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Shareware Amateurs Vs. Shareware Professionals?
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamedev.net article called 'Shareware Amateurs Vs. Shareware Professionals'. The article, by shareware game developer Steve Pavlina, starts: "Why is it that some shareware developers seem to be hugely successful in financial terms, growing their sales from scratch to generate tens of thousands of dollars in income, while the vast majority struggle to generate even a handful of sales? The answer can be found by exploring the difference in mindsets between both groups."
Well...
I must say I disagree with most of the stuff presented in the article. Let's take a look at two examples.
WinZip: I bought WinZip (way back when they were NicoMak Computing) because it was a good product. It was (and I think still is) a solid product with an intuitive interface. Basically, I bought this product because it the developers knew its role. WinZip is a means to an end (unzipping files), not the end itself. Now I'm not sure, but I don't think that WinZip 1.0 had a 200-strong developer team behind it, or even what Mr. Pavlina would call a "Shareware Professional."
mIRC: (Yes, I'm a Windows user.) I purchased a license for mIRC because it's a good product, and, for my purposes, "best in show" for IRC clients.
So what's the moral of this post? People (me, my mother, joe user, whomever) buy software because (they percieve that) it's the best in it's particular field.
Not to say that Mr. Pavlina's article doesn't hit on some good points; namely, that developers need to improve their products as a whole and not just improve "what they're good at" (design, programming, what have you). But seriously, something that was lacking in this article was the fact that, if you want to make money on software, you have to actually make software that does its job well, and that the end-user can actually use.
Then again, I could be full of hot air.
An amateur is defined as someone that is either not as skilled as a professional or someone that engages in a particular activity as a hobby rather than a profession. Amateur works are frequently (but not always) constructed more poorly than professional works, but there are certainly exceptions. And in general the entire shareware market is seen as an amateurâ(TM)s field with professionals not deigning to sink so low (this is a market perspective really, not necessarily my own).
The linked to article fails to address any new or particularly interesting aspects of shareware development and as a whole contains a lot of rather flame inducing, silly, generalizations. He should have called it, "Lazy and Ignorant Shareware Authors vs Motivated and Knowledgeable Shareware Authors." Of course then there would have been little point in writing the rest of the article.
Not all amateurs are lazy and mercurial.
Not all "professionals" are smart, savvy, and dedicated.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
It should be noted that Mr. Pavlina only cites his own experience in the article. Since I don't have a business or economics background, I couldn't begin to agree or disagree on his points. However, his lack of comparative figures, that is, citing other shareware successes and failures based on his criteria, makes his process more of an opinion than a thesis. I'd be negligent if I based my entire shareware concept on this. However, it is thought-provoking. This looks like a great concept for an series of Slashdot interviews of shareware professionals, whom I will classify as those who sell their own shareware as their primary source of income.
Although the parent comment comes off as a troll a bit, the question is actually an interesting one I think. Sometime during the last decade there has been a shift in what we consider shareware. It is now pretty commonplace to move beyond simple nag screens in shareware - especially games.
The definition of shareware as per the ASP is "a marketing method, not a type of software or even strictly just a distribution method." So you could say that although there has been a shift to more than nag screens, the basic definition of shareware is still the same, and it differs from box products with demos (for instance) because it is more than the demo. It is a marketing tool, a distribution tool, and (hopefully) a pretty functional version of the product that you can evaluate.