Shareware Beach

It’s that time of the year again, where the shareware industry collectively pats itself on the back at the annual Shareware Industry Awards presented at the Shareware Industry Conference. Every year, I feel like it’s a missed opportunity.

Most people seem to nominate and vote for products that they’ve either been using for a long time, or products that have been created by people they like on a personal level. There’s nothing wrong with patting your buddies on the back for a job well done. But to me, it seems like the shareware awards could be so much more. Instead of congratulating ourselves, we could be promoting the shareware industry as a whole.

Giving awards is nice for those who win. Promoting the industry helps everybody, including those that are still laboring away at their future first release, and those that haven’t even written the first line of code yet. Incidentally, many such people attend the SIC every year. It’s a great way to get started!

Since I don’t want to offend anybody, I’ll use my own products to illustrate my point. None of them have ever been nominated for or won any shareware awards.

Take EditPad Pro. EditPad has been around in various editions since forever (1996), lots of people use it, and its a solid product. Many such products win awards every year. But why? There’s a million text editors out there. Even if EditPad Pro is the very best of them all (it is according to many of my customers; others might disagree), why should it get an award? How does the shareware industry benefit if it does? Nobody is going to get excited over it. No journalist is going to write a front page article about it.

What if we nominated and voted for innovative products, new stuff? Show them what our industry is capable of. Show them that innovation often comes from the little guys, not the big established companies. That would give people something to talk and write about. That might create some buzz and raise awareness. Probably not a lot for a single event, but ten years in a row, the awards may become an event that outsiders look forward to. (When Eric Sink comments in an MSDN atricle about winning an award that he’d never even heard of, that’s quite telling.)

There’s plenty of innovation going on in the shareware industry that we can put in the spotlight for a day to raise the profile of the whole industry. Take RegexBuddy. It’s a product almost in a class of its own. No shareware download site has a category for it that comes even close. While there are a handful of other tools out there that make it easier to test regular expressions, none of them offer the full spectrum of features to help you through the whole process, from creating, to testing, implementing and saving.

Or take PowerGREP. UNIX grep was created before I was born. That’s nothing new. Yet, I don’t know of any other Windows grep tool that allows you to combine up to three sequences (each with a specific role) of an unlimited number of regular expressions to execute a search, search-and-replace, or collect data. That may sound complicated, but it actually makes PowerGREP easier to use in many situations. With PowerGREP, you can use numerous trivial regular expressions instead of one huge cryptic regex that does it all.

I’ll be the first to admit that both RegexBuddy and PowerGREP appeal to a limited (geeky) audience. That’s why there’s plenty of categories to nominate products in for the Shareware Industry Awards. I promised not to use other people’s products as examples, so I’ll leave finding more innovative products as an exercise to the reader.

Perhaps that’s where the real problem lies. Finding innovative products to nominate, particularly innovative products that you don’t have a need for yourself, takes quite some time and effort. Nominating the usual suspects is much easier.

Still, I feel it’s a missed chance to spotlight our industry. I would love to see the whole nomination and voting process revamped to focus on innovation. Perhaps fewer categories. Perhaps a restriction on older programs and/or previous winners. Certainly a message to voters that promoting the industry, not patting our buddies on the back, will pay the biggest dividents for us all.

If my recent posts about online music services thought I was an old hand at buying music downloads, that’s unfortunately not the case. I say “unfortunately”, because most services simply don’t want to take my money. “U.S. residents only” they say. So much for the global reach of the Internet.

It makes no sense. Amazon.com has never refused to sell me a CD. I’ve ordered over a dozen from them over the years, mostly music that isn’t mainstream and impossible to find in stores. If Amazon can export U.S. music, then so can download services if they really want to. Adding local music from around the world to their catalogs would obviously take more time and effort.

MP3tunes.com imposes no territorial restrictions. Their catalog seems to consist entirely of music by little-known artists. I guess that since they don’t have deals with the major record labels, MP3tunes has much more freedom in setting their own policies. They sell songs for 88 cents and albums for $8.8 US. The songs are high-bitrate MP3 files without any kind of copy protection. You can even re-download all the songs you’ve purchased at any time, in case you didn’t make a backup. So far so good.

Before you enter your credit card details on their site, one word of warning: once you’ve logged in, all “buy now” buttons do exactly that: with one click, you’ve bought the song or CD and your card is charged. That wouldn’t be so bad (in fact, it would be really convenient) if it was possible to cancel the purchase. Buying a CD does not automatically start the download. So until you’ve downloaded the music for the first time, the download page could easily show a refund button. Downloading is also a bit more cumbersome than it should be, at least if you’re not using a download manager. Unlike the one-click buy, there’s no one-click download. I’d rather download the whole album as one .zip file.

But none of that will stop MP3tunes from becoming a success. The real problem is that it’s simply too cumbersome to discover new music on MP3tunes.com. With a catalog of unknown artists, easy discovery is a vital feature. What I’ve found most annoying is that the 30-second samples have to be downloaded. They don’t stream in once you click on them, like the samples on Amazon.com. Sampling a CD takes time. Click on a song, wait for the download, listen to the sample, repeat. A 5-minute streaming CD sampler (i.e. an MP3 of 30-second samples stiched together) would be far more convenient.

The music is also poorly categorized. When you click on an album in one category, the breadcrumbs at the top of the album page often indicate a completely different category. It seems many albums are placed in multiple categories. A cheap trick to make a catalog look larger. Unfortunately, it quickly backfires. If I expect to hear a reggea beat but my laptop’s speakers blast rock music, I’m not impressed. Not to mention if I’m going to wait for another 30-second sample download.

The company claims they “spotlight emerging artists”. If they really want to promote artists, Internet radio would be a far better medium than 30-second samples. Radio plays in the background while I work. Listening to samples is an activity that doesn’t mix well with tasks that require concentration. So it’s unlikely MP3tunes’ artists are going to get much of my listening time.

When you’re selling a product or a service, at some point you’ll have to choose. Do you continue selling more of the same, pleasing existing customers? Or do you start selling something new to new customers, losing part of your existing customer base?

I got the idea for this article from Seth Godin’s blog entry where he talks about a company being held back by its customers. About nine months ago I faced a similar choice, and decided to go for broke.

PowerGREP version 2 was certainly a very nice product. I’m still proud of it. But it fell a bit short of my goal of making it the ultimate Windows grep tool.

There was no way I could add all the features I had in mind, and still keep PowerGREP’s existing user interface. So I had to choose between improving the existing PowerGREP, limiting the amount of new functionality, or completely redesigning the product. You can see the result below. Can you spot the 7 differences?

PowerGREP 3 has been out for a couple of weeks now. As I expected, some PowerGREP 2 customers wrote in no uncertain terms that the old version was much better. Of course, while they say that PowerGREP 2 is better, what they really mean is that they like it better. Humans like things they’re used to and comfortable with. Just like the paper company still finds a market for its quaint designs, many people will continue to use PowerGREP 2 for years to come. After all, it is a solid product.

At the same time, other people wrote to express their thanks and admiration for the brand new version. The real test will be how the product fares as the sales generated by the announcement of the new release wears off.

The key lesson is that you can only listen to your customers to a certain extent. When I announced a pre-release version of PowerGREP 3 to part of the user base, feedback saying the older version was better dominated. When I released the finished PowerGREP 3 this month, more people wrote to say they like the newer version.

If you’re ever faced with the decision to put through a major redesign, or evolve an existing design, keep in mind that your customer base is very familiar with your present design. The new design will be alien to them. It’s quote possible that existing customers favor the old design, while new customers favor the new design. So the question is who you want to cater to most. Unless you’ve already cornered a significant slice of the market, new customers are probably where the money is.

But don’t redesign a product for the sake of redesigning it. The major upgrade to RegexBuddy, released in January, is very much more of the same. The original design works just fine, and could easily accomodate the additional features.

After an unreliable voting process, which was extended for two weeks, it’s been decided that the next European Shareware Conference will be held in Brussels, Belgium. I doubt though that all 812 people who voted for Brussels will attend, much less the 2178 total voters. That’s after removal of duplicate votes. If 10% of all voters attend the conference will be a huge success compared with previous years.

That’s not a criticism of the conference, though. The small scope makes it possible to get acquainted with almost all attendees. People get connected and fit in. While the sessions are always informative, it’s the socializing before, during and after the event that makes attending really worthwhile.