Another Mac shareware vendor bows out

Posted on February 28, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 43 views |

A message was posted today to the Macintosh Software Business group that contained a forwarded message from Brian Clark, author of the excellent power-user Usenet newsgroup app Thoth. Brian has decided to no longer ship his shareware applications citing declining sales, poor response from users, and a general sense of apathy from the Mac community among his reasons:

Thoth and Rosetta and Ptah were not hobbies to me. I
worked hard to write and improve the programs. I was
online about eight hours a day to provide support via
email. I did my best to answer email soon as I saw it.
The programs were released as shareware because I
needed the registration income to support myself. I
worked full time as a shareware author and had no other
source of income or support.
…
There was no single, catastrophic event that made me
stop selling the programs last Saturday. I still have
my old G3, the Kagi store would still be happy to sell
the programs and take their cut, and my website is paid
up for the next nine months. I could release Thoth 1.8.0
(the version with OS X spelling checker and SMTP
authentication support) tomorrow. But unfortunately I
don’t believe that would change anything. I don’t think
sales would pick up again. I wasn’t expecting a large
number of sales each day — I mostly just wanted enough
to pay room and board with a bit left over for savings.
The sales volume I got last October was enough for me
to keep going, and a modest improvement on that would
have been enough to invest in a new G5 and get to work
full time on Thoth 2.0. But all the evidence of the
past two years is that this just would not happen. Some
Thoth users really do love the program, and would be
happy to pay for new versions and encourage their
friends to buy Thoth too. I just don’t believe there
are enough people who would do this.

Click the “Continue reading” link below to read Brian’s entire, thought-provoking message.

This makes me sad. It always makes me a bit sad when a respected shareware developer decides to close up shop but as a paying user of Thoth this one hits a bit closer to home.

I can’t fault Brian for his reasons and would be hard-pressed to fault his efforts, never having tried to earn a living solely from shareware sales, however one point stands out.

Regarding Thoth and the decrease in sales per release: My experience with software is that point releases (x.2, x.3) and bug fix releases (x.x.1, x.x.2) don’t generate sales at all, nor do they foster good will from users or garner press. The presence of a point release indicates that they’re simply building upon what’s already there. In the entire time I’ve owned Thoth (since before it was called Thoth) it’s only made it to 1.7. The presence of 2.0 in the version isn’t just telling the user it’s another version, it’s an indicator that it’s a new version worth notice and closer examination. Psychologically it also indicates it may be a version worth paying for.

Like it or not the glut of 1.x shareware in the Mac market means that users are very wary of software perceived as ‘infantile’ in it’s development stage. In the Unix world of free-as-in-beer it’s cool to never release a 1.0 version. It shows you’re serious about making sure everything’s rock solid and every feature but an email app are built in. In the Mac shareware world the greater the version the greater the perceived stability and usability, the greater the interest from users. As a long-time Mac user I rarely ever bother to look at shareware on
MacUpdate if the version number is < 2 or 3 because it generally means someone hacked it out in a few hours and now hopes I'll tell them what's wrong with it and what to add to it.

In my opinion the 2.0 release of Thoth came long ago. It consistently had features added that made me think “cool, great!” that only garnered a mere point increase. I wonder if things would have been different for Thoth otherwise… I can’t help but wonder if the held-back 2.0 release would have made a difference.

On a different note…

Here’s a thought for Mac shareware developers: if you write Mac shareware and you hope and expect to be paid for yours, then do pay for the shareware you use. It’s the only fair and honourable way to play and it strengthens the community as a whole.

And for all other Mac users: When you begin to think of shareware fees in pints of beer ($15 shareware fee as really just three pints of beer) you’ll see that most apps are pretty damned cheap and if you’ve used it more than three times probably worth every penny. Don’t think of it as paying for some piece of software you can easily pirate, think of it as buying a hard-working developer two or three or four pints of beer to slake their thirst. If you knew that developer personally and they solved a computer problem for you, you wouldn’t hesitate to take them out for a couple of rounds so why not? I challenge everyone reading this, Mac or PC, to find at one piece of shareware on your computer right now, register it, and buy that developer a couple of pints.

And finally: When you pay for shareware take a minute to fire off a nice email to the developer. The money makes them feel nice but it’s the comments that make them feel warm. Hell, even if you don’t bother paying for it, if you like it enough to use it fire off an email anyway. I promise you the developer won’t come hunt you down or chastise you if you haven’t paid, and you just might make their nine-hour bug hunting marathon worth every minute.

I for one will continue to use Thoth because truth be told the rest of the Mac newsreaders are still lacking in it’s shear power (Unison is pretty damned cute for light usage but bogs down in a UI-unfriendly sort of way when trying to skim many message-intensive groups at once). So to Brian Clark: thanks for your work and good luck with whatever’s next on your plate.

Please pardon this form letter. I’ve received a handful
or so of emails from people who were sorry to see that I
had stopped selling Thoth and my other programs and
hoped that I would reconsider. The following is my
attempt to better explain the situation.

* * *

Thoth and Rosetta and Ptah were not hobbies to me. I
worked hard to write and improve the programs. I was
online about eight hours a day to provide support via
email. I did my best to answer email soon as I saw it.
The programs were released as shareware because I
needed the registration income to support myself. I
worked full time as a shareware author and had no other
source of income or support.

Users have certain expectations of shareware programs.
One is that updates will be numerous and free for a
long time, if not forever. There’s some irony that it’s
considered OK for a commercial program to have no free
trial period, cost $600 new, and have updates costing
$150 or more while shareware programs are expected to
be dirt cheap and have free updates (and often better
and faster customer support via email). The average
Thoth user paid $25 for Thoth back when he was using OS
X 10.0 or 10.1. Since then he’s had to pay Apple for two
full-price updates to OS X 10.2 and 10.3. All the Thoth
updates were free.

Initial sales of Thoth and Rosetta and Ptah were rather
poor. Apple may have sold 100,000 copies of the OS X
public beta in the first week or so after it was
announced, but relatively few people registered my
programs in the days of OS X Public Beta. It was only
much later, around the time that OS X 10.1 came out,
that sales become more numerous and stable.
Unfortunately that’s also when the first forged
registration codes started to be circulated. Sales
started to fall steadily and significantly after a
couple of months and have continued to do so.

It’s difficult to earn a living as a shareware
programmer. Steady income requires continued sales.
Typically many more people use a shareware program than
register it. That alone can doom a new program to being
released, updated once or twice, and then quietly
retired. Even if sales are good for a while, there’s
still the issue of keeping sales coming. If you aren’t
supposed to be like Apple and Adobe and Microsoft and
charge people for new versions, you need new customers
who will ignore the available pirated registration
codes and pay the registration fee.

I considered charging existing customers again for a
Thoth 2.0 version. But I wasn’t sure how many would
accept this as a practical necessity. It might just
mean more people using forged registration codes and
bad publicity that would dissuade potential new
customers.

As a programmer I also have my own upgrade costs to
bear. Falling sales the past two years means I’m still
using my old beige G3 that won’t even run OS X 10.3
(thanks to Apple dropping support for these machines).
Moving forward with Thoth would mean spending a good
bit of money on a new G5 system that would be the best
suited for OS X development. It’s hard to justify
spending money on a new system like this, or investing
a lot of time on a major software revision, when sales
are weak and declining.

Sometimes sales behavior seems to defy logic. Sales of
Thoth actually seem to drop when a new version is
released. I’m literally punished when I release a free
Thoth update with some nice new features because I lose
income. It becomes better to release fewer, simpler
updates. Since last August I’ve actually had a
ready-for-release version of Thoth that added spelling
checker support under OS X (including having misspelled
words in message windows displayed with a distinct color
and underlined) and support for SMTP authentication. I
ended up not releasing it since doing so would have
cost me sales and hastened Thoth’s demise. That’s
something that bothered me, as I liked to update the
program to give users more for their money.

It’s also hard to know what to do when there’s little
positive or specific customer feedback about new Thoth
versions. It’s understandable that most customer email
will deal with questions or problems that their having.
But there’s no rule that users can’t write to express
support. That’s an obvious way to encourage further
development and show what particular features of Thoth
are important to the user. Yet despite the fact that
Thoth received a good number of updates in the past two
years that added quite a few useful new or improved
features, I received only one or two emails in all that
time that said something like “thanks for adding AAA to
the new Thoth version BBB.” That makes it hard to know
what to do in new versions of Thoth. And, given the
sales drop problem noted above, it means there’s even
less incentive to update Thoth regularly. If the
features I add and changes I make seem not to be
welcome, and if sales drop whenever I release a new
version, why do so?

I had done a good bit of work on Thoth 2.0. This was
designed to deal with a variety of issues. One was
dealing with OS X memory management issues. Another was
to work better with news servers that didn’t have
working or useful searching via XPAT, to allow easy
downloading of multi-part binaries using multiple
servers when no one server had all the parts, to allow
by default the caching of headers so that users could
keep seeing older posts that hard been marked read, and
generally try to easily handle newsgroups with enormous
numbers of posts. Given the lack of user feedback, I’m
not sure how many people would like this new version of
Thoth, or how many existing customers would be prepared
to pay again to use it. A good bit of development work
still needed to be done, and not all design choices and
implementation issues had been settled, but a lot of
design and coding and testing had been accomplished.

Anyway, I was sorry when I reached the decision that it
was time to stop publishing Thoth and Rosetta and Ptah.
As I’ve said, I needed the programs to generate a
steady flow of registrations. As sales kept falling the
past two years I lowered my expectations and
requirements regarding what minimum level of income I
needed to keep going. Unfortunately February 2004 has
been a very bad month for sales, with more and more
days generating zero or one registration.

I could have kept selling the programs without
releasing any more updates, to squeeze the last
possible penny out of them. Some people do this. But
because I believed in active support and development of
my programs, I really didn’t think this was right. After
seeing sales fall for almost two years, I had no reason
to believe that sales would rebound and again make
active development practicable. I wasn’t getting email
from people saying that they thought Thoth was anything
special.

There was no single, catastrophic event that made me
stop selling the programs last Saturday. I still have
my old G3, the Kagi store would still be happy to sell
the programs and take their cut, and my website is paid
up for the next nine months. I could release Thoth 1.8.0
(the version with OS X spelling checker and SMTP
authentication support) tomorrow. But unfortunately I
don’t believe that would change anything. I don’t think
sales would pick up again. I wasn’t expecting a large
number of sales each day — I mostly just wanted enough
to pay room and board with a bit left over for savings.
The sales volume I got last October was enough for me
to keep going, and a modest improvement on that would
have been enough to invest in a new G5 and get to work
full time on Thoth 2.0. But all the evidence of the
past two years is that this just would not happen. Some
Thoth users really do love the program, and would be
happy to pay for new versions and encourage their
friends to buy Thoth too. I just don’t believe there
are enough people who would do this.

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