Amazing Realization!!!! ........

[solrac]

Wait...
If I was a software company owner....

And my software made piracy completely impossible....

But I only had 10,000 users, that would suck.

Then what if I made all my software easily pirated....

and then in 2 years I have 1,000,000 users!!!

I still have my original 10,000 paid users.

But... out of the 1,000,000 non-paid pirated users....

say 10% of them decide to pay since piracy is bad and illegal......

Now I have 100,000 paid users!!! Piracy actually increased my business TENFOLD!!

So to have a successful software business you need two things:
1) Software that is EASY to pirate, like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and Mac OS X.
2) Massive amounts of anti-piracy literature to convince people to pay for the software!

We need both! We need anti-piracy taught to EVERYONE, and software that is SOO easy to pirate!

This makes MONEY PEOPLE!!!

Remember, the most powerful companies are the ones with the largest user base, period. Not the most amount of paid users.

And to prove my point... when I buy Photoshop later this year, I will be a new paid Adobe user. However if I never pirated Photoshop originally 2 years ago, they would NEVER have gotten any money from me this year!!!

Think about it!!!

now back to your regularly scheduled program.

[themacko]

Wow, maybe Adobe should hire and promote you their board of directors....

[solrac]

Originally posted by themacko
Wow, maybe Adobe should hire and promote you their board of directors....

I'm sure they already got someone who realized this a few years ago

[themacko]

[Koelling]

I often think I should be sending money to someone for the opensource software I use. In a perfect world software would be good enough that you would want to pay for it, even if you don't get anything more. I know that will never happen but it would be nice to think about.

[edX]

wow koelling, you put a whole new spin on this topic - wanting to pay for software!! What are you thinking?

I totally agree with you. I have begun to feel that way about more and more apps. Recently i paid for an app that i have used for years. The author is rather lenient about the issue and allows free use with a constant reminder to pay. But i was so excited that one of my favorite games got ported to osx, that i went and paid as soon as i had the measly $10. It turns out that the developer is a member of this site, recognized my name from here, worked on my suggestion in the comments box on purchase order, and now i am privy to a beta that works just like i wanted it to. Wasn't that a great surprize?!!

hey, if i could get more of what i want from every app by paying for it, i would glady go ahead and pay for all those apps that aren't quite there yet - the ones i test and then discard. well, at least as many as i could afford.

[toast]

Hi Ed, can I ask you what game you're talking about ?

Just -too- curious .

As for solrac, I've got a book for him:
<u>Wealth of Nations</u>, Adam Smith.
You need economic lessons, solrac. Much of them .

[fryke]

Let's go back in time. Way back in time.

In the eighties, I had an Atari 1040 STf. I know, I know, but it was *much* cheaper than a Macintosh over here in Switzerland, and it had a larger and better screen than a Mac Plus, which was the cheapest Mac around when I bought the Atari.

There was no internet access for home users, and while there might have been some BBS, I didn't know about them back then.

Software piracy was about copying floppy disks between friends, and it meant that one would buy the software so that all of our friends had access to it. Basically, we arranged that on every birthday of one of my Atari friends, we would get - as a group - another part of the application-suite we would need.

Guess what happened when one of us bought the really great word processing application Signum! 2.0. We would all copy the app, we would all use it, for school work, too and: By the end of the year, each of us had a full version. Not because there was something wrong with the copied versions (other than that they were pirated, of course), but because a) the application was very good, b) the manual was actually useful and c) because we felt the developers actually earned our money!

The whole piracy issue could have been resolved very early on in the process by two measures:

1) Developers should have written bug-free, good (really good) applications.

2) Development companies should have charged reasonable amounts of money for their software.

They did not do so. At least a large part of them didn't. The rest, as they say, is history, but it's also our present situation. And this situation is that developers push out new versions of their software too early (unfinished, buggy), charge too much and make lousy manuals.

It's the same, really, with the music and movie industries. There are great exceptions there, however. Even with all the possibilities to download content (music, movies, other stuff), I still buy the CDs I'd have bought before those possibilities. And I still buy the DVDs I would have bought before. Why? Because they put something in it that can't really be downloaded: Good covers (yeah I know there are scans, but it's not the same thing) & booklets, bonus material on the DVDs and the like.

What I'm really waiting for is what internet content providers strive for: They want us to pay for information. They want to create news services that have 'added value' for which you pay monthly fees. What they don't see is the one thing that everybody *in* cyberspace knows ever since the term came about: Information wants to be free. I know this sounds like the hacker's credo, but it's really the truth. As soon as I *tell* a secret to somebody, even if he pays for it, the information is free. It *wants* to be free.

Versiontracker charges money for the services they gave to us for free a month ago. Yes, you also get *more* if you pay, but now you get *less* if you don't. Maybe it works out for them, but *I* won't pay. If I find somebody giving out account information for versiontracker, I guess I'll use that for free (piracy), because I think they can make their money with ads. Or, if I don't find that information, I'll use another service or I'll stick with what they still give me.

Similar thing: Avantgo. Was a great service for Palm users. Did let me read the news of c't's newsticker while I was on the way back home by train. Then they started to charge fees from the content provider (!) and c't wasn't willing to pay, thus I couldn't get the news anymore. What did happen was that I used iSilo and MobiPocket Reader instead of AvantGo. They just don't seem to understand the very, very simple fact, that information wants to be free.