Seriously? This is a major company with some very big problems regarding how they handle (or outsource) legitimate digital purchases.

It's this kind of crap that drives people to piracy (with justification).

You know you're doing something wrong when your customers would rather trust binaries downloaded via bittorrent than trust your online store with their credit card number.

What justification? If someone can't cope with a buying process then they shouldn't buy, it is no excuse for stealing. This is as asinine as seeing a long queue at a supermarket and declaring this is "justification" for walking out with the goods without paying.

I mean that people who engage in piracy can claim they do so because it's difficult for them to easily and legally purchase the same item.

When VMWare moves to a simpler (perhaps iTunes-like) system, then pirates have no rational justification.

It's a justification. You don't have to agree with it, but not doing so doesn't make it any less of a justification.

"The line was long" is also a justification for shoplifting. "He looked at me funny" is also a justification for murder. All you're saying is "the offender can tell him/herself that they have a reason." Which is always true for anything anybody does.

I get that you should make it easy for people to buy your software legitimately. But I don't buy the argument that if you don't, they are "justified" in stealing it. Everybody rationalizes whatever they do. That doesn't make it right.

He didn't ask me to post it and I didn't ask anyone to upvote it. The only thing I did was let him know I posted it, so he'd know some extra traffic might be coming his way.

> Why on earth did you think other people would be interested in this?

Well, right now it's top on HN. Seems pretty self-explanatory.

This story is a case study in how not to sell software. This is exactly what I would expect to see at HN.

Also important: it is the kind of software that HN readers are likely to buy. Knowing about the crappy post-purchase experience is valuable information to anybody considering the purchase.

It also shows why Apple gets things right by concentrating on customer experience. Buying VMware from the Apple App Store would have been an entirely different experience.

It's also an area where businesses have to work constantly to resist legitimate forces: the desire to know more about customers, the desire to reduce piracy, and the desire to outsource tricky business processes. VMWare might be an extreme example, but most checkout processes trend in this direction without conscious effort.

Oh FFS, really? Really??

There are an infinite number of ways to communicate how not to do things. Enumerating them only serves to decrease the entropy rate.

What I suspect is most people enjoyed this article because VMware made a fool of themselves, but not, as you suggest, because it provides an enlightening anecdote that will inspire the reader to avoid a common pitfall and yield an effective checkout process.

I suspect you're getting downvoted for your tone, because your point is legitimate:"reversed stupidity is not intelligence" -EY

While it is true that "reversed stupidity is not intelligence", that does not mean negative examples are without merits.

Someone once said to me "A smart person learns from their mistakes, a brilliant person learns from other people's mistakes."

Positive examples show you what you should do and how you should do it, but they often leave out why. A negative example makes it very clear why you should do things a certain way and avoid doing them other ways.