Pointless trials

I had a play with the trial edition of Webcentral's Promotions Manager as a substitute for our current cranky and unreliable newsletter system.

Very quickly I hit the limits of the trial; specifically the limit of ten recipients per email.

That's a plain stupid limit. You cannot test a bulk emailing program with a limit of ten users. It's like taking a car for a test drive but being unable to take it out of the driveway. Sending ten emails is very different to sending five thousand.

WebCentral and other vendors need to understand that crippleware like this is a waste of time. If you aren't going to let the customer trial the full product in real circumstances, then you may as well not bother.

As it stands this trial version is useless. It's simply not worth bothering with. It's a classic example of bean-counting managers not understanding their market.