How can small software companies fail to see how potentially damaging to their business software activation is? It seems to be increasingly popular with a certain type of 'one man and a dog' developer, though - especially via Esellerate's complete abortion of an activation process.

What these developers never seem to realise is that every time one of their less-experienced customers buys a new computer, has a hard drive fail, or - God forbid - reformats their hard drive, there's roughly a 50-50 chance of losing that customer for good. Very few people remember to de-activate their software when required so that they can re-install. Hell, many of them may not even realise they need to. Let alone those poor sods who have a hardware failure and never even get the chance...

Yes, I know that these companies will try to help people in that situation, supplying them with a replacement serial, but this fails to take into account a: the inconvenience to the customer and b: the fact that they may not realise they're entitled to a replacement serial.

Microsoft are big enough to get away with this. Just. RealMac Software (as an example) are not.

It has long been my habit to abandon software developers who are sufficiently butt-headed to insist on activation. Now whilst most of my sites are produced in a text editor, until recently I had been using RealMac's RapidWeaver to roll out simple-to-edit sites with custom-designed themes whenever a non-techie insisted on being able to edit said site. I've also used it for the odd personal project, simply because apathy won.

Following Realmac's latest upgrade, however, we have the dreaded, bug-ridden Esellerate engine to worry about. Hence I'll be looking at other solutions in the future - certainly, I won't be recommending clients to purchase RapidWeaver unless the licensing arrangements change.

Sorry RealMac Software - you've made a very poor decision. I hope you realise your mistake before it's too late.

My current challenge at work is to find an alternative I.T. Support contractor. The current company we're using are a lot better than the useless bunch of f*ckwits ... errrm, previous mob we were saddled with when I took over running our systems, but we're really paying for more service than we need - and, more importantly, response is pretty glacial at times. We constantly get the feeling of being a small, unimportant client of a large company.

It's like this. 98% of the I.T. problems that occur are solved by me. I monitor the servers for problems, fix PCs, install software and generally keep the place running. The sort of support we need is a: to provide basic disaster cover if, say, a server fails, b: provide coverage for all of our systems on the rare occasion that I'm not in the office (on holiday, whatever) c: to be there to provide advice should I come across a situation I can't figure out (bearing in mind that I'm a Mac/Unix expert but supporting a largely Windows network) and d: to help with new projects, such as setting up new servers etc.

We're a charity and it's senseless paying a couple of grand per month for support when we barely use it.

So, what I'm looking for is a company who will either provide the above on a pay-as-you-go basis, OR for a low fixed fee for the day-to-day stuff (I'm thinking £5k pa or less) plus call-out charges where appropriate.

You'd think this would be easy - there must be a lot of small-to-medium businesses with I.T. staff on-site who just need a little extra backup - but it ain't. Having a real struggle finding a company that fits our needs and is small enough that we have a chance to build up a profitable relationship with them. I'm still lookin'.... wish me luck!

EDIT:

Well, we finally found a company who I think we stand a chance of getting along REAL well with - they seem to fit the bill perfectly, and I have been very impressed with their general attitude and knowledge so far. They take over in September. Fingers crossed! =]

It goes like this. I've never had any interest whatsoever in video, so whilst I've installed iMovie and iDVD on my machines as part of the iLife suite, in all these years I've never even opened them.

Until today.

A colleague comes to me with several video clips that she needs to circulate around our board of Trustees (I work for a charity). They need editing. They need to be turned into a DVD.

So, after saying 'no promises, as I have no clue what I am doing', I broke out iMovie and iDVD. 90 minutes after launching them for the first time ever (I didn't even know what the apps looked like until today). I have a DVD with a nice animated menu and several clips of video launch-able from that menu. The bosses are delighted. I'm amazed lol

I still have no interest in video, but I certainly had a BIG reminder today of why I use Macs. No faffing around - they just let you get the job done.

I remember a post I made to the 'old' Blogger-powered version of this site shortly after I bought my current G5. I said that it was a mistake - I should have bought a top-end powerbook instead...

Well, it's still true - in fact, I'm using my desktop machine less and less these days and am spending increasing amounts of time on my clapped out 5 year-old Powerbook G4. The thing is that the TiBook is no longer powerful enough to do what I need - namely it won't run Aperture. Secondly it would be very handy to be able to run Parallels on an occasional basis, hence a requirement for an Intel Mac.

So it's time. I'm going to be selling the G5 sometime in the next couple of months and replacing it with a MacBook Pro (or possibly even just a regular MacBook, dependent on finances). Once I've done that, I'll also move on the powerbook G4. I was semi-tempted to pick up a Mac Mini for desktop use, but, to be honest, I really don't know what I'd use it for. A laptop will be faster, will still be usable with my 20" screen and external storage can be handled by my G4 fileserver. Job done.

Frankly, gone are the days when a laptop is only powerful enough to be a second machine. For Photoshop, Indesign and Dreamweaver use (the 3 apps I spend most of my time in), even a base model MacBook will be more than adequately powerful.

Soo.... anyone wanna buy a PowerMac G5 1.8? ;-)