The inevitable "Hacker News Devil's Advocate" post.

Yes, the OP is complaining about marketing pages, because he doesn't want to deal with marketing! He wants the danged download!

If there's something wrong with that, go for it, but having to use Google to get to a download page from a vendor shouldn't be the 'solution'.

> Yes, the OP is complaining about marketing pages, because he doesn't want to deal with marketing!

If you go to Shell.com to buy gas, you're going to be disappointed.

Quite a misleading analogy. If you go to <any site>.com to buy <anything that can't be downloaded or legally mailed to you>, you're going to be disappointed.

Should we have the same expectations for downloadable software that we do for gasoline (or any product that can't be downloaded or shipped)?

I say "no", but that's something we could disagree on.

(Author) Yep there is definitely an instant download page. Strange it's not the #1 result on Google. The #1 result is actually the thing as I've annotated.

> Yep there is definitely an instant download page. Strange it's not the #1 result on Google.

Not strange at all. The #1 page is heavily SEOd by the marketing SEO teams. The technical download pages don't have the luxury of full time SEO teams.

>Not strange at all.

What exactly is the purposes of a marketing team which prevents interested users from using your products?

There is no marketing to be done at that point - the market has already found you.

Think of them more as a sales team than a marketing one, they're trying to upsell you, and presumably it works in enough cases as they keep doing it.

Who are they marketing to though? Do they think someone is going to fall for this trap and call purchasing to get them to just go ahead and purchase it?

It'd only take one to justify it. And even zero isn't necessarily a negative outcome. From the point of view of someone whose performance is measured by the number of commercial SQL Server licenses sold, there's no distinction between someone who gets a copy of SQL Server Express and someone who gives up in frustration and grabs a copy of PostgreSQL instead.

To the company there's absolutely a distinction. And to someone who's playing the long game there's absolutely a distinction. But those are red herrings. This decision's probably being made by someone who's got an annual performance review to worry about.