I have to agree with this here, as you pointed out something else
I had planned on going into, the PAYBACK freeware gets.
Like right now, you're using a web browser of some sort...and each
time you run it, chances are, you see a splash screen reminding you
of your choice. Further, you may get asked "What is your favorite
web browser?" Your answer may sway that person's decision based on
their technical trust in you.
There is definite payback for freeware. I once called up realaudio
on the phone, trying to get tech support for their freeware edition.
I wanted to figure out how to make a file that I could launch every
morning, which would playback my five favorite news-on-the-hour
streams. Each would be about five mminutes, and when each ends, it
would automatically go to the next.
As soon as they heard I wasn't using the shareware version, instead
of saying "we don't support those who didn't pay," they decided to
lie to me and said it was "impossible." I asked for a high level
engineer, and they told me I was talking to the HIGHEST level
engineer they had. Then he hung up. (this was 4 years ago)
Later I found a website being hosted by a 90 year old AOL member.
He claimed he knew of a way to do this, but his documentation was
a little sparse. He left a field on the webpage to email him, like
an email-form, and I sent him my phone number at work. He called me
and talked me through it, and it worked!! I later learned he served
in the airforce years ago, and engineered old mainframe systems for
them and such. He was also fluent in Assembler and Cobol. Pretty
cool guy! And here realaudio.com told me it wasn't possible, simply
because I didn't pay.
Once I learned how, I showed this to many others who wanted to do
the same thing...and they all started doing this every morning like
I was....thusly plugging the RealPlayer product that many more times!
They got their product promoted because of me, see...but it wasn't
because THEY helped me. They couldn't have been getting a lot of calls,
I got the same guy picking up the phone on the 2nd ring each time
I tried calling back and telling HIM how to do it, but he insisted on
hanging up on me. Heh.
On Wed, 31 January 2001, Vicki Bennett wrote:
> I understand what you're saying, but think that if you put a product
> into the public it should be the best, regardless of what you pay to
> whom - otherwise what's the point in making something. I think it is
> really CRAP that people think that you should get a buggy piece of
> software or a half-hearted shit into the ether just because people
> aren't paying cash. There will always be publicity for products and
> even people using cracked Cubase are publicising the software. I
> downloaded ProTools Free a month ago and it is full of annoying bugs
> - if I were a potential buyer of the real product I would think twice
> about making a purchase, given THIS example of what is on offer.
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