Wisdom through the ages. A classic DaveNet essay at: http://davenet.userland.com/1995/09/03/wemakeshittysoftware
Archive | May 20, 2003
CloudMark now wants you to pay for your free service. Hunh?
I endorsed CloudMark some time ago, before they let us in on their business plan to make money doing this. I had hoped that they were planning on marketing their database and services to businesses, in exchange for fees, while leaving their personal product free. A business with hundreds or thousands of users can easily show a good business case why their storage and bandwidth shouldn’t be consumed with spam. On the personal level, the justification is weaker. There certainly had been no hint during the “beta” that the product would have a fee after the testing period. Now that we’ve populated their database, they want us to pay $60 to continue to access it. With free competitors like SpamBayes available, I doubt they will succeed. Too bad, a good idea gone greedy.
Where’s the “but it will cost you” in the signature a friend uses?
I’ve stopped 29.254 spam messages. You can too!
Get your free, safe spam protection at http://www.cloudmark.com/spamnetsig/
What is it about “free” I am misunderstanding?
Fees rile spam foes. Claiming they helped build a service that was supposed to be free, testers of Cloudmark’s spam-blocking system are protesting the finished version, which costs $60 per year. [CNET News.com]
Feedback from WinHec
WinHec sounds like someplace a Bible-belter goes when the computer starts going haywire, but it is, in fact, a Microsoft conference on hardware. My favorite quote:
“We’re decomposing the user experience,” said Tom Phillips, general manager in the Windows hardware experience group at Microsoft
Microsoft’s un-grand design. CNET News.com’s Michael Kanellos explains why the software company is scaling down its ambitions when it comes to convincing the rest of the computer industry to adopt design changes. [CNET News.com]