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Shareware Versus Retail

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    Shareware Versus Retail

    Hi,

    I am one of three colleagues who have developed what we believe is a rather neat piece of business software.

    We had planned to launch this as shareware (build in a 30 expiry clause etc).

    We were fortunate through contacts to spend some free time with an software industry analyst who has adviced against going the shareware route but rather to go straight to retail and large corporates. His believe is no one ever makes real money through shareware and starting that route can actually damage the credibility of your product should your ever decide to try to sell it direct to businesses. We should go get funding, advertise properly and start trying to sell into large companies.

    Question: Does anyone know of shareware companies that have been successful, or is it the backwater for neat, clever but finantially unsuccessful software tools!

    Any thoughts/advice really welcome

    #2
    shareware

    there are products which have done this, I think it depends on the type of product and likelly cost / support cost.

    winzip is distributed on a 30 day basis.....

    most that I know of are niche products from small/unknown companies which offer a full product at a real price. clients get to try an unknown without massive cost.

    Issue really is how you intend to position from a marketting point of view. how complex is the product what benefit does it deliver , how easy is it to demonstrate benefit to customers ?

    Comment


      #3
      re: Shareware Versus Retail

      Strange but true. Having spoken to many IT buyers there's a certain finger of thumb rule which they use. A complex application has to be more than a few meg in size. I'm not kidding when I say that you would be very reluctant to buy a corporate application if it came on a single floppy disk. I think it's human nature. There seems to be more value in bloatware at corporate level.

      In the case of shareware vs retail, you would have a hard time selling something like winzip for 1k pounds if it can be downloaded and put on a floppy disk, regardless of the fact that it has become the de facto standard.
      So if you go down the retail route (which I think you should because nobody I know, registers their shareware. They use one of those magic uninstallers and reinstall for another 30 days. People are cheap skates by nature.) make sure it looks impressive and fills at least one CD.
      My opinions of course ... ask yourself, would you pay for full version of winzip, VNC, photoshop, etc. ?

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        #4
        Shareware vs. retail

        Three points spring to mind:

        1. I agree with Mark that those shareware products that have been financially successful have been in relatively niche areas.

        2. Successful shareware products take much longer to achieve any kind of payback. However, this could be offset by the long-term effect of having more people using your product, which itself acts as a catalyst for generating business (but, I repeat: this assumes that a) the shareware product is successful, and b) it takes a long time before enough people are using your product).

        3. If you are serious about taking the retail route, invest in a decent dictionary first! I'm not saying this as a fully paid up member of the Nit-Picking Society; if your sales pitch is full of sloppy language, potential customers will assume your code is as unreliable as your spelling.

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          #5
          I think that shareware is the best way of marketing the product are getting it out there.

          The shareware version should perform some function very well
          but be limited. Limited in that...

          The funtionality is limited.. eg: process 10's of files instead of 100's, work for 30 days

          Display advert banner and require mouse clicks.

          The purchase version should have increased functionality, can be automated and have no advert and less mouse clicks. It should also retail for a minimum fee.

          Once it is out there - because it's free. If it is any good and people start to use it then they will pay for the product if the increased functionality makes the product better.

          For example:

          I paid bought winzip because it was not expensive and I was fed up with the number of mouse clicks required to get it to do anything. I also bought adware because I wanted the functionality to be automatic.
          I also bought a file splitter because I wanted to split files larger than X MB into smaller files whereas the free version was limited to smaller files.

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            #6
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              #7
              shareware is a good way to get your name out there and get people to use your product, even if they pirate it. After that you can sell proper commercial version with much better featuers. Thus a good forward planning on what you will and what you wont release in shareware version is essential. Once you are a known company you can do strictly commercial software.

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                #8
                Your "software industry analyst" is talking out of his bottom.

                Serif PagePlus, the biggest selling DTP package, is, in the basic version, given away free on magazine fronts etc.

                PaintShop Pro, is a try before you buy, 30 days.

                VMWare, trail license period of 30 days.

                I have various pieces of quite specialist shareware out there and is licenced and used by companies like Rolls Royce amongst other.

                I disagree with s2budd on one point, crippleware puts people off.

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                  #9
                  crippleware is bad, but having 2 distintc versions of a product like zonealarm - free and commercial with a lot of good features helps a lot.

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                    #10
                    Shareware doesn't work:-

                    Crippled it usually does enough to keep most people happy (so not paying). Time restricted its easy to workaround I've not seen a time restriction system that is not easily hackable (regardless of what the developers may say).

                    Your best bet is to have a crippled free version and a commercial version with additional features. This may be easy of use, automation..... but it should make the software significantly easier to use to justify the payment.

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