{"id":249,"date":"2009-02-11T19:33:08","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T00:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/11\/asking-nicely-works\/"},"modified":"2009-02-11T19:33:10","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T00:33:10","slug":"asking-nicely-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/11\/asking-nicely-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Asking Nicely Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.panic.com\/\">Panic<\/a> did some experimentation &#8230; a little over a year ago, when they released <a href=\"http:\/\/www.panic.com\/candybar\/\">Candy Bar 3.1<\/a> They have a phone-home system for serial numbers \u2014 not for any sort of Adobe- or Microsoft-style \u201cactivation\u201d scheme, but simply to check whether a serial number is valid or known to be circulating on bootleg message boards and forums. They experimented with different dialog boxes that appeared when a user entered a known-to-be-pirated serial number. One message was staid and serious (\u201cMicrosoft-style\u201d, in Cabel Sasser\u2019s words), along the lines of \u201c<em>It appears someone gave you an invalid serial number\u2026<\/em>\u201d; the other two messages were more personal, along the lines of \u201c<em>Please don\u2019t pirate Candy Bar. We\u2019re a small company making software for you, and software sales are what keep our company going.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>They got better results with the more personal messages<\/strong> \u2014 about 10 percent of would-be-bootleggers presented with those dialogs clicked the button and immediately bought a legitimate license for the app. But even the staid, impersonal message had a 5 percent sell-through rate \u2014 far higher than Panic expected.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8212;<a href=\"http:\/\/daringfireball.net\/2009\/02\/anti_bootlegging_app_store\">John Gruber<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Panic did some experimentation &#8230; a little over a year ago, when they released Candy Bar 3.1 They have a phone-home system for serial numbers \u2014 not for any sort of Adobe- or Microsoft-style \u201cactivation\u201d scheme, but simply to check whether a serial number is valid or known to be circulating on bootleg message boards [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4,24],"tags":[169,193],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-programming","category-quotes","tag-software-development","tag-software-piracy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}