Category: Software

Good news for SyncToy fans

Reyna, a Program Manager at Microsoft, ran across a post from a few months ago lamenting the fact that SyncToy doesn’t work with Windows Vista and provides this update:

We are planning another version of SyncToy for release some time this fall and it will have Vista support (and it won’t require running it as administrator). Our 3 person team is also working on other projects, so thank you for your patience!

That’s really great news, especially in light of this week’s decision to chop PC-to-PC Sync out of Windows Vista. Now if they can figure a way to make SyncToy and FolderShare work in harmony, I’ll be really, really happy.

Reyna’s comment also illustrates a point I make regularly: Microsoft doesn’t have unlimited development resources (all the cash in the world won’t buy you great coders).

“A small matter of code”

Via Further Reading, I found this snippet from Tony Hoare’s 1980 Turing Award lecture (C.A.R. Hoare, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes.” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 24, No. 2, February 1981, pp. 75-83):

How do you build software that really works? Attitude is everything — you need a healthy respect for how hard it is to build working software. It might seem that adding this whiz-bang feature is only “a small matter of code”, but that’s the path to late, buggy products that don’t work.

Exactly.

Corel completes destruction of WinZip

Sometime in the past few years, I stopped using WinZip. That’s after ten years of enthusiastic use of what used to be an essential utility. It helped that basic support for the non-proprietary and widely used Zip format was built into Windows Me and then Windows XP.

But WinZip also lost me because somewhere along the way they turned from a scrappy little underdog that sold a necessary product at a reasonable price into a faceless corporation that tried to maximize its revenue stream by squeezing its longtime customers. First they bundled Google’s toolbar. Then, after years of offering free upgrades to paying customers like me, the company started charging for upgrades last year. In fact, the new, $29.95 license (the pro version is a mind-boggling $50) doesn’t include any upgrade rights unless I pay an extra $6.95 for upgrade assurance. (I think that’s close to what I paid for my original WinZip license 10 years ago.) As a longtime customer, I get a paltry five bucks off the single-user license price. Gee, thanks, WinZip.

It’s no wonder that WinZip’s revenues have been plummeting in the past three years.

And now the transformation is complete:

Corel Corporation Acquires WinZip Computing

Corel Corporation (NASDAQ: CREL; TSX: CRE) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of WinZip Computing, makers of the world’s leading aftermarket compression utility.

So long, WinZip.

Update:

A commenter at PC World’s Techlog says:

[A]fter 15 years in this industry, I have to say that I don’t know of ANYONE who has EVER actually paid for WinZip.

I paid for my copy of WinZip back in the day. I know others who did as well. But individual users are the exception. The real revenue stream for a product like WinZip these days is from corporations, which dare not have dodgy unlicensed evaluation software on their users machines. So because they know that some of their users will try to sneak WinZip in, they buy site licenses that cover the cost for every seat in the organization. It’s cheap insurance against lawsuits.

I would bet those licenses are a buck or two per seat, rather than the $29 or $49 that WinZip wants. Those prices may have made sense in 1993, when a computer cost $5000 and a copy of WordPerfect was $299, but they don’t make a lot of sense today, when free and cheap alternatives are widely available.

How much should an add-in cost?

The PC Doctor and Joe Wikert have both posted enthusiastic reviews about an Office add-in called Intellitabs. It’s a one-trick-pony, but that trick sounds like a good one: it adds tabs to the interface of Excel, Word, or PowerPoint so you can work with multiple worksheets, documents, or presentations from a single window.

Both reviews specifically pointed out the utility’s pricing was completely out of line. As of last week, the company wanted $79 for any one of the three add-ins, with a bundle price of $229 to get all three.

That price was completely insane, and to the company’s credit they announced new lower prices this week. The new price is $29 for each copy of the Standard edition, $59 for a Professional edition, or $99 for all three Professional products.

Sorry, that’s still too high for a simple Office add-in. It’s been many years since I took Economics 101, but I remember the concept of price elasticity of demand pretty well, and my instinct tells me that this add-in (if it does what it promises and doesn’t introduce instabilities) would be a huge hit at $29 for one program that adds this capability to the whole Office suite. I wouldn’t pay $59 unless it did a whole lot more.

Would you pay for this capability? How much?

Why doesn’t SyncToy work with Windows Vista?

New rule: Any software Microsoft releases must run on Windows Vista.

You’d think that would be obvious, for a company that has bet the farm on its upcoming upgrade. But apparently some folks haven’t yet gotten the memo. Today’s example is this week’s update to the SyncToy utility:

SyncToy is a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows XP that provides an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without added complexity. SyncToy can manage multiple sets of folders at the same time; it can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another. Unlike other applications, SyncToy actually keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder.

I wrote approvingly about SyncToy when it came out last August. And this release (version 1.2) fixes probably the biggest issue with the original release, which was the inability to use UNC network paths.

But even though this is an unsupported power toy (hosted on Microsoft servers, officially announced via the Microsoft Downloads list), I have to take issue with the team that released it. Why on earth should Microsoft be releasing any utility that doesn’t work with Windows Vista? Yes, I know its official name includes the words “for Windows XP.” But there are plenty of Windows XP-compatible apps that work just fine on Windows Vista. This one doesn’t. And it doesn’t just fail, it fails ugly, with a series of increasingly cryptic error messages that end with the program refusing to run.

Sometime next month, Microsoft is going to release a public beta of Windows Vista that will be installed by hundreds of thousands of people. If they download a six-week-old utility from Microsoft’s website, they should expect it to work. And if Microsoft programmers can’t get it together to think six weeks ahead, how can they expect third-party developers to do so?

Microsoft’s other synchronization utility, FolderShare, works just fine with Vista. Maybe Robert Scoble needs to bring his video camera over to both teams and find out why one group has a clue and the other doesn’t.

My favorite RSS reader gets a big update

FeedDemon 2.0 is now officially released. I’ve been using the beta for a few months, and I can enthusiastically recommend it as my favorite RSS reader, bar none. It’s well worth the $29.95 price tag. The two biggest pluses for me are:

  1. It synchronizes with NewsGator Online (which also just got a major overhaul). That means I can add, remove, update, or read my favorite RSS feeds on any computer, using a Web browser or FeedDemon or the NewsGator Inbox add-in for Outlook, and know that everything will be in perfect sync. The synchronization feature isn’t free, but at $19.95 a year I consider the NewsGator Online Premium Package a bargain. (If you don’t need to sync feeds on multiple machines, FeedDemon works fine all by itself.)
  2. I can back up and restore my cache of feeds, including posts I’ve flagged or saved in News Bins, with just a few clicks. For someone in the news and technology business, that’s a huge benefit.

FeedDemon offers a free 30–day trial and works with just about any Windows version. Highly recommended.

Update: Marc Orchant has more details in this ZDNet post. He also notes that the price of FeedDemon includes a one-year NewsGator Online Premium subscription.

Great moments in software history

I heard the hype about AjaxWrite, and decided I must investigate. Alas, when I clicked the AjaxWrite icon, I was greeted with this error message:

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I can’t decide whether this is a work of brilliant satire or just a boneheaded move. Either way it’s hilarious.

Update: In the comments, Pete quotes a post from “ajaxbrian” that says, “YES, we are GOING to support I.E.” No link, so I can’t check it out more fully.

Update #2: AjaxWrite might need a better spell-checker. Look carefully at the screen snippet I posted here. Hint: It’s worth waiting for.

IE7 vs. Everyone Else

InternetWeek has a thorough four-way comparison of the latest browsers: IE7 Vs. Everyone Else.

I wrote the section on Microsoft’s IE7 Beta 2 Preview for Windows XP. My erstwhile PC Computing cohorts Scot Finnie and Ron White tackled other parts of the story (Firefox and Maxthon, respectively), with Dennis Fowler contributing the Opera review.

TechWeb reviews editor Barbara Krasnoff did a great job putting this long piece together. Go read it, and if you have a comment or question, feel free to leave it here.