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A bug saved the company

(weblog.rogueamoeba.com)
379 points ingve | 2 comments | 24 Aug 25 09:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dlcarrier ◴[26 Aug 25 06:59 UTC] No.45023173[source]▶
So, letting people try it out it for two weeks prevented them from buying it? That doesn't reflect well on customer satisfaction.
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1. ffsm8 ◴[26 Aug 25 09:51 UTC] No.45024364[source]▶
I see you weren't around when such shareware was the norm.

With a two weeks trial, the effort to reset the app whenever the restriction popped up was minuscule, hence nobody paid money for it.

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2. Twirrim ◴[26 Aug 25 15:34 UTC] No.45028000[source]▶
This is almost certainly why the bug changed everything.

It's really hard to do time limited trials in any durable fashion, where that encompasses more than a single runtime of the program. Something, somewhere, has to persist some kind of indication to the program as to when that period started, and you can always modify it, nuke it etc.