.
[@Daryl]
You’re funny — you’d stop giving away software if you ran a company, that’s your comment on a giveaway site!
Giveaways are like what a test drive is for the automobile industry, no one buys without a test, even if there’s a money-back guarantee, we still wanna play with stuff before we decide,
… and more, in that, if a customer uses your company’s programs at all, then they are not using your competitor’s programs,
… and more, in that you can upsell your free users if you can show that there is added value in your non-free versions,
… and more, you expand your base of alpha / beta / gamma testers who can and do give valuable user-experience feedback, such as yours, to help guide your product’s appropriateness, reliability, and evolution,
… and more, early adopters recommend your product to others who are then more ready to purchase based on other user’s recommendations,
… and more … you can take it from here, the benefits of giveaways are endless and perennial.
__________
All companies need:
— creators, designers, inventors, programmers, creative people,
— sales, marketing savvy,
— cash flow, finances, money management.
Those three need to work in balanced cooperation together.
If ONE of those becomes the boss, the company fails, such as if the bean-counter accounting department demands that that marketing department stop giving away the company’s products, in ignorance of the points I shared above, then the competition make inroads, and the programmers lose user feedback, their product’s qualities, and customer base, both shrink.
__________
Note: I see alternatives where instead of building a self-perpetuating company serving an ever expanding customer base, some software is actually the creative brainchild of one programmer, such as the offering from solo practitioners who do not want to build a customer-service oriented software company that outlives them:
— Steve Gibson’s SpinRite at [ GRC. com ]
— Jeremy Collake’s Process Lasso at [ Bitsum. com ]
— Kyle Katarn of [ KCSoftwares. com ]
— Nir Soffer’s [ NirSoft. net ],
— Irfan Skiljan’s [ IrfanView. net ],
— Shane Croft of [ Tweaking. com ] and [ PCWinTech. com ],
— and more and more, we all have some utility on our computer that is the result of one programmer’s passion,
… and then they retire, I mean die, see also the history of great programs such as
— PKZip,
— MyDefrag,
— VOpt,
… each the product of passion from one programmer.
And special cases like the genius of Peter Norton who sold out to Symantec and never created anything again.
We need [ PC Hall Of Fame ] to help us all appreciate the variety of geniuses who got us hear and will lead us on, including the Steves of Apple and Bill Lowe of IBM, and all who preceded and followed, momentously if momentarily.
Wanna build a [ PC HOF ]?
[ https :// en. m. wikipedia. org/wiki/Pc_hall_of_fame ]
__________
PS — Ashampoo Snap is awful, I could not get it to work ( record, snip, and save a video-playing window ), I would never pay for it, it motivated me to search for functional alternatives, Ashampoo programmers seem averse to constructive feedback, typical German “we know better than the customer”, such that they never join any discussion at a giveaway site and ask questions of end users — the ones who are happy will pay, and Ashampoo only cares about their own programmers being happy, not happy customers, so let the programmers pay for their software.
.