Corporate Greed and Upselling - Trialware On Your Computer

None of us has made it this far in life without hearing McDonald's famous "would you like fries with that?" upsell.  Whether its the "extended warranties" that put electronics retailers in the dubious position of convincing us that their products are subject to highly likely and frequent failures, or the person in the restaurant asking "did you want cheese with that?" or "anything to drink", we are constantly surrounded by upselling.  It is the corporation's attempt to extract more money from our wallets than we have decided to give them.  They have a captive audience and are greedy for a little more of our after-tax money.  Sometimes its sneaky like a well placed food-bar at the exit of a big box retailer, other times it is more overtly evil like additional charges on your restaurant bill for items you thought were included in the posted price.  Sometimes it is putting the customer in a situation where they have to work hard and spend their time to avoid paying money.  I have been seeing the same thing happening on the last few computers I have purchased.

When purchasing computers in the last couple years, it has become difficult to ignore the seriously large amount of  CRAP software that is loaded onto the desktop.  It is software loaded onto the computers that promises to disappoint in one of the following ways.  The software;

• will stop working after a time period
• will allow you to create documents in a proprietary format before locking up.
• will offer a narrow range of functionality with enough limitation or irritation that upgrading seems like the only way to make the pain stop.
• offers a service you never would have sought out on your own.
• is ad supported and to make the annoying ads stop you must pay.
• (mcafee) is stuck in a half installed state that is only solved by creating an account on their website.

When did it become OK for some corporation to put something on our computers without our permission, particularly something that advertises at us, or promises to frustrate, or slows the computer to a crawl by starting when the computer starts...  For example there was some DVD software that came installed on a net-book that ran 2 executables at boot time, each of which used several Megs of RAM (you caught that it was a netbook and had no DVD drive right?...

My best guess is that companies like HP and Acer are being paid to install this software on your computer. ($15/computer etc) knowing that a certain percentage of suckers will simply obey the computer and type in their credit card number to continue.

So I am technically savvy and have no problem recognizing these "special offers", but I truly pity the older generations and the less astute who may not understand their computer software is going to "stop working" in 60 days.  To prey on the ignorance of the ill-informed is reprehensible behaviour.  These corporations seem to think nothing of taking actions that will lead to confusion and frustration and disappointment on the part of their customers, as long as they get their $15 per computer sold.  Ok, so they make money by making their customers experience frustrating while bloating their computer's RAM and cluttering the start menu and desktop.   I would suggest that the term "free-trial" is the other meaning of "trial"  the one that means the same as "ordeal" and not a "test-drive".  There is an arrogance with these software manufacturers in that they seem to believe the following about their software;

• that it is so important it should take up space on my desktop where I will see it constantly
• that it is ok to use up your RAM on startup to keep "helpers" and "startup assistants" in memory even if you don't use their software that day.
• that it is OK to hijack file associations and make themselves the default software for use with files of those types
• that your data (audio/text etc) should be stored in a proprietary format that only their software reads/writes

When we recently purchased a computer for my parents, we uninstalled (or modified the behaviour of) the following crap trial-ware; Adobe Reader (does not need to load on start), cyberlink DVD software (does not need to load, this is a netbook), Microsoft Works (ad supported? really Microsoft you are sounding more desperate each year), 15 time limited games, Mcafee antivirus software (60 days).

MS Office student edition 60 day trial, carbonite online storage.

There are lots of excellent and free software packages out there that surpass those listed above, so I've loaded these onto the computers to replace the advertising, crippled trial-ware and deceptive marketing.

Many of these were in my list of free software earlier this year.

Hey Manufacturers....  My next computer will be Linux or Google-OS.  Stop treating your customers like a "market to be exploited" and start putting yourself in their shoes and asking "how would I like to be treated?"

Software vendors.... Your software isn't as good as you think it is.  People aren't delighted to "TRY" your software "FOR FREE".  Get out of the 80s.  Deliver real value to people with no strings attached and you will have a loyal following (anyone heard of Google or open source software).  Stop trying to trap the customer into your profit center.

People...  Use free open source software.  It works, its better, its less of a headache, it costs less.  Be free.

Cheers,

Greg

P.S.  Acer you owe me 8 hours of my life back.  I bill at $60/hour, I think you owe me a laptop.  Email me to arrange delivery.