Shareware Beach

One of the worlds best-known shareware products, WinZip, has been acquired by a venture capital company. I hope Nico Mak & Co. got a lot of money for their baby.

However, like Tom Warfield, I’m not so sure that Vector Capital’s plans will go smoothly. WinZip has been true shareware since it was first released, relying entirely on the honor system to collect money. As most shareware authors know, that system doesn’t work very well in a world where most users have no idea about the effort takes to produce even a relatively simple tool like WinZip.

Tom points out that this acquisition is an opportunity for WinZip’s competitors. It’s indeed quite likely that people who have been using WinZip beyond the trial period will look at alternatives if they suddenly find themselves forced to pay.

However, there’s another risk. File compression is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Most software these days is distributed in self-extracting setups. No zip tool needed. Hard disks get larger by the minute, and can easily hold a lifetime of data. DVD writers are becoming standard issue, and the discs are very cheap. And for really large stuff, like movies, you need tailored algorithms like mpeg rather than zip for compression.

Email is probably the only reason to use a zip tool, particularly for people with slow connections. However, if there’s suddenly no popular free zip tool, it won’t be long before most email clients have built-in zip and unzip capabilities.

Still, WinZip’s biggest competitor is WinZip itself. The version I’m using dates from the previous millenium. It’s unlikely I’ll ever upgrade to anything else, since it does all I need. It’ll be hard for WinZip’s new owners to convince the people using an older version beyond its trial period to download a newer version that expires.