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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...
The answer can be found by exploring the difference in mindsets between both groups
The answer can be found by realising that some people release great software and do well, and others release crap software and do badly.
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.
This brings me to a larger point. Everyone who scratches an itch on Windows releases the corresponding tool for $25 as shareware. Then they discover that noone buys their product. Just take a look at the archiver section of TUCOWS. A million different GUI's for zip, all shareware. What exactly do the authors expect? They cannot compete with WinZip on features and generally their user interface is even worse. If I had to buy an archiver, I would buy WinZip. A $10 saving over WinZip is not going to make me buy something with no reputation whatsoever.
Most software today except games is shareware anyway. You can get time-limited demos for pretty much anything that does not come from Microsoft. So what does "shareware" offer that regular commercial software does not? All I see is having to go through 20 crappy programs on TUCOWS to find one that may be slightly useful. And then having the author abandon it a month later.
Give me proprietary software or Free Software anytime.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
When did time-limited demos and crippled products become "shareware?"
And I kind of agree with the title, too. To me, a professional is someone who not only knows a lot something, but also uses that knowledge to earn a living (e.g. a pro photographer). An amateur is a person, who does something as a hobby, as pointed out by another poster. IMHO, a shareware developer, who fits the "amateur" characteristics described by the article's author, will have a hard time earning much from their work, and most likely not enough to sustain themselves, thus falling into the amateur bin (ok ok, let's call it the "unsuccessful pro" bin, if it makes you feel better).
That issue aside, I think the author has hit a lot of nails on the head there. When I compare myself and my lofty business ideas with those of my brother-in-law, then look at where I am and where he is, there is no doubt which one of us is a pro. What amateur like me must realize is that there is a way to become pro, and Steve Pavlina outlines the stepping stones to get us on our way. Focus. Drive. Determination. Perserverance. Diversity. Research. Goals. Deadlines. Discipline. All those good things that we really don't like to do unless absolutely necessary. Try it. Find a role model. You'll see. I already have mine.
Have EVDO, will travel.
It's tended (particulary in the past) to be easy to modify reasorce application forks to get around this sort of thing - using Apple's own freely downloadable reasource editing tool, ResEdit (or using a similar 3rd party reasource editing tool).
/System/Libraries/Extensions/Driver/Foo/Bar.ktext) and alter the hard coded line data to work with UK ADSL lines, but it was just an XML file being used for the driver definitions so was fairly trivial).
:)
Years ago I once took a game demo off a cover disk (some sort of Global-Thermonuclear-Warfare-WWIII-type-stragegy sim) and made it into the full version by just tweaking around in a reasource editor, enabling hidden and disabled menus and options (so you could save games, and start other levels).
The same sort of thing is true of Mac OS X apps (though in a slightly different manner). A few months ago I downloaded a USB Alcatel Modem driver from a US web site.
The installer refused to installed because this was version 2.0 of the installer, and it required 1.0 to be installed first (which was no longer avalible). I opened up the installer, hacked the file which did the checking for this existing version (it turned out to be a bash script embedded in the installer) and installed it. Once it was installed I found I had to find the driver (it was somewhere like
This is where the 'Macs are easier to use' idea comes from - it's not just easier on the surface (obviously Microsoft have made quite a few gains in this department, as has free software) - it's that they are nice to work with from a developer standpoint.
If your coding your program 'normally', using Reasource Forks (OS 9 and lower) or XML files (OS X and above) in the usual way, then you'd normally impliment something like time limiting in this manner, though obviously, as it's realatively easy to work around so many developers use obfuscation.
It's just to do with alternative paradigm for development that makes everything easy to open and edit. For example, with ResEdit, you can edit any applications menus and change the names, layout and shortcuts for a menu, colour the menus, graphically redesign the applications dialog boxes, change the layout and graphics for tool bars, even change all the spites, text and sound in a game and have it still function perfectly.
Obviously, this approach has big advantages for developers and users, I know many non technical users who just like to be able to add/customise menu shortcuts.
You could even hack the Finder to change the Window Manager style or trash can icons, most fun was hacking an actively running copy of the Finder!
That can cause *very* funky and amazingly weird things to happen!
I found the article highly useful as a personal development tool - to illuminate the things in life I could do differently to better my life - and I'm speaking IN GENERAL.
You sound like you assumed that the author was placing you in the one of two groups. He's in all probability not an a**h*le, so that assumption simply can't be right.
Place yourself in his shoes. He wants to list the things a person *could* do to increase their odds of eventually succeeding, and as an excellent counterpoint list the opposite, the things that will decrease your odds of succeeding.
Just because he's seperated it up into these two camps, doesn't mean he's accusing you or anyone else who isn't "successful" of being a brain-dead paranoid retard with *all* of those listed failings. But he is trying to list some of the things you could do to increase your chances of success.
>Isn't is possible to write good software and have it sell without huge amounts of thought about marketing
Sure, it could happen. If you want to leave things to chance and to whatever random assortment of luck and personal attributes you've been handed in life - you can do that.
But if you want some ideas to try and exceed whatever random thing happens to your effort, there they are. Pick and choose whatever bits you think might help you.