Networking Technology

Shades of Novell! - Not content with having lost most of their market share to Adobe, Corel have now decided to lose the rest. With the release of Corel Graphics Suite X5, they have continued to make use of Protexis, a copy protection scheme which installs a Service which takes up space, bandwidth and CPU time, "phoning home"  to ensure that the copy is licenced. Worse still in this age of Virtualization, this doesn't lend itself to ThinApps and as the use of ThinApps grows by the day, the chance of software using this kind of protection surviving is about NIL.

For this intrusive piece of software they are charging almost $1,000. Now I wonder how many people are going to pay this crazy price for having intrusive services installed without their knowledge onto their machines, when you can buy the entire Adobe Master Collection (which doesn't install CPU sapping services) for less? You can also download The GIMP, which is equally as good and it's FREE.

I wonder if they too have farmed out their support and development to India? I wonder how much longer they can continue to charge these fancy prices in an ever shrinking market and in a world-wide recession? This kind of copy protection is a complete waste of time. Businesses which rely on Graphics Design software will always BUY the product. The youngsters who can't afford it and the small businesses who can't afford it, wouldn't be able to buy it in any case, so what's the point. These fancy copy-protection schemes actually LOSE market share, they don't increase it. Look at what happened to Wordstar!

All this does is throw down the gauntlet to the youngsters, and there are a lot of them with a combined brainpower far greater than anything a mere company can dream up!