Sat, 08 Feb 2003
Workspot Is Back Online (with bugs)
Scripting News reports that workspot is back online. Being an early user of their system several years ago, that's great news! However, the news for users this time around isn't so good. They have a $9.95 per month subscription fee and worse yet, no free trial. Their marketing guru has obviously seen fit to explain their approach in the FAQ:
Why don't you have free demo accounts?
We feel that $9.95 is a reasonable fee for a month-long demonstration of an extraordinary service! If you try to make the most of it, we think you'll find it indispensable. Otherwise, you can think of it as an indirect way of supporting the Free Software movement.
Unfortunately, the words "extraordinary service" don't seem to apply to my experience using workspot his morning.
After logging in, workspot responded by throwing no less than a half dozen of these message boxes:
Then, when I tried to add a system monitor utility to the gnome toolbar, I got this crash:
So I get 5 days to figure out whether this experience is worth ten bucks a month. Let's see, that only took 5 seconds. No!
I loved the kind of triangulation that workspot provided, being able to ssh from work to my home system through the company firewall was a real boon. It beats the hell out of doing the same over an http tunnel. Also, being able to run a web browser for testing outside the firewall was equally handy. I can think of lots of reasons why workspot was just amazing.
You want me to pay, you've got to provide something worth paying for. The old service was worth a healthy 5 bucks a month. This service isn't worth 5 cents a month.
One last question, does anybody know what happened to the talk about open sourcing the workspot souce code?
Posted at: 10:23 | permalink
