software piracy (was "Interactive and me")

[Rick Richardson]

In article <371 at icjapan.uucp> jimmy at denwa.info.com (Jim Gottlieb) writes:
>In article <1580 at redsox.bsw.com> campbell at redsox.bsw.com (Larry Campbell) writes:
>>Well, I was wrong...Oddly, most of the problem was in Europe...and the 

>I have encountered similar attitudes here in Japan.

I wasn't going to say anything in my last post where I gave our
piracy stats, but since the subject has been broached I'll comment.

First, I'd like to say that *we love our European customers*.  They
seem to be more UNIX aware than a lot of our domestic customers.
Europe seems to be in the good position of having lagged behind
us in some technology and now is able to leap-frog ahead (e.g. not
as blinded by MS-DOS, and going straight from pulse dial to ISDN).

However, our stats show an alarming difference in repeat business
with Europe vs. repeat business in the USA.  Because these are
sensitive numbers, I won't give absolutes, other than to say
the repeat business rate in Europe is less than 20% of what it
is in the US.  I hate to draw the obvious conclusion.

Another poster gave some reasons why piracy might be higher in
Europe.  Although many of these are valid points, I think in
the case of this particular product, we have attempted to
minimize the impact of distance and culture differences.

Note that these figures are strictly for a pure software
product, JetRoff.  The price is the same no matter where
in the world you are.  US Airmail (OK, its slow) shipping
has been *free* all along, no matter where in the world
you are (e.g. we don't make as much on foreign sales).
We have support for A4 paper and EUUG troff specials
specifically for those folks, so its not like we ignore
European needs.

About the only thing left is the cost of support calls.
Most of the support requests come by EMAIL (even for US
customers), anyway.  And if you don't buy it, you get
promised zero support, no matter where you are (and even
that promise isn't kept -- we support people with the
unregistered Shareware version on a time available basis).

Its easy for an entire industry to generate bad attitudes
among potential customers.  But we've tried to halt some
of that.  And if there's more we can do, I'd like to hear
about it.  I can't fix telephone rates, and I can't read
or write any foreign languages (my fault), though.

-Rick
-- 
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