On the other hand, allowing potential customers to easily try your product can destroy your chances at gaining them.
Here's a quick example:
A few years back, I was writing Smalltalk web systems and evaluating which commercial implementation to use. The two big ones that bubbled to the top of the list then were Gemstone and Cincom.
Cincom offered a relatively familiar set up which would require using sticky sessions for the web server, and another backend database like PostgreSQL.
Gemstone offered pearls on a platter: shared session state across all the backends, and a build in distributed object database. I thought it would be brilliant, and reading their blogs and documentations gave no hint of any pitfalls.
Cimcom was a download away---as were any of the free smalltalks---but Gemstone then required you to contact their sales staff before playing with it. So I made a mistake and chose Gemstone, and the system was built to target their as of yet unseen architecture. When I finally got to use Gemstone, it was a mess!
If I had that experience to start with rather than just their glowing self-produced reports, I'd have never picked Gemstone and instead gone with the familiar "kludgy" system that was "good enough".
Comments
On the other hand, allowing potential customers to easily try your product can destroy your chances at gaining them.
Here's a quick example:
A few years back, I was writing Smalltalk web systems and evaluating which commercial implementation to use. The two big ones that bubbled to the top of the list then were Gemstone and Cincom.
Cincom offered a relatively familiar set up which would require using sticky sessions for the web server, and another backend database like PostgreSQL.
Gemstone offered pearls on a platter: shared session state across all the backends, and a build in distributed object database. I thought it would be brilliant, and reading their blogs and documentations gave no hint of any pitfalls.
Cimcom was a download away---as were any of the free smalltalks---but Gemstone then required you to contact their sales staff before playing with it. So I made a mistake and chose Gemstone, and the system was built to target their as of yet unseen architecture. When I finally got to use Gemstone, it was a mess!
If I had that experience to start with rather than just their glowing self-produced reports, I'd have never picked Gemstone and instead gone with the familiar "kludgy" system that was "good enough".