In my short time of being a software analyst, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that software companies are being shortsighted.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love software and appreciate the enormous amount of hard work that gets put into it before it hits “the shelf”.
I recently trawled the net for system requirements and compatibility information for over 2000 versions of software. Now if you want to really know about software by the time you’ve finished I recommend this job.
However I encountered one major problem. Where’s the data. It is shockingly hard to find the system requirements and compatibility information for some software. After trawling through companies websites and pages and pages of search I came to the aforementioned conclusion. All the effort is being put in to bringing the software to the finishing stages and very little is being done on the marketing side of things.
Now when I want to buy software, I want to know if it is compatible to the OS (operating system) that I’m using, will it run on my computer, phone,tablet and if it is a web app is it going to run with my version of web browser. I don’t want to buy your software, have it not work and sit in the queue of other people complaining and looking for a solution.
Is it really so hard for companies to publish this information in a readily accessible place? No it isn’t. And some companies do it beautifully. If I have to go search for that information on other webpages and forums its a guarantee that I will pass plenty of other software sites that will fulfill my goals and if their information is easy to get to, you miss out on a sale. In some cases we are talking about 1000s of copies of software at a time that you could have sold. Its simple, time = money and if you save your customers time you reap the rewards.
So it comes to my second point:
So I bought that piece of software, because your awesome or at least you pretended to be and you’ve now brought out this really awesome update. Now I know you cant support every version of software you make, especially when you provide upgrades all the time. I don’t expect you to but having what version 6 is compatible with on your requirements page, even when your on version 8 shouldn’t really be hard. It makes the customer like the product more and sometimes software cant be upgraded when an update is available for a variety of reasons, some money related, other times for software compatibility issues. People remember these sort of software vendors and as soon as they are ready to upgrade they remain loyal. Nothing is better than loyal customers, especially when you get extra sales because good praise comes back tenfold.
So please strip it back to the basics at least somewhere on your site, I know at least I look past those pretty logos and fancy descriptive words. I want to know how your software is going to work with my system, and I’m sure plenty of other software purchasers look for the same thing.
