This morning I was pleased to find a comment to yesterday's blog post about JetBrains from
In contrast to my earlier post, this is a very smart way to sell software. "But", you may say, "they haven't sold anything". And that's true, so far. But what they have done taken a disgruntled prospect, who probably wouldn't have purchased the software at this point anyway, and turned him into a potential advocate for their software. At best, I may like the product so much that I recommend to my co-workers that we buy more licenses. At worst, they've addressed a public complaint and generated some good will. This is one of the beauties of the software business, by the way - it doesn't actually cost them material goods to do this. Just an email containing a license key.
Kudos to JetBrains for keeping their ears to the ground and staying engaged in the community. Even with a lowly ZZ lister like me.
I stand by my contention that time-limited license keys are a bad idea, though. Had the software simply been time-bombed from the install date, I might have been a real paying customer from the get-go.