Award-Winning Software Usually Isn’t
In the early ’90s, I wrote about software just about every day of my life – and that’s how Lockergnome came into being. There were very few original sources for content, and I was one of them (tilting at windmills by publishing through email). I really lost interest after dozens of Web sites sprang up and cluttered the landscape with useless award stickers and insipid reviews to inferior products. It was cathartic to read The software awards scam this afternoon…
The truth is that many download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords. Hopefully these bottom-feeders will be put out of business by the continually improving search engines, leaving only the better sites. I think there is still a role for good quality download sites. But there needs to be more emphasis on quality, classification, and additional content (e.g. reviews). Whether it is possible for such a business to be profitable, I don’t know. However, it seems to work in the MacOSX world where the download sites are much fewer in number, but with much higher quality and more user interaction.
So, is the software editorial dead? Do ratings and awards (for anything) really matter anymore? Why hasn’t the shareware industry done anything about it – and if they have tried, why is it still happening?
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6 Comments
Off The Cuff: Reputation is still everything | WinExtra
August 21st, 2007
at 4:22pm
[...] Referenced posts and sites:Chris Pirillo – Award-Winning Software usually isn’tAndy Brice – The software awards scamDownloadSquad – siteSoftPedia – siteLifeHacker – site [...]
CoderMonkey
August 22nd, 2007
at 6:23am
I really think the software sites, and their awards/editorials are now very much useless. Big software companies (As well as I’m sure some smaller software companies) are willing to throw around some money to make sure these sites make their software sounds wonderful, no matter how bad it is.
Take for example Norton. Now, while some of the bigger tech news sites all say it’s basically ‘meh’, many of the smaller download sites, which shall remain nameless, say it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread which coming from a computer admin side of things, is not true in the least.
The software editorials had their place back in the day, but sadly they no longer have any place other than bandwidth sucking uselessness.
Chris Elrod
August 23rd, 2007
at 5:54am
I fully agree. As the Admin of a computer retail and repair shop, I receive repairs all the time where the customers computers have basically locked down from all the bloatware programs and are also full of adware and spyware programs. The customers continually get fake pop ups while surfing the internet stating their computer is infected. Not knowing, they click the link which will take them to a site selling award winning software to remove the so called viruses. They buy it and it simply removes the ad and just adds to their problems. This is true of the large companies as well such as Norton and McAfee. Case in point I had a customer call with what sounded like too much adware and spyware that had infected his computer to the point it was running as slow as a 386 computer or slower. He happened to go by Office Depot that night and saw McAfee on sale for close to $100 advertising it’s built in adware and spyware tools. He bought it in hopes it would fix his problem and he would have no need to bring the computer in for repair. Once installed his computer would not boot directly caused from all the added startup programs that were installed by McAfee. He brought it in the next day. I booted to safe mode and ran the McAfee program. It found 55 problems and was able to fix 3 of them. I uninstalled it and began installing our recommended free software such as AVG, Spybot, Ad-Aware, etc. 6 programs later I was able to boot back into regular mode and when all was said and done the free programs removed over 1400 problem software and the computer started behaving correctly. Just goes to show most programs you pay for are noty anything they claim to be and don’t deserve any awards. Other than business software I have used for years I don’t know of too many programs outside shareware and freeware that’s worth the sleeve the CD comes in. Vista is another case in point I won’t even begin to elaborate on.
Friendly PC’s Admin
CoderMonkey
August 24th, 2007
at 4:52am
Yea, I have seen similar things Chris. People get spyware, and then it says “Oh, you have a virus, go here cause this is a 100% award winning program to take care of your problems”. Next thing you know, they have 30, 40, 50, 100 pieces of spyware killing their computer, and the only way to take care of it is…well wipe everything.
I think there needs to be an impartial site to review software honestly. Not take money from companies, just really put it out there, and give honest reviews. I’m half tempted to do it myself, but I don’t know what type of interest there would be with the biggies already out there.
Frank C
August 27th, 2007
at 5:55am
I agree with CoderMonkey. To be honest, It’s why I have been following Lockergnome for so long. It was introduced to me by a friend, and I got hooked.
An impartial party to review software, make honest suggestions and recommendations would be awesome. An independent panel of judges, coming under a recognized name that is endorsed by the major software producers would be best. I don’t think there is a resource like that. I have seen a few sites that review anti virus software and tell you which ones are real vs. fake spyware clones. That is rather specialized, so the other type of software out there don’t get a spotlight.
Melly
December 20th, 2007
at 7:58pm
This is a great tutorial thanks!.