Convincing People to Buy Your Software: An Introspective Case Study

Short Summary: No Update in almost 3 years. Dead Blog. They Failed.

In a forum comment, I read of iClip, a Mac OS X utility that allows you to have multiple items in your clipboard. Sounds good. Sometimes I wish I had such a thing. So I type iClip into Google and see this as the top Google result:

So far, so good.

I go to the site, it’s nice, stylish, polished. All good signs that this is a strong company. This bit jumps out at me:

Let’s see: 40,000 users times $30 a copy…more than a million dollars in sales. Yep, that’s reassuring.

Let’s download this sucker, I think to myself, and go to the Download page, where I see this:

Hmm, the newest version is almost three years old. No update since the days of Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). That’s worrying. This could be a dead product.

Lesson: if you are going to have a date in your version history, you better release at least yearly.

Does it work properly on Snow Leopard? Maybe the blog will tell me. There’s a blog link in the main navigation bar.

Okaaaaaay. Not much of a blog. Never got past the first test entry. This site seems dead. I’m outta here.

I didn’t even bother downloading.