SJS's Journal: TurboCAD

My wife and I were given TurboCAD as a gift -- mostly because we keep talking about remodelling the house, and bashing out the various ideas takes a lot of paper.

What are my impressions? Well... I haven't gotten very far, yet, but already I'm forming some significant impressions: The installation process is hindered by copy-protection and mandatory registration. You have to let the software vendor (IMSI or somesuch) snoop on your system. Well, okay, just once.

I don't object to paying for software (I rather approve of the idea, considering), and I realize that a lot of people out there do, so a reasonable level of care is okay. But I had a sneaking suspicion. . .

So I installed it on our (shared) Mac Mini. I logged in as the administrative user, and did the registration-all-of-our-customers-are-thieves-and-scum dance... and then tried using it. Whoops! It's not REALLY installed, I have to type in an obnoxious string. And then my wife tried using it, and look, here it is that dialog again! Then me... and again! WTF?

In short, the copy-protection mechanism is designed to be unfriendly and obnoxious. We'll have to see if they get any worse, but considering that I tried to find a place to leave feedback on their website, and noticed that "support" costs $1 per minute...

Y'know, I like recommending software to friends and acquaintances. I like telling folks "Hey, here's a good program, go buy it." I've barely started to use this program, and already, I can tell I won't be doing that with TurboCAD. I'll be telling people to go find some other software -- just so that can avoid the experience of paying for software broken in such a deliberate and fundamental manner.

Features? Who cares? This is the sort of treatment that customers should absolutely not put up with. And calling to complain will cost me $1/minute? That's a disincentive for me to call and a disincentive for them to provide me with actual, reasonable, timely support.

Something to look for boys and girls: if it says IMSI on the box, put the box down and go get some software from a vendor that doesn't despise you. Or at least one that doesn't shuffle the task of copy-protection off on to the least competent programmer in the house.

This is why open-source software will win -- given a choice between this and free-as-in-beer-and-won't-treat-me-like-scum software that does half the job in twice the time using three times the resources, it's a no-brainer. I'll take mutual respect any day of the week.