Quote:
Originally Posted by HamsterRage
If I remember correctly, one of the first DRM failures was the old "dBase" software. Ashton-Tate put copy protection on the discs (5 1/4" floppies back then) and then found that sales dropped.
It turned out, or so I was told, that people would get pirated copies of dBase, install it and then decide that they wanted the manuals and all the good feelings that came with buying a legitimate copy of the software. So in essence, the pirated copies were excellent advertising for them.
It probably planted the seeds for the idea of trial versions of software.
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Ashton-Tate wasn't the only one.
I once worked for a small systems house that resold AT&T systems, back when AT&T was in the computer business. One product we sold was a desktop Unix system intended to compete with the IBM PC. It uses a Motorola CPU, but you could get an expansion card that had an Intel 8086 CPU and 512KB of RAM, and run MS-DOS applications from a virtual DOS drive.
Of course, you had to install the DOS application to be able to use it, and the most popular application
everyone wanted to run back them was Lotus 1,2,3. Lotus 1,2,3 was copy protected, and couldn't be installed because of it, so I found myself breaking the copy protection on customer's legitimately purchased copies of Lotus so they could install and run it on their AT&T system.
One of the better takes I saw back then was a product called the Spreadsheet of Steel by Potomac Pacific Engineering, who used to advertise in Byte magazine. Their pitch was simple: "We wrote this internally for our own use. It's solid and works well, and we thought others might like it, so we're making it available. We aren't software publishers, and don't want to
be software publishers. We're consulting engineers. The money we charge for this covers our costs in making and sending the disks, and pays for these ads. Use the software, share it with your friends, and if you need consulting engineering, give us a call." I suspect they got a fair bit of business with that calling card.
More recently, and old friend who does DTP for a publisher talked about getting Adobe InDesign at home. She couldn't afford the retail price for the current version. But if she installed a pirated older version, Adobe would happily sell her the current version at the upgrade price, and didn't care about the provenance of the version it was upgrading. They seemed to feel that some money was better than none...
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Dennis