WhItE said:
After downloading and installing the firewall, just register with us and
you will be sent a license for one year. It is a free, perpetual license
that simply requires annual registration.
----
Two things.
1. Some of us are not keen on making freeware registrations.
...and...
2. One year seems more like a limitation to provide for rescission.
Neither of these are likely to inspire usage by very many.
I think so too. It might seem minor to the dev team, but from the end
user perspective there are several free firewalls available, and I'd
far rather install something I know will work forever with no further
mucking about. With a 1 year registration, firstly theres muck about to
get it working, then who knows what you'll do with my email address, so
its more hassle setting up a temp addy, and hoping you get a
registration response today rather than next week ot never, then you
dont really know whats going to happen in a year, maybe just a quick
re-reg, maybe have to uninstall and wish you'd put proper freeware on
there in the first place. Since ZA is a known quantity, safe,
acceptably, effective, easy to use, why would I choose to make my life
harder? I just wouldnt choose it.
For a team to undertake a large project, spend a lot of money and time
finding out what users want, give it away free to the world, and then
have people complain that they have to register it may well seem like
taking the piss. Maybe it is, but thats how capitalism works, the
winner in the user's eyes is chosen, 2nd place gets not a lot. So if we
want to succeed we must make the effort to pander to the user's whims,
even when we think them a bit trivial.
If the aim is as I presume to get people to go to the website, see
what's on offer, use the firewall, like it and want to look at the
complete security package, then registration will act against this aim
quite considerably, even if it seems like a trivial matter to you.
Registering and re-registering achieve more visits to the site, more
exposure to the product. Or at least it seems that way. But it also:
- makes it registerware rather than proper freeware, thus it will be
removed from a lot of free exposure lists
- puts a lot of your possible customers off.
thus reduces exposure.
As a simple example of this, you're getting a lot of free exposure
here. That might stop once people notice registerware isnt quite
freeware.
So, is there a way to achieve your goal of widespread trying out of the
fw plus letting the user know what else you can supply? Yes there is.
First, lose the registration. Second, add a 'more' button, along with
the usual file, edit, window, etc. The 'more' menu lists each app you
provide (at the time of distribution of the firewall), and clicking
each menu option takes the user to the info page on your site for that
product/service.
A couple of points. It is important that the FW does not attempt to
update this 'more' menu via the web. If it ever does this, many users
will get paranoid, remove the fw and refuse to recommend it to others.
You may trust yourself completely, but others wont. This means the more
menu list may get outdated. Include 'update this menu' at the bottom of
the menu, and the process is under user control, users are happy. And
if you choose to include a few trivial interesting things, you may get
more clicks. A few pocket size freeware apps from other authors on your
site is a quick easy way to do this. There are even tiny <10k apps that
wont tax the servers.
_If_ you give users everything they want, including the various bending
over backwards, somersaults etc that capitalism requires, your FW would
then be widely advertised at no cost to yourself, with no further work
on your part, and millions of users would be using Comodo FW. Many
would like it, and would explore that 'more' menu. Result:sales. Dont
forget its not only the fw installing people you'll sell to, others
will see the systems too.
Most companies have it the wrong way round with registration imho. Reg
makes sense from the seller's POV, and is the model we all are familiar
with. However it does not add up for a lot of users, nor does it add up
when it comes to exposure. Time to use a more successful biz model
there.
System Requirements
* 32 MB available RAM
* 15 MB of available free hard disk space
Both of these seem about twice as much as is typically encountered.
I dont see how that would be a real problem though, This is an NT only
fw, how many machines run Winnt on <32M? Probably none, IIRC 32M is the
minimum for 2k. The more features a fw has, the more ram it will eat,
and iiuc comodo is trying to produce a kitchen sink product, not a
lightweight for old pcs.
There are still quite a lot of corporate machines running 98 btw. I
assume its too much investment for a shrinking market.
And less relevantly, a few oldies still on 95. And purely for the
curious, a business machine running 3.1 was recently spotted in a
roadside cafe. And I recently came across a corporate 486 fileserving
from a tiny 120M hdd with Win95. 'Its fast but its run out of space'
Now, enough about this company... here's the antidote to their fw, a
firewall that answers every single complaint above, and is real
freeware:
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/index.html
NT
) This version will have the licenses done so that it