🚀 go-pugleaf

 
I've pontificated here about `program crippling' in the past. 

My feeling was that software crippling _detracts_ from potential 
registrations.  It's a brutal method, more suitable for herding farm 
animals... than for encouraging people to register a program.  
(Maybe that's one reason the Association of Shareware Professionals 
frowns on crippled shareware.)

I also said that more ingenious ways of registration encouragement 
could be devised, ones that wouldn't antagonize prospects.

Well, I've just run across an interesting and original way of doing 
precisely that.

There is a bilingual editor (Cyrillic/Latin, or Russian/English, if 
you will) released by John N. Thomson, of Milton Keyes, UK which 
uses a clever way of registration encouragement.

When the editor starts up, the lower portion of the screen is taken 
up by a bilingual keyboard display. This shows every key with both 
Latin and Cyrillic equivalents, so that a novice user has a constant 
reference onscreen to the keyboard layout in both languages.  A 
really useful feature. This keyboard display does take some screen 
space, however, so it can be toggled ON and OFF at will.

Now comes the enticement: if you register the program, you get a set 
of keycap stickers that you can adhere to the keys, and you don't 
need the screen display anymore!  You can leave it OFF permanently and
you now have more screen space for text. 

This is crippling in reverse! Instead of *disabling* a feature of 
the program, the author offers an *addition* to it.  This is 
intelligent, positive marketing.

You may or may not agree with _this particular form_ of registration 
enticement, and it may not be applicable to every shareware program 
out there, but it does illustrate perfectly the difference between 
simply CRIPPLING an existing function (something any idiot can do) 
and offering a true ENHANCEMENT (something that takes a bit more 
imagination and inventiveness to devise.) 

My congratulations to John Thomson for showing the way.

(The bilingual editor CYRIL is available by ftp from 130.149.17.7 
(ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de) as cyril.arj, in directory 
/pub/msdos/dos/editor)