Good riddance. They got my money for XCopy, while they were advertising free upgrades for life. Then, when XCopy Platinum came out, their greedy President, Robert Moore, changed his mind. "Did I say upgrades? I meant updates...yeah, that's it, that's the ticket."
After months of wrangling with hordes of angry users on their support forums, Moore finally decided that, if you bought your XCopy prior to a certain date in the past, you would get the upgrade to Platinum. Otherwise, you were out of luck, period.
Then he decided that you would still not get the upgrade to Platinum unless you paid the full $99.99 retail price for your XCopy. Of course, in the United States, price fixing is illegal, hence, it is never any publisher's or manufacturer's business how much you paid for any product, their obligations are exactly the same whether you paid one cent or one hundred thousand dollars.
The reason for this bizarre behavior became apparent almost immediately...folks who paid less than $99.99 were offered the upgrade if they paid 321 Studios (not the dealer they bought it from) the difference between what they paid and $99.99. So the lucky users who bought during the right date range lined up to pay 321 Studios and Mr. Moore twenty bucks or so a head.
And what did they get? A bug-ridden release of Platinum with partially implemented features. "Hey, how come this checkbox is grayed out?" "Oh, that feature will be implemented in a future release." Sure, honey.
The reasoning Moore gave for his greediness was this; "To give lifetime upgrades to everyone who bought Xcopy at a discount would not be fair to the people who paid full price".
After suffering with Xcopy and Platinum for too long, I found Decrypter and Shrink, which absolutely eat XCopy's lunch...and they're FREE! XCopy was a terribly buggy product, whereas Decrypter and Shrink are the closest thing to a bulletproof DVD backup solution out there. 321 Studos' products were barely worth the hard drive storage before...now that they're unsupported orphanware, I wouldn't waste the space.
If Robert Moore was some sort of champion for backup rights, it was for his own nefarious purposes. Personally, I hope he is going through Kentucky Fried Chicken garbage bins right now. I never want to see a product of his again as long as I live.
Just my 2¢. Not my $0.02.
Carl
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread
Facebook
Twitter