Today I stumbled on an
article by Daniel Jalkut about piracy. Daniel is also a Mac software developer.
He claims that piracy is not such a bad thing, because
pirates will become our customers tomorrow.
A short summary of his article could be:
Granted,
Pirates are not paying our bills today, but they contribute to word-of-mouth marketing, they provide some peer-to-peer support, and by
choosing your product they help fighting your competitors. Eventually, theyll
grow a moral backbone and legitimately pay for your products.
He concludes that piracy should be ostracized as a bad social behavior, rather than fought like crime.
At first, I found his reasoning very interesting and mostly agreed with him. But when I tried to apply it to
SimpleMovieX, my main product, I discovered a more complex reality.
Like every software worth two pennies,
SimpleMovieX has been cracked for a long time. My protection scheme is extremely simple, and I guess that any cracker with the right tools can break it in five minutes. Making it more difficult would be a loss of time, it would be cracked anyway. So this protection scheme is just aimed at reminding users of demo version that its a 30$ product, that they can buy it, receive my eternal gratitude, and enjoy a world-class technical support.
So as Im not fighting piracy seriously, does it make me a supporter of Daniels reasoning? Not so fast!
SimpleMovieX is
not pirated enough to see the benefits that Daniel mentions. Word-of-mouth marketing, peer-to-peer support, fighting competitors, and finally getting future customers, all this depends on the pirates massively adopting your software.
You will say:
Pirates dont choose it because its a bad quality product with too few features.
Wrong! They dont choose it because its competing in a completly distorted market.
Ill take an example: If you like cars, and youre a thief, youll probably pick the most exclusive cars. A Porsche is not more difficult to steal as a Ford, but its much more rewarding, and the cost is the same: Nothing.
With software piracy, the same happens: If you can get cracked versions of Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and SimpleMovieX, which one would you use? High-end video editing or entry-level video editing? The fact that SimpleMovieX costs 30$ versus over 500$ for the other ones, doesnt matter for the pirate crowd. Not to mention freeware products, iMovie, and QuickTime Pro with hundreds of registration keys in the wild.
But its not an excuse. Im willing to fight for
SimpleMovieX anyway. Ill continue improving it, differentiating it, and Ill try to turn this distorted market to my advantage.
Its clear that a certain type of entry-level software, often high-quality products, developed by small developers, is getting hurt harder. If the positioning is: offer less features but be affordable, then you get little pirates attention.
Like it or not, freeware and piracy are two forces that are shaping the software market. They decide to what extent a product can be successful, or said in other words, they decide what products get developed.
Ill learn the lesson for my next product, and one of design goals (not the first one!) will be to get maximum pirates attention.
A market shaped by free products and future customers cannot but be a passionate one!
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