Network World has an article by Eric Lai up today on “Five recession-era strategies for software vendors (and their customers.)”
The first suggestion, however is to “Crack down on piracy.” It’s not that customers (or pseudo-customers) are malicious, it’s just that oftentimes the licensing is often complex – like, for example, forgetting to renew a time-based license but continuing to use the software. The problem isn’t that people don’t want to pay – the problem, Network World says, is that it’s difficult for vendors to figure out when and how to pay.
I can attest to that, just from a personal standpoint. This past weekend, I reformatted my main desktop computer to the Windows 7 beta. Reinstalling my programs worked pretty well, until I got to one particular program that I bought.
I won’t name the program, save that costs over $100, and all it does is convert video files taken from certain videocameras from an unprocessed form to one that can be used in various video editing applications. A specialist tool to be sure – but until very recently, it had a monopoly on the Windows platform. (On the Mac platform, there’s a freeware app that does the same thing, but you have to buy a Mac to use it....)
Now, this program, in order to prevent piracy, requires that you register and activate online. This is no different than many programs nowadays; but the process for this program is particularly onerous. You enter in your name and serial number into a form on the company’s Web site. That Web form will then give you an activation code number which you enter back into the application. If the Web form goes down, or you can’t access the Internet, you can’t use the product past a seven day trial.
This is actually kind of standard, as many programs require online support for registration, including Adobe products. My problem comes with the de-activation process.
That is, if you wanted to use this program on multiple computers, you would need to deactivate the program on one computer, and re-activate it on another. And de-activation is just as complicated as activation – you tell the program you want to deactivate, and it gives you a deactivation code to enter into the Web form – which you can copy and paste, or write down later. You then install the program on the other computer, and you reactivate it. You cannot use the program simultaneously on multiple computers (like, for example, home, work, and laptop) so you have to keep juggling them.
One of the big problems is that if you delete the program BEFORE you deactivate the program – for example, your hard drive crashes, or you contract a nasty computer virus, or you simply forget to deactivate the program before reformatting your OS to the new version of Windows… you have to open a trouble ticket to get the support team to deactivate the program on their end. Their support team, of course, only works on business hours, Monday through Friday, and they have better things to do, presumably, than babysit people’s applications.
In my case, I simply forgot to deactivate the program before reinstalling it, so it wouldn’t let me reactivate. That was Thursday.
On Friday, I ended up getting a computer virus because I did something stupid. (Note to self: Install antivirus program BEFORE installing e-mail program next time…)
So I needed to reformat again. This time, I remembered that you need to deactivate the program before you can reactivate it, so I hit the deactivate button. The client program then notified me that it was deactivated, and gave me an eight digit code to enter into the Web form.
Of course, before I could write the eight digit code down, the virus told the computer to reboot. When I came back, there was no way to get that eight digit code back. So now I have to go back to the support team – again – and tell them to deactivate the program on their end – again.
Maybe this cuts down on piracy. But I’d bet that this specialist tool is useful to so few people that there just isn’t enough of a critical mass of people willing to take the time to crack and pirate the program.
But it’s still problematic, especially from a network performance perspective. That is – if something goes wrong – and it frequently does – it requires a man-hour investment for people to do a mindless, repetitive task.
When you consider that this problem occurs frequently, you have to ask – why is human intervention necessary? Why can’t customers just log-in with the username and password they used when they bought the program and remotely deactivate the program themselves when something goes wrong? Why do customers need to enter in a code to deactivate, and then go to the Web site to enter that code – couldn’t the application just deactivate it automatically when the “deactivate” button is pressed?
And of course, there’s the problem that there’s no guarantee that the company that makes this program – which is the only one of its type – will continue to be in business and operate the activation servers at any time in the future.
All in all, this was a very frustrating experience; and the biggest frustration was that I paid for this application, while those who pirate software never have to deal with this.
It doesn’t make piracy any more ethically moral, but the biggest advantage that software companies have over pirates is convenience – you get the software you want, when you want it, when you pay for it. Except – I can’t use the software I bought. I’m left more annoyed than someone else who may have pirated and cracked the software and don’t have to wait until the weekend is over in order to use it. The pirated product is a superior one – and this can mean that frustrations caused by anti-piracy measures, (“Aargh!”) can actually lead to piracy. (“Arrrr!”)
All of this reminds me of chatty apps that were coded to work on LANs – very low latency, high bandwidth networks – by constantly sending little bits of information back and forth, and finding out that those apps don’t work well on high latency, low bandwidth WANs. In many of those cases, application performance can only be improved by recoding the application for the WAN.
In this case, I’d suggest two main changes for the program above: First, I’d give each user five activations. This way, they can keep the program at home, on their laptop, and their work computer without moving it around. And, if they should happen to need to reinstall when they forgot to deactivate, they could do so, using up one of those spare activations. And, finally, if they use all five activations, then they could either use their login and password to deactivate all five of their activations at once on the server side – or, if that isn’t secure for some reason, at least it will cut down the amount of time that the staff spends deactivating programs by hand by a factor of five.
Now, there’s always a problem with multihost licensing, in that two or more people might decide to share a single purchase among them. That’s fine, but I think the cost savings of fewer support man-hours would offset that – and increased customer satisfaction and positive word of mouth would lead to more sales overall.
The idea of a multihost licensing scheme is probably most familiar to people that use iTunes, which is one of the most successful anti-piracy programs in existence. And it’s one of the most successful anti-piracy programs not because it limits customers but because it provides better service than piracy at a reasonable price.
Because I honestly cannot see this company lasting for long if more people need this specialized tool. Eventually a competitor will come along and undercut them – (and one particular competitor is actually very close) or someone will finally just sit down and design a freeware application to take care of it. Maybe even the camera companies themselves – who might even get around the problem by recoding their cameras to record directly to the type of video file that computers can use.
So yes – cut down on piracy. But do it in a way that’s smart, that doesn’t increase costs or turn away customers. And keep in mind that time – both the time of the end user – and the time measured in bandwidth – is important when considering applications.