Amazing Adventures of a licensed FineReader user
Bought home a text recognition program - the famous ABBYY FineReader . There is no money for the professional version (they ask as much as 3750 rubles), so I bought a home version for 990. It is interesting that the professional version has the number 8.0. The home version for, I note, tangible money is still selling the previous version 7.0, version 8.0 is not on sale. The manufacturer's approach has already pleased.
ABBYY is notable for the fact that by developing excellent, and in some places simply outstanding software products, it tries to make life as difficult as possible for legal users of its programs. Since ancient times, all sorts of perverted copy protection have become the talk of the town, despite the fact that pirated CDs with ABBYY products were sold at every corner. Two years ago I was presented with a licensed Lingvo - so it had to be installed using a key diskette (floppy! This was in 2005, then!), Moreover, I did not have a disk drive for such floppy disks on my laptop (by that time they stopped putting laptops ); as it turned out, you can activate the product by phone / internet, but at first the diskette was shocked. Now, too, the bad suspicions have crept in, although the bundled product was only a CD-ROM - without any silly floppy disks.
Before installing FineReader, my hands did not reach me, I decided that my wife would install it, besides, the program was bought for her, she needed to recognize a lot of documents, and I somehow don’t have such tasks. The paper installation instructions that came with the disk said that all that was needed was to insert the disk and the installation program would start automatically — in general, the usual procedure. But everything turned out to be not so simple: ABBYY once again did not let down!
')
I sit at work, suddenly my wife is knocking on ICQ - she just decided to install FineReader at home. Tells the installer to save setup.exe. I wonder - why save it somewhere, the program should start the installation! I say that, since they offer to save, save the file somewhere. The wife saves it, runs it - the program does not work, it requires an initialization file. Well, I think, we arrived - ABBYY made a distributive curve. I tell my wife to wait for my return from work so that I look.
At home in the evening I put the disk in the computer drive. Starting ... browser! That is, the “installer” referred to in the instructions is a simple HTML page:
When you click on the “Install” button, a folder on the disk with installation files opens, you need to run the setup.exe file and only then the installation program will start. Here it became clear that there were strange requests to save files. The default browser on the computer is Firefox, and a page from the disk opens in it. Firefox shows files on disk in its own window. When you click on the file name, the file does not start, and Firefox prompts you to save it:
If Internet Explorer was our default browser, then yes, everything would work out right away, the list of files would open in the Windows Explorer window and you could run the file setup.exe. But we, like about 15% of users, and even more - Firefox!
Well, of course, rhetorical questions arise:
1) Why for the product, and not the cheapest in the company's product line, it was impossible to spend 10 (!) Minutes and make the start splash screen as a normal program that starts the installation, which is even on any pirated disc, and not shameful HTML- page?
2) Why, if it was impatient to make an HTML page, it was impossible to register a call to Internet Explorer in the autorun.exe program?
In general, an illustrative example: a legal user, who is not yet the most inexperienced, is at once stumped, cannot use a legal product. An image of the licensed software is created accordingly.
Actually, once again confirmed the well-known thesis that the fight against piracy in our country is difficult not only because of high prices or unwillingness of users to pay money, but also due to the fact that software manufacturers themselves are not very Russian users. and interested.
Yes, and more. As it turned out later, the installed FineReader requires a distribution CD to work. Well, why? And if you make an image from this CD and connect it as a virtual disk, it swallows it without sound. That is, an experienced user will bypass this “protection” (it is unclear only from whom), and the teapot (a significant part of the target audience of the Home version) will suffer from the original disk.
Update 03.10.2007: After they began to write in the comments that the disk was allegedly not required for the launch, I checked - yes, the disk is not asked, the product starts. However, the requirement to insert a disc at the first launch was seen with my own eyes, so that it did not consciously mislead the readers. I apologize for the hasty conclusions about the mandatory CD-ROM for the FineReader 7 Home.
ABBYY is notable for the fact that by developing excellent, and in some places simply outstanding software products, it tries to make life as difficult as possible for legal users of its programs. Since ancient times, all sorts of perverted copy protection have become the talk of the town, despite the fact that pirated CDs with ABBYY products were sold at every corner. Two years ago I was presented with a licensed Lingvo - so it had to be installed using a key diskette (floppy! This was in 2005, then!), Moreover, I did not have a disk drive for such floppy disks on my laptop (by that time they stopped putting laptops ); as it turned out, you can activate the product by phone / internet, but at first the diskette was shocked. Now, too, the bad suspicions have crept in, although the bundled product was only a CD-ROM - without any silly floppy disks.
Before installing FineReader, my hands did not reach me, I decided that my wife would install it, besides, the program was bought for her, she needed to recognize a lot of documents, and I somehow don’t have such tasks. The paper installation instructions that came with the disk said that all that was needed was to insert the disk and the installation program would start automatically — in general, the usual procedure. But everything turned out to be not so simple: ABBYY once again did not let down!
')
I sit at work, suddenly my wife is knocking on ICQ - she just decided to install FineReader at home. Tells the installer to save setup.exe. I wonder - why save it somewhere, the program should start the installation! I say that, since they offer to save, save the file somewhere. The wife saves it, runs it - the program does not work, it requires an initialization file. Well, I think, we arrived - ABBYY made a distributive curve. I tell my wife to wait for my return from work so that I look.
At home in the evening I put the disk in the computer drive. Starting ... browser! That is, the “installer” referred to in the instructions is a simple HTML page:
When you click on the “Install” button, a folder on the disk with installation files opens, you need to run the setup.exe file and only then the installation program will start. Here it became clear that there were strange requests to save files. The default browser on the computer is Firefox, and a page from the disk opens in it. Firefox shows files on disk in its own window. When you click on the file name, the file does not start, and Firefox prompts you to save it:
If Internet Explorer was our default browser, then yes, everything would work out right away, the list of files would open in the Windows Explorer window and you could run the file setup.exe. But we, like about 15% of users, and even more - Firefox!
Well, of course, rhetorical questions arise:
1) Why for the product, and not the cheapest in the company's product line, it was impossible to spend 10 (!) Minutes and make the start splash screen as a normal program that starts the installation, which is even on any pirated disc, and not shameful HTML- page?
2) Why, if it was impatient to make an HTML page, it was impossible to register a call to Internet Explorer in the autorun.exe program?
In general, an illustrative example: a legal user, who is not yet the most inexperienced, is at once stumped, cannot use a legal product. An image of the licensed software is created accordingly.
Actually, once again confirmed the well-known thesis that the fight against piracy in our country is difficult not only because of high prices or unwillingness of users to pay money, but also due to the fact that software manufacturers themselves are not very Russian users. and interested.
Yes, and more. As it turned out later, the installed FineReader requires a distribution CD to work. Well, why? And if you make an image from this CD and connect it as a virtual disk, it swallows it without sound. That is, an experienced user will bypass this “protection” (it is unclear only from whom), and the teapot (a significant part of the target audience of the Home version) will suffer from the original disk.
Update 03.10.2007: After they began to write in the comments that the disk was allegedly not required for the launch, I checked - yes, the disk is not asked, the product starts. However, the requirement to insert a disc at the first launch was seen with my own eyes, so that it did not consciously mislead the readers. I apologize for the hasty conclusions about the mandatory CD-ROM for the FineReader 7 Home.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/14504/
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