One of the great things about the bit trade is that you can take software out for the digital equivalent of a test drive before deciding to buy. Software publishers are just beginning to experiment with "try-before-you-buy" arrangements, but as bandwidth expands, so should the market.
Release Software, which boasts such customers as Intuit and Netscape, this week launched a full-blown marketing effort on Entrepreneur magazine's Web site. There, the magazine's readership of small-business owners can download trial versions of such apps as Executive '97, a productivity package from Softplus, or Family Lawyer, Quicken's package of legal documents.
Trialware is superior to demo versions (which usually have limited capabilities) because "users can check out the full capability of it. You really get a true sense of what the software can deliver," says Othnial Palomino, executive vice president of the software and online service group at TechWave. TechWave creates distribution channels and technologies that allow online software sales.
But do such trial versions actually help sales? So far, it's hard to tell, says Alexis Tatem, Internet section manager at the Software Publishers Association. "Right now, we're in a period of experimentation," she said. "We're just starting to find out what works and what doesn't."
In general, Tatem said, the cheaper and smaller the application, the more likely a person will be to try it. But even that's not a hard-and-fast rule. "People will actually wait a lot longer than you might think for products to download," she added.
TechWave's Palomino predicts that within three years, paid-for downloads - negligible now - will account for about 30 percent of total sales. And free trials will be a commonplace marketing tool, he says. "But if bandwidth increases faster than we think, that percentage could be much higher," he added.
Even so, the effectiveness of trialware is still in question. "Some [publishers] are concerned that they're actually cannibalizing their sales," said Tatem. "Others say it's great for sales. The effectiveness of try-before-you-buy is one of the unanswered questions."
But trialware offers one hook that software publishers can rely on. Test driving software is different from car shopping in one crucial way: when you test drive a car, you don't usually put all your stuff in the trunk. But with software, especially productivity products, users often enter lots of critical information, and when the clock runs out on their trial, they are left with a big incentive to buy the app. "That's true," Palomino says. "You begin to build your business or run your organization on the product, and you really want to keep it going."
