Once upon a time, about 10 months ago, a company called CodeWeavers ran a promotion allowing customers to download and install their software fore free. CodeWeavers suite of Crossover apps basically lets users run a number of Windows games and utilities including PhotoShop, Office, and World of Warcraft on Mac or Linux machines. The programs usually run about $40 to $70, but thanks to a heck of a lot of publicity, CodeWeavers wound up giving away an estimated $45 million dollars worh of software in one day.
On the one hand, the promotion wound up boosting CodeWeaver's customer base by 400% (although I'm certain some people downloaded the application without ever getting around to installing it). On the other hand, a huge number of people who might otherwise have paid for the software over the last 10 months might have decided there wasn't much reason to do so.
Now that the 1 year anniversary of the big promotion is coming up, CodeWeavers is sending out emails to the roughly 650,000 people who downloaded the free software asking them to consider paying for ongoing support. The company is also planning on releasing a new version of the software in December, meaning anyone who pays for support will get the update, while those who let their 1 year subscription expire will have to pay full price for the new version.
Do you need support in order to keep using the software. No. But even if you don't need the updates or customer support, you might want to think about taking pity on a company that wound up giving away a ridiculous amount of software in one day last year at the risk of dramatically decreasing revenue for the next year. Last December, the company explained that sales were down 25% since the october promotion, but I'm not sure what the impact has been since then.
1 comments:
Some points of clarification:
1) Yes, our sales were impacted somewhat by the giveaway during Q4 2008. But 2008 still ended up being a record year for us anyway, and 2009 hasn't been bad, either. So, despite the sort of crazy scale of the giveaway, we feel like it was a great success. We had fun with it, and we hope our users did, too. No one needs to view our efforts around year-end upgrades as being some sort of a pity party to help us recover from the effects of the giveaway. That's not at all the case. Rather, we hope that people will extend their support because they found the product useful. If they didn't, that's fine.
2) We actually haven't yet started actively sending emails to all of the folks who downloaded the product for free last year. We've done some test mailings to a few, just trying to figure out what we want to offer in the way of promos when the year expiration date draws closer at the end of October. We'll be getting more serious about that in a few more weeks.
Cheers,
-jon parshall-
COO
www.codeweavers.com
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