Why people use cracked software

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:02:25 GMT

Today I tried to buy a copy (i.e. "activate the demo") of Native Instruments Traktor 3.3. The bloody NI website makes it impossible to buy anything either with credit card or Paypal - an object lesson on how not to design a website store. Getting in the way of the credit card payment! Obtuse error messages. Apparently non-existent Paypal integration (landing me at my standard Paypal home page rather than the page that allows me to authorise payment).

An all-round abysmal experience of abject web usability. E.g. obviously pointing to the wrong paypal page, a credit card details screen that was extremely hard to conquer -- in a non-sizeable pop-up window but too small for the available window size, from a third party (i.e. too cheap to get their own payment gateway or even front someone else's), all in Deutsche, and seemingly would not take either my American Express or Visa card, and while it had an error message for that in English, it wasn't helpful ("payment option not enabled for this user"???). Also they forced me to create an account on their website in order to buy, continually rejected fields in my address details with no explanation, and so on.

Really it was a pathetic experience and it lost them over USD$200. And future sales because there is no way I'm gonna buy any of their software until they make it easy (or even possible) to pay for it. They probably wonder why they don't have any web sales and end up in a vicious circle of "we don't make money from direct web sales, so don't spend any money on the process" and they probably wonder how Ableton manages to do it!

I deliberately contrast this to Ableton whom I have found nothing but a pleasure to deal with on the two occasions I had to contact their support, including the time I exceeded the unlock limit on my previous version of Live after I bought a Macbook. They cheerfully - and speedily - replied that since I was an "old friend" (i.e. a long term customer from v1 days) they had no problem giving me another block of unlocks on the version and I was operational again within the course of my working day.

Anyway the cracked version of Traktor 3.3 that I downloaded via a torrent was however, perfectly reasonable and functioned out-of-the-box so well done "ArCADE". Frankly I believe that as NI wasted more than a couple of hours of my time as I tried every conceivable option to pay for their software, they owe me a free copy.

Xray Dubs - traktor tag

Why people use cracked software