Software companies, the hard sell and the whiff of desperation

I’ve just got off the phone with a global software company, and I’m shocked. Partly because I’ve had to phone up and register a piece of software in 2010 – it’s like a throwback to 1997 – but mostly because of the cynical way that the phone registration was used to try and pressure me, a potential customer, into buying stuff I just didn’t want.

The call started amicably enough: while I didn’t like having to hand over my email address, phone number and postcode in order to register an account, the operator was friendly and chatty.

Immediately afterwards he started talking, casually at first, about the software I was registering and how I planned to use it, before moving on to the benefits of the latest version of the same application. I was pretty non-committal – after all, I’d only just installed the application and hadn’t actually used it. His computer then told him that I’d registered an account with the company back in January, although I’ve since forgotten.

He then proceeded with the hard sell, both for the updated version of the product I was registering and the now-forgotten free application I’d installed in January. The full-fat versions of both applications cost around £80, and I want neither. It’s worth mentioning that his selling technique was to repeatedly run down the software I was registering in comparison with the new version, even if he didn’t specify one new or improved feature.

When I turned down his offer, the operator sounded incredulous: why on Earth would I not want a pair of such outstanding products? After all, he’d spent all that time reading his script, and now I was knocking him back like a cheap floozy in a bar.

The Hard Sell

His attitude swiftly changed from amicable to sarcastic, and I was told that plenty of other applications are available if I just wanted free software. He also couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to spend £160 on these two tools, neither of which I’d actually used yet. He then put me on hold so, presumably, he could fetch my registration code.

When he returned, he told me that his supervisors had been listening to the call for training purposes – yeah, right – and they were prepared to offer me a special deal. It equated to around £30 off each application. I turned that down, too.

The operator then expressed his shock that I’d turned down his offer, baffled by why I wouldn’t want such stellar products gracing my desktop, and gave me the registration code I’d wanted 15 minutes beforehand. He then sharply told me to have a nice day before hanging up.

It was, in short, not a very nice experience, and one that I don’t wish on any consumer who has the misfortune of phoning up for a simple registration key rather than to spend a significant amount of money on software they don’t want or need. It also could explain why the company chooses phone registration over the normal email system. It’s far easier to bully people into sales when you’ve got them on the other end of the line, after all.

Don’t ask me to the name the company because the operator may just have been having an off day – I’m sure that dozens of other people on the end of the same phone lines are far more cordial and far less abrasive. And it’s not as if this particular company is alone in using these sort of techniques to hoodwink users. Other examples are easy to find.

Not alone

Take CCleaner. I think it’s a brilliant piece of software: it cleans your PC of unnecessary files and clutter, and it’s installed on all three of my computers. It’s also free. Try and install CCleaner, though, and you’re greeted with the option to add a CCleaner Yahoo! Toolbar.

CCleaner isn’t the only piece of reliable software that’s become filled with this sort of rubbish. AVG AntiVirus, for instance, makes one of the world’s most popular free virus packages. The application does carry an advert for the full version of the software, which is fair enough, but other pitfalls lurk during the install process. Once again, you’re asked to opt for Yahoo! as your default search engine, and the option to install an AVG toolbar is available, too.

Countless other applications invite you to install invasive toolbars throughout the installation process, and dozens more open web browsers and ask you to take surveys if you have to temerity to uninstall their software. I also regularly receive emails from most of these companies, and most of those merely wipe their feet on my inbox before finding a regular home in my Deleted Items folder.

Like the encounter I had with the telephone operator, it smacks of a desperate hard sell. Don’t get me wrong. These companies do have to make money and, in a world where companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google control mighty chunks of their respective markets, it must be trickier than ever to make a reasonable profit.

But, whether it’s over-the-phone badgering or multiple requests to install “extras” I don’t want,  are these tactics really the answer?

MindView 3.0 Business Edition: mind maps made easy

Mind mapping frees you from the tyranny of the top-down page and can be a powerful tool for small business people as it allows thoughts to be recorded as they occur and without too much initial analysis. I’ve used mind mapping for years for planning the content of books, websites and elearning projects, or when coming up with creative ideas that tend to tumble out as they occur.

Matchware’s MindView 3 Business Edition mind-mapping software finds itself in a pretty crowded marketplace that ranges from the open-source Freemind to industry standard MindJet which costs £199 (£233.83 incl VAT) and a raft of new online mind-mapping services.

So what can MindView bring to the party? First and foremost it’s easy to use. Anyone who’s used a computer to create mind maps knows that it’s essential the software doesn’t interfere with the process. Intuitive keyboard shortcuts such as [enter] for creating a new node on the same level and [insert] for creating a child node are shared with other mind-mapping software, but somehow MindView feels more slick and responsive than others I’ve tried.

MindView Business Edition now allows you to add “calculated fields”. This means you can plan a project, adding tasks as child nodes and assigning each a cost (or any other custom field you choose). You can then add a SUM field to the parent node and MindView will add up all the child nodes to give a total. This can then be exported to Excel to form the basis of a more in-depth analysis.

MindView also allows you to view your data in Timeline format (mainly useful for laying out data for educational purposes, it seems to me) and in the Gantt form so beloved of project managers. By attaching dates to nodes, you can develop a Gantt chart in mind-map mode before then viewing it as a project plan. It’s all very easy to do and, in the main, simply works as you’d expect. Indeed, the mind-map approach to adding tasks and subtasks to a project is much more intuitive and productive than the traditional spreadsheet-style approach. It’s possible to get the broad plan in place using the mind-map view and then tune it in project-plan view – the best of both worlds.

Export to Word, Powerpoint and Excel is supported if you have them installed on your PC and you can also export as a picture, in Rich Text Format or as a web page. However, there is no export to PDF which, to me, is a critical omission and MindView is very limited in the formats it allows you to import, making it hard to swap data between applications.

Seen as a standalone application, MindView is a joy to use and it’s possible to create the largest of mind maps quickly and then use the new Focus Mode to zoom in on a child node and work as if that node and its children were a separate mind map – much easier than having to navigate around the entire tree structure.

Aside from the import/export limitations, my only major reservation is the price. At £245 (£291 including 19% German VAT) it’s more expensive than its main competitor, whilst offering a broadly similar feature set. Were money no object, MindView would be my choice of mind-mapping software. For basic needs, FreeMind will do just fine (and includes PDF output) and Mindjet is the standard across the industry. For me, MindView is the superior product.

Core i7-980X PC versus eight-core Xeon workstation

Having been writing about photo-realistic 3D graphics rendering for issue 192 of the magazine, I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with the state of 3D graphics and looking into the absolute best techniques for achieving realistic lighting. And along the way I’ve got a new insight into the sheer speed of the latest CPUs.

Turns out the best 3D rendering algorithm is a hugely intensive method known as path tracing, which is sort of like ray tracing’s dad. The theory behind the method actually pre-dates ray tracing, but it’s only now that PCs are getting fast enough for experimental dabbling at home. … Continue Reading

BigCommerce 6: a preview of e-commerce to come

BigCommerce is a feature-packed hosted e-commerce service based on the InterSpire shopping cart. I’ve been using it since January for our MakingYourOwnCandles.co.uk online shop and the experience has been excellent, bar one short period when Royal Mail integration broke.

The biggest bugbear has been the lack of built-in support for bulk emailing customers, which has meant that I’ve been forced to export my customer database from BigCommerce and import it into MailChimp each time I want to send a mailout.

The good news is that one of the standout features of version 6, which I’m beta testing at the moment, is excellent integration with MailChimp. V6 makes it possible to link BigCommerce with your MailChimp account in such a way that new subscribers to your newsletter and/or new customers can be automatically added to the mailing list. You can set the system up to follow the standard “double opt-in” approach which requires the user to confirm their subscription or to opt-out if you’ve already done this via your shop’s customer registration process.

BigCommerce 6 also includes e-commerce templates for mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Palm and Android so far) which renders your site in an optimised form for those smartphones. However, for many the most exciting new feature will be version 6’s integration with eBay which allows you to sell products both from within your shop and on eBay from the same product listings (no more typing everything twice). It looks to me like an easy way to maintain two shops but I need to see it working in practice before I’d be prepared to use it in anger (and anger is my usual reaction when it comes to eBay selling!).

Aside from those major features, version 6 also adds a whole host of more minor new features, upgrades and enhancements. For example, you can take and manage pre-orders (only useful for some business models of course), the integration with Facebook has been improved allowing you to sell from within the world’s biggest social community, and more of the system’s guts have been exposed so that you can tweak your site for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.
It’s naturally very difficult to give an e-commerce beta a proper test. Although BigCommerce set me up with a duplicate of my working site, I can’t use it to test the entire process since customers can’t purchase from it. The other problem is that version 6 has been in the offing for a long, long time now and there’s no definite release date yet. Clearly with an e-commerce product, it must be stable before it’s applied across the board but it would be disappointing if it’s not up and running ahead of the festive blow-out.

How will IT departments cope with virtualisation fever?

This week, the Channel Pro team has been chatting about different industry trends, and in particular, the virtualisation ‘love-in’ that we’ve seen happening for a while now. Better utilisation of resources, lower power consumption, ease of management – the list of things virtualisation can do seems endless. Too good to be true? Well maybe it is, a little.

Those who remember back to the switch from mainframe to client server will recognise another paradigm shift, but there are some drawbacks. Much more technically adept colleagues tell me virtual machines are easy to set up and deploy but gauging performance is much trickier. And even though assets are now sweated harder, performance is degraded as resources are no longer dedicated.

No problem really – just buy more powerful hardware. But if you’re trying to rein in costs, a server upgrade programme is the last thing you really want to do. Ironically, most large virtualisation projects coincide with a server upgrade anyway, so parts of the savings are absorbed by capital investment.

Training is another area of concern; the skill set for designing, deploying and managing virtualised environments is still relatively new. There are no industry standards for the management processes of a virtualised environment and there will be issues as different individuals or teams fumble their way through designing a virtual policy within each environment.

Lastly, there is fear. At a basic level, few IT professionals want to work themselves out of a job. The magic bullet that is virtualisation often reduces the complexity of managing infrastructure. Rows of telex operators or switchboard staff were made obsolete very quickly by modern data input systems and IVR, and although not as extreme, virtualisation could potentially reduce the need for a distinct layer of IT staff.

OK, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate here, as the rise of virtualisation is unstoppable – it provides too many benefits. However, the IT industry needs to arm itself with a counter to the potential issues it brings, both technical and cultural, to ensure the smoothest of sales.