Ironically, CS3, the whole suite, installed without a hitch and activated in seconds. Did that stop me from buying Creative Suite 3 Design Premium? Nope. I have a completely legal retail box copy of Photoshop CS2 sitting on the shelf, which I have installed 12-15 times but have yet to be able to activate and use, despite a half-dozen support tickets and untold hours on the phone. It smacks to me of the vendor saying, "We don't trust you, and we're going to make sure you don't steal from us." I've also been burned by it. Against that must be weighed the potentially much larger losses to be incurred were it possible to simply reinstall and restart the trial, thus extending it indefinitely. The vendor may lose a very small percentage of potential customers who experience these issues and cannot resolve them, it is true. The great majority of users experience no issues with the Help system, and for many of those who do there are solutions (some of which may be found here on this forum). This is a trial, the intent of which is to garner revenue by the purchases of trial users. Furthermore, viewed from the point of view of the vendor, the respective consequences fail of parallelism. The premise does not support the conclusion. With a trial product which provides precisely zero revenue, and not inconsiderable cost, what is the incentive for the vendor to go to the additional expense of providing activation-style tracking for downloads which may result in one in ten, or fewer, actual sales?Īs for #2, that is simply faulty reasoning. With a trial product, most vendors would be ecstatic with a 10 percent conversion rate from trial download to product purchase. When you pay your subscription and activate the product, the subscription enters into the system which tracks activated product. You are comparing a paid, activated subscription to an open distribution trial. I don't think I ever even looked at the part of the dialog which displays the expiry date, just clicked the Convert button, but if I had, it probably would have said, "This copy has expired." No date, of course.Īs for #1, the analogy does not hold. When I started the program and found that it had expired, I ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived I invoked the wizard to enter my retail key. I probably don't remember encountering it, or seeing an expiration date, because I installed and used the trial until it expired, without ever invoking the activation wizard except for the trial key. To my even greater surprise, it shows a date beyond the period for which I thought that the EW trial period would extend. That screen is the activation wizard, and it does, indeed, show an expiration date. I didn't think that I remembered a "registration screen," and it's a relief to find that I'm not suffering from incipient Alzheimer's. This being the case, reinstalls should be allowed.Īs for the expiry date/registration screen, I do not know how to post a picture here, but take a look at the photo on this for the reply, and for posting that screenshot. MS acknowledges problems with the help system.MS knows when my OneCare subscription expires and it does not matter how often I install it. The activation system can easily take care of this.Well, at this stage it is academic about how MS could address the reistall issue, but I'll make two comments anyway: This just happens to be the one that Microsoft chose. All manufacturers of products from which they expect to return some revenue provide some mechanism for protecting the trial from abuse. You get 30 (45, 60, whatever) executions of the program during the trial, after which the trial expires. Other methods have been used, such as execution counters. It's just a protection method against repeated reinstalls to extend the trial period. One installation per trial key is all you get. As to why, it was because it was a reinstall. Registration screen? What registration screen? Perhaps I missed it, but I don't recall anything notifying me when the trial expired, and in the activated product there is no such screen that I could locate. In both cases the trial expired 31 Jan 09 (which is why I don't get why the reinstall broke it. I have installed the trial on two systems (as you have probably gathered by now). All I can say is that the web site says 30 days, but the registration screen says 31 January 2009.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |