Not a complete failure

Today I stumbled on an article by Daniel Jalkut about piracy. Daniel is also a Mac software developer.
He claims that piracy is not such a bad thing, because pirates will become our customers tomorrow.

A short summary of his article could be:
Granted, “Pirates are not paying our bills today”, but they contribute to word-of-mouth marketing, they provide some peer-to-peer support, and by choosing your product they help fighting your competitors. Eventually, they’ll “grow a moral backbone” and legitimately pay for your products.
He concludes that piracy should be ostracized as a bad social behavior, rather than fought like crime.

At first, I found his reasoning very interesting and mostly agreed with him. But when I tried to apply it to SimpleMovieX, my main product, I discovered a more complex reality.

Like every software worth two pennies, SimpleMovieX has been cracked for a long time. My protection scheme is extremely simple, and I guess that any cracker with the right tools can break it in five minutes. Making it more difficult would be a loss of time, it would be cracked anyway. So this protection scheme is just aimed at reminding users of demo version that it’s a 30$ product, that they can buy it, receive my eternal gratitude, and enjoy a world-class technical support.

So as I’m not fighting piracy seriously, does it make me a supporter of Daniel’s reasoning? Not so fast!

SimpleMovieX is not pirated enough to see the benefits that Daniel mentions. Word-of-mouth marketing, peer-to-peer support, fighting competitors, and finally getting future customers, all this depends on the pirates massively adopting your software.
You will say: Pirates don’t choose it because it’s a bad quality product with too few features. Wrong! They don’t choose it because it’s competing in a completly distorted “market”.

I’ll take an example: If you like cars, and you’re a thief, you’ll probably pick the most exclusive cars. A Porsche is not more difficult to steal as a Ford, but it’s much more rewarding, and the cost is the same: Nothing.
With software piracy, the same happens: If you can get cracked versions of Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and SimpleMovieX, which one would you use? High-end video editing or entry-level video editing? The fact that SimpleMovieX costs 30$ versus over 500$ for the other ones, doesn’t matter for the pirate crowd. Not to mention freeware products, iMovie, and QuickTime Pro with hundreds of registration keys “in the wild”.

But it’s not an excuse. I’m willing to fight for SimpleMovieX anyway. I’ll continue improving it, differentiating it, and I’ll try to turn this distorted market to my advantage.
It’s clear that a certain type of entry-level software, often high-quality products, developed by small developers, is getting hurt harder. If the positioning is: offer less features but be affordable, then you get little pirate’s attention.

Like it or not, freeware and piracy are two forces that are shaping the software market. They decide to what extent a product can be successful, or said in other words, they decide what products get developed.
I’ll learn the lesson for my next product, and one of design goals (not the first one!) will be to get maximum pirate’s attention.
A market shaped by free products and future customers cannot but be a passionate one!

Version 3.0 is finally here, today is a great day. But bigger than the D-day, is the “Deadline”, yet to come.

Let me explain what is the Deadline:
When I first started planning and developing this version, I was overly optimistic about the schedule. As always, the software is quickly 80% done, but the remaining 20% is what takes more time. Also, it’s hard to resist the temptation to add more and more features. What was to last 2 months stretched to 10 months.

Then arrived the September’06 breaking news: my wife was expecting our second kid.

Babies take 9 months, no matter what. The Deadline was set to April’07. Needless to say, in the last few weeks, I was under pressure. The baby could arrive at any moment, and the software was not ready.

Finally, Lady Nature was wise enough to let me finish my SimpleMovieX. The result is a fairly good 3.0 release, the most stable I’ve seen in years. Now I’m preparing for another great Day.
But that’s another story…

Last week, suddenly my site disappeared from Google search results.

Nowadays, for a company like Aero Quartet, search engines can generate a big part of website traffic, and also be responsible for a similar chunk of the sales pie. So it’s a big loss that can even break a company if one gets too reliant on search engine traffic.

The same day, I read an article in reddit about the demise of a small software company due to sudden loss of search engine traffic.

I started to be really concerned after checking how my weekly visits from search engine had plummeted:

• First week of March: 224
• Third week of March: 239
• First week of April: 14

What could I have done to deserve the wrath of *Googlebot?

I did a round-up of related internet pages, read some FAQ pages from Google, and checked again my webpages. No clue.

As far as I remembered, I had just uploaded my redesigned website by mid-march and cancelled my Adwords account a couple of weeks ago.

But wait! Isn’t this just looking for problems?
What if Google had “punished” me for cancelling my account and drown my site into search results oblivion? I’m resisting to believe it, it would be “evil”, and violate Google’s sixth corporate commandment.

It’s most likely a side effect of uploading a whole new site, and I hope that after a transitory black-out, the flow of visitors coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN will recover to March levels. If within one or two weeks, it hasn’t happened, then I switch to DefCon 3.
With a Google account, you can use the Webmaster tools and consult some statistics about how Google is indexing your website. To my surprise, only a fraction of my current pages are here, and Google still has a lot of old, now defunct pages, listed. I’ll track it in the next days.

Another theory: Googlebot doesn’t see all my pages because I’m using redirects and invalid XHTML content. What made me think this is a visit of my site through a web spider’s eyes. I’ve used Poodle Predictor and it was not able to see most of my pages content. I quickly corrected all my pages by validating them against strict XHTML rules, and using 301 Permanent redirects instead of refresh redirects.
Now let’s see what happens in the next days.

UPDATE: It took several weeks to recover, now everything is back to normal. My guess is that the website redesign caused this problem.

* Googlebot is the name of the computer or group of computers at Google that every few days visit all websites in the world to collect information.