4th September 2008

Demo Version Problems

posted in Technology, Developers, Business, Software |

This morning I wanted to check out the latest stuff from Nero- I’m looking for some good video transcoding solutions. The problem with this space is that with all the proliferation of codecs and container formats its often pretty hard to tell whether a given product will work for a specific scenario or not. I’ve got the AVS Media tools and they work for some things but not for others, but was hoping that Nero Recode could do the trick.

After a little poking around I see that Nero has a 15-day trial version. Great, I’ll check it out and if it works I’m happy to buy it. I apply for a trial key, download the 150mb installer and suffer through two reboots (one to remove an older version of some Nero stuff another to install the new stuff).

But then I find out that the feature of encoding into MPEG-4 is also removed from the trial. When I checked back on the trial download page, this information was there, but only if you opened a little “Additional Information” tab on the page- basically it was totally hidden.

Creating mechanisms for demo software can be a pain- most of them are somewhat annoying. For this kind of thing you can do 15-day trails, limited encoding length (only 60 seconds?), watermark the output, etc. But the key is that you need to give people a real taste of the software and this particular implementation sucks- the limitations we hidden on their web site so I wasted my time downloading and installing this useless demo, plus I can’t even verify that the functionality I’m interested in works at all.

Oh well…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under Technology, Developers, Business, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 2 responses to “Demo Version Problems”

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  1. 1 On September 5th, 2008, brett said:

    i offer a counter proposal. i think the software industry has spoiled users with freeware and trials.

    i can’t go into nordstrom and as for a free 15-day trail of a nice new sweater. but i can buy it, bring it home, decide if it goes with my existing wardrobe and then return it for a refund in 14 days if it doesn’t fit.

    software should be the same. the nero website should have enough product information to remove the ambiguity about what you will get when you buy; and they should offer a return-guarantee within 14 days if you don’t like what you bought.

    less free-loaders downloading stuff with no pruchase intent - and a better experience for intenders - the full feature set - in exchange for a little payment info up-front.

  2. 2 On September 8th, 2008, Alex said:

    That would have worked in this situation too- I’d be happy to buy it if I was confident that there was an easy way to “return” it. Nordstrom has a top reputation that makes this work. To be honest, in the software industry we suck. There is no way I’m going to set myself up to wait on hold for 60min somewhere to go through a bunch of hassle for a refund if the software doesn’t actually perform as advertised.

    But to use your Nordstrom example a bit more- its not like Nordstrom forces me to buy clothes without trying them on. So if you really want to smooth things over to sell your software you probably need both a clean trial mode as well as an great refund mechanism (that doesn’t require a phone call).

    This is of course most complicated for software that is occasional use. If I’m buying something that I’m going to use all the time, its easy to come up with trial terms. But for something like disk repair, there is certainly the issue that people feel like they just need it once…

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