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Originally posted by assorted
I think I saw this brought up somewhere else here but I can't find it so here goes...
How do y'all feel about brand loyalty; or loyalty to a program? Are you going to stick with Morpeus no matter what? Or what made you leave Napster? Or any of the others.
Myself, I'd say my loyalty as a consumer is very very thin. I left Napster as soon as Audiognome became stable enough. And I've left Morpheus now that it is Gnucleus as I have Gnucleus already. I might have stuck Audiognome out but events dictated otherwise. And initially I was excited about Vinnie's interaction with Bearshare until I started disagreeing with nearly every direction he started pulling the program in. Regardless, no matter how friendly Vinnie was I would have jumped to Xolox immediately simply because it is a more stable client with superior features.
So, any brand loyalty here? Enough to even possibly make you pay $$ one day? None from me.
If they charge $$ for the software I'll get it cracked. If they charge for the network I'll either try to get around it or I'll switch to something else. And the second the # of files decrease or anything better comes along I'll switch.
Am I alone on that?
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If somebody needs unconditional loyalty, get a dog. Loyalty cuts both ways, and any company that expects my loyalty had better be prepared to offer significant, ongoing, clearly differentiated value in return.
If it's a piece of software, and it's free, I'll use it as long as works. Once it ceases to work or fill my need, it's gone. If I'm paying for it, my expectations are gonna be much higher. If Napster returned tomorrow, with a bug-free version that worked liked the old one (re: unlimited d/l's, unlimited usage), and they wanted a couple of bucks a month for it, I'd certainly consider it...but they better be prepared to maintain a standard of quality.
Along these lines, I just ran across this approach today, which is kind of novel for a P2P application:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../03092002b.php
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Rather than bombarding Toadnode users with advertising or invading their privacy by collecting usage data to sell, we simply charge $5.00. We feel that is a fair price to pay for the public version of Toadnode 3.0.
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While I'm sure the approach will fail miserably, I do admire the candor of their pitch.
