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Apple Converting Trial and Pirated iWork, iLife and Aperture To Full Versions
tlhIngan writes "One aspect about the new OS X Mavericks release was that all Apple produced software was to be downloadable and updatable through the Mac App Store. However, this raises the obvious question: what happens to users who bought the software beforehand? Initial reports showed that the Mac App Store scanned your hard drive for software and offered to associate it with your Apple ID. The scans even found trial and pirated versions and upgraded those to fully-licensed versions. Even more interestingly, this is not a bug, and it appears Apple is turning a blind eye to the practice, giving away copies of iLife, iWork and Aperture to users who own trial or even pirated versions of the apps. Apple has also recently stopped providing downloadable trial versions of iLife, iWork and Aperture from their web site."
Good job, Apple. This will likely increase revenue from some of those whom you make legit, and will warm the hearts of some who, like me, despise all things Apple. Well, a little less today.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Piracy Edition (Piracy being assumed as the natural, efficient and convenient way to get software over the internet). It's working for Adobe, despite glacial user acceptance and strong vociferous opposition.
Step 1) entering product categories involving widely used standards: In this case we look at the "product category" as "minimal effort and cost software downloads" - what everyone lovingly calls digital piracy.
Step 2) extending those standards with proprietary capabilities: Beat-out the pirates on even the 'minimal effort' part by not requiring a crack, key or navigation of noisy comments for affirmation of operation/safety and worry of nested nasty bits in your bytes. Also the cost is actually less, since it's free of money and of questionable legitimacy.
Step 3) using those differences to disadvantage its competitors: No more trial downloads to easily crack, deeper mechanisms for software updates coupled with the ability to release consitent and constant updates which actually contain scoped functionality thereby daunting the crackers and hackers with new security mechanisms and version hell which results in a saturation of the pirate space with even more questionable softwares with varying levels of functionality/stability thus severly diminishing the causual pirate's desire and ability to identify and use the software they wish.
Brilliant. It works. Now I have to pay ;) (I, personally, have a personal moral stance which makes me inevitably wind up paying for, conservatively, %50 of the software I download - because it is the software I actually like or use and YES, believe it or not I actually want to pay programmers to write stuff!).
Still, it seems like there is another shoe to drop here. Now to read everyone else's comments for that shoe.
I bought Win8 using a pirated Win7. I suspect MS turned a blind eye as well, as my poorly cracked copy constantly nagged about being counterfeit software etc.
Same sort of thing happened with iTunes match. It scans your whole music library (legal or otherwise) and gives you high bit rate versions of all your tracks in the cloud (and available to download permanently, even if you don't renew).
Apple does offer syncing for small businesses: http://www.apple.com/osx/server/
Not only that they offer an almost no setup hardware bundle: http://www.apple.com/mac-mini/server/
It could be less about the value of your ID, and more about trying to get people into the fold. Not only would this likely simplify the development and testing (thus decrease the cost of deployment) but it could generate some good will and keep people using the Apple stack. And since Apple is more a hardware and media company then a software one, getting people to pay for their software is probably a relatively low priority, esp when it might be in conflict with the other two major ones.