slow and "pretty." If I want something that I have a lot of control over, the commercial software takes all control from me in the name of being user-friendly. If I want something that does one thing quite well, I get a package that tries to be an end-all-be-all of computer use (and if I want that I can use fucking emacs).
That all said, I usually stick to writing software myself, or just downloading some free GPL stuff. At least that way I'll HEAR about bugs, or be able to work on fixing them myself.
Commercial software has never been my first choice.
~D
The most bothersome piece of evaluation software that I have used is one where the time limited demo started from the point that the company emailed me the key, because I may not get around to actually installing and using the software for another week or so. And even then I may only get a few hours to play with it. By the time the demo is over, I have only logged a couple of sessions with the software. I would find a piece of software limited by the number of uses or the number of actual days used to be much more capable of providing a period for proper evaluation.
I must be bored.
Another example: When I go to a store do I need to give my credit card etc.. to the sales clerk just to try on a suit?
I'm frequently a person who fills out the original forms on the vendor site, but then doesn't proceed to the download, or to the install. My 4 biggest turnoffs are:
1. When it comes time to do the download, the site doesn't respond to my browser, is extremely slow, demands security be turned off, or shows errors. This happens very often.
2. If during the install, the registration / activation requires an analog phone-line, I'll cancel the install and remove the software.
3. If during the install, the package insists that I turn off my virus checkers, its gone.
4. After the install, if there isn't a de-install available, I revert the system.
Yes it is annoying, even when I worked for em a year or so. But in their defense I will say that they have never abused their database. They tell you they collect it to send out the monthly flyer and that is all they ever do with it.
Too many companies think, well this guy wandered by my website/visited my store, etc. and was stupid enough to leave contact info so we now have permission to spam him silly for eternity. And screw honoring requests to stop.
Democrat delenda est
This is where the name "Justin Case" would come in handy. Maybe "Anita Name"...
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
...is a CD with no time limit, free for personal, educational, and evaluation purposes. Later, when the product is to be used for profit, I expect to pay a fee. If need be, limit the number of connections or otherwise cripple for production use. But do not limit the functionality... that is why I'm trying to learn and/or evaluate the product.
SPAM and excessive phone calls ARE a problem. Perhaps your company would respect that, but your peers and predecessors have already abused the privilege. Sorry. Just make yourself available by phone and email. Also provide good doc on the web site and CD. Marketing fluff is perhaps necessary, but so is good, solid technical information.
I'm glad you asked, but then my question to you and your peers is, "Will this exercise make any difference?"
you all should use donkeyb AT lls.com or bigh AT iryhole.com :)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
Good! Listen up, then, and you'll learn something here.
1.) Personal Data: As was said so eloquently above, I neither know nor trust you. I don't have any real reason to believe you'll keep my email address private, even if you say you will. If your software requires a key code to run, and I have to give you an address to get it, I'll move on to the next package. If and when I decide to buy it, I'll give you my information.
2.) Time: If you think the time necessary to fill out the form is the important part, you're wrong. First is trust (see #1 above), and second is response time. If for some reason I assume your product is worth downloading, but I can't make it run immediately to see if it suits, I'll find another that will. I rarely have time to put any package to an exhaustive test period, and mostly I get these sorts of programs because I need a specific problem solved in short order. If your package can't demonstrate its utility in this regard within my time frame, I'm off to the next.
3.) Profitability: I don't have time to care if you think licensing is the only way to make money. If you think that way, then don't do eval packages. I care only that your software can (or cannot) solve the problem for which I sought it out. That's the real world. If your package does what I need, and does it well enough that it's better than the alternatives, you'll get a check. If it's not around in a year, then that's your software's problem. If you think that fully functional shareware can't make money, I point out that PKWare built a business on it. I like it, I use it, so I bought it. I didn't have to pay, since the shareware version is fully functional and never expires, but since it's better than the alternatives and does what I need it to do, they got a check.
Do the same and you'll get paid. Welcome to the real world.
Virg
Deal with software businesses in England ONLY.
This is our company policy, by UK law under the Data Protection Act of 1998 all businesses that get personal data MUST keep it for the minimum time, and MUST provide an opt-out clause on all correpsondence where such data is given to the business. Even if you're just going to pass the data around within the company.
The laws are so strict that to calculate employee sick days you need every employee's signed permission to access the sickness records database.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Nothing subjective is 'fair'.
On a more on-topic note, the evaluation keys I ordered for WinGate yesterday at 8pm (it's a little after noon on the next day now) just now arrived. Jerks. The choice between reviving an old Linux box running ipchains and buying WinGate just got a lot easier.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The truth as I see it:
/. people tend to be free software/freedom people, many from California and other high tech areas. What were you thinking posting your question here? You've probably noticed that you're getting a pretty biased opinion. Here's my view (heh, i'll try not to be biased)
America is legally-oriented, an unusually high number of computer-literate Americans regard copying music as something the RIAA will bust your door down for, the law is merely delayed in some dark think tank/committee somewhere. For this demographic a discrete "I wrote this software, please please please *cute puppy look from a homeless child* gimme some money works. These high tech people empathise with poor coders eating plain pizza base (ewwwwww) and do actually pay, these people are about 0.0001% of the worldwide population and between 0.01% (book-keeping apps, etc.) to 95% (custom EJB, support DLL, etc.) of your potential customers.
1. Simple products for simple people e.g. a Calculator or screensaver, then give couple of screenshots, platform requirments and a direct download link, form appears in IE during download saying, "If you feel like it, fill in your details while the app downloads", on app startup a nag screen. Software stops working after 14 days and gives loads of registration requests with uninstall prompt.
2. Simple products for technical people e.g. /. comments archiver, then pop up version screen for 2 seconds "Arubasoft converter, 30 days eval remaining". Registration via some obscure Help->Register menu. Personal cheque and email mandatory, address+phone not required but recommended
3. Complex products for simple people e.g. ERP. Deep end => 12 month trial, decreased to 3 months if load exceeds 10 transactions per second for 48 hours (i.e. deployed). At trial end, software gives a warning, 14 days later introduces delay loops, 28 days later shows nag screen and 12 hour time limit OR calls Ctrl-Alt-Del followed by nagscreen, after 60 days shuts down. Users are marketing types, so obnoxious nag screens every 10 minutes.
4. Complex software for complex people, e.g. Rational Rose, half second nag screen "Non-redistributable version of Rational Rose, 120 days remaining". At trial end pops up a discreet nag screen "This software developer is using an illegal version of Rational Rose please email piracy@rational.com" OR pingflood -> 127.0.0.1 OR wait 30 seconds on each save with nagscreen OR nagscreen("The user on this workstation is affiliated with Osama binLaden, please call 911, or register this software").
If selling in Russia, China, Singapore, Malaysia then throw away your PC and do accountancy in KPMG, or pirate your own software for $1 per CDR. If you can't beat them join them.
I haven't done a survey, the percentages above are to be regarded as best guess Mr. Sulu, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
1) Don't limit the features (it's nice you can look at ther data but unless it can prin the way I want it it won't sell me, many programs disable the printer function.)
2) Time IS a very important factor so I would do three things:
1- 90 days trial period especially for complex tools.
2- Demo data or demo files, (read GOOD demo data), something that can test all the keyfeatures already in pace. Many working Jors don't have time to set up their business on a 30 or 90 day program to see if it can actually do the work.
3- Written tutorial (See RealBasic's) something that goes through the process of how the system works and demonstrates the ease of use while producing *something*.
If I or another customer is shown the product can do the job, handle the load and is easy and powerful enough to use, you bet I'll get the powers that be to purchase it.
Download time is somewhat a factor, with above features even a wait is tolerable if it is evaluation ready. Screenshots (of something other than the splash screen) are also a big plus.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
To cut the clutter on dealing with the /. uberuser:
1)If you must, do your work open source under the various licenses.
2)If you happen to be the closed source type offering a demo, just offer it in a clear place - you are on their time, and respect that.
3)If you need to send out information relevant to the program, do it with haste. Again, you are on their clock.
4)If you even think about collecting email addresses, they'd better be staying in your possession. Otherwise, expect the lawyers knocking at your door.
5)This is for you TDS 3(diamondcs) types: dont be doing anything that smacks of spyware, even if it's checking that auth key and triggering your pirated key procedure. Spying on your users generates distrust, and thus generates less want for your inferior product. You are just going to backfire your efforts. Be truthful about what's in that black box of closed source code, and you might get some sales.
6)If 1-5 dont seem to comprehend well, and you're the closed source type, have somebody who understands it use a clue-by-four on you until you do understand. Tolerance is something in short supply here for the clueless.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Why didn't I download after registering?
This occurs not only from server errors but from the assumption that I'll let you:
1. Set Cookies
2. Run Javascripts
3. Use Active-X controls
4. Tell you my User-agent (browser)
5. Tell you what site refered me (referer tag)
and the failure of the download to function if any of these are not true.
Give me a link to an ftp site!
And about those 30-day trials? Make them 30 days on which the software is *used*, not 30 days from now - I may not get around to installing your product until next week, and have only two days to test until two weeks after that. And if you upgrade before then, let me just go back to the ftp site.
The spam issue has been well covered, you should know better than to abuse potential customers.
-It is against corporate policy to download any software off the internet. Ship a CD for evaluations and don't charge me for it, 'cause getting **any** money is impossible until all the legal documents are signed and we are working on POs for HW, SW, LAN, WAN, Security, External connections, Application support, OS support, ... you get the idea. ...
-Registrations
-Short evaluation Periods
-No price; I have no reason to evaluate something that will cost me $400. I will never buy it for home use.
-Pushy salesmen
-Nagware
-Crippleware
-Installs that don't work. Heck, if that can't get the installation correct
-Software that requires an outside expert to come in and configure it. If it is that complicated, bring all your own systems and a local network with you for the dog & pony show. You won't have any network access on our internal network and there won't be an analog phone line in the demonstration room.
-3rd party license requirements. We want 1 stop shopping. Come in with all the those licenses already included in your agreement.
-Personal-I want GPL, LGPL, Apache or other open source licenseing
-Work-I cannot choose any software that uses any GLP, LGPL or other free software licensing do to legal issues. Absolutely zero free software.
-Follow the corporate architecture, whatever that may be. If your software doesn't meet our corporate architecture, then we are extremely suspect of the robustness, scalability, fault-tolorance and security of your total system. We've been burned too many times before. Most new vendors (and many old) don't understand the scale of solutions that we must work in. Windows servers don't cut it. They don't have the proven clustering, failover, hence availability for most enterprise applications. The system has to be available 24/7/365 with no downtime for the end users. We do rolling upgrades and patching.
-Use tools that we have corporate licenses for.
-Create generic input and output interfaces for sync, async, and batch transactions so other systems can be connected to your systems. Almost no system works alone in my environment. Think pub/sub and CORBA.
I'm a technical architect at a very large company. There must be other issues for why eval software isn't downloaded; these are the hilites. If you said the type of software, I could have zero'd in better.
1. Registration of any kind should be a big no-no. If I'm going to try software then I don't see why I should have to fork over any details - it should be total anonymity until I choose to place an order.
2. Spyware / ads is another no-no. You're not providing me with a service when I test your software. *I'm* giving *you* the opportunity to sell me a product and, as such, don't have to help pay your bills for the privilige.
3. Privacy should be totally up front. I want you to state, matter of fact, that I have no privacy concerns. I don't want to have to wade through small print checking out links for any possible loophole before I choose to try it.
4. No additional components (e.g. "companion" products) should be installed without clear notice (e.g. a in warning dialog - not stashed in 2 pages of small print).
5. As an "after-the-event" thing, you should make your software uninstall cleanly. This generally wouldn't affect my decision to test (as you don't know until later) but it's a common courtesy to at least let the tester clean up easily if they choose not go with the software after all.
They expire after a month. During the evaluation period, they're fully functional. Not a single feature missing. The only difference is there's a dialog that pops up each time you run it, reminding you how many days you have remaining.
SecureCRT got to be so much a part of my daily routine that I almost got into a panic seeing the days trickle down at the end. I registered.
ive been spoiled by all the great freeware and open source stuff out there. why get eval when you can get it free? or make your own?
I will usually look for alternatives to anything that puts a time limit on the trial unless I have a specific need and/or a block of time I can dedicate to testing the new application. IF required I may use a crack to extend an evaluation period however if it is software that I link and will be using on a continuous basis then I will puchase it. After all I would like to see new versions and updates from time to time.
Somehting else I don't like is an evaluation version that is in some way difference in features or functionality that the actual software available for purchase. In the case of server software that may rely on code being written or content being created that requires testing, any significant difference between the released code and the eval that would require a secondary testing period is simply unacceptable. This will almost always cause me to look to other vendors who may release better evaluation software.
And yes, I have bought and been responsible for the purchase and licensing of quite a bit of software in the past years.