I have two computers at two different locations that I regularly use and I installed Windows Vista on one of them yesterday (more about my first Vista impressions in a later posting). Since I wanted to fix some SmartInspect issues under Vista I decided to install Delphi. Because I only use Delphi for Win32 and because the new Turbos have all the latest updates already included, I thought I would give Turbo Delphi Professional a try. Besides a smaller problem with the .NET 1.1 Service Pack 1 installation, the Turbo Delphi installation went smoothly under Vista.
After the installation completed, the BDS registration wizard that we all learned to hate popped up. No problem I thought and entered the serial number and registration code. Now I just had to activate Delphi and I could start tracking the SmartInspect Vista bugs down.
I tried to activate Delphi over the internet and sure enough, it failed. There are two other ways of activating Delphi: getting the activation code directly from reg.borland.com and activating Delphi via phone. I tried to go to reg.borland.com and it too, failed. The server timed out. The next thing I tried was calling the phone activation number that is listed in the setup (I called the German one). An answering machine then told me that the service hours are Monday - Friday, 8am - 5pm and that I should call again during the service hours.
Umm, hello? I just want to activate Delphi, why can’t I do this when no human is reachable? Ever called the Microsoft Windows activation phone number? You can complete the entire activation without speaking to a human (and if something goes wrong with the Windows activation, you can talk to a support guy even at 2am on a Sunday morning, which I actually did some time ago).
Okay, no problem I thought. You have a 14-day grace period in which you don’t have to activate Delphi. So I continued without activation and started Delphi. The first thing I usually do after installing Delphi is to install the third-party components that we use. So I opened the SynEdit Delphi package, compiled it and pressed the “Install” button. Guess what? Without activating Turbo Delphi Professional, it behaves like Turbo Delphi Express and I was unable to install any packages and use any third-party components.
So what’s the lesson of this? If you require software activation, please make sure that it’s never down or your customers are going to be pissed. It’s just so frustrating to install a program and then find out that you can’t use it until the registration servers are online again!
I installed BDS 2006 after the activation fiasco. It requires me to install all the updates, but I can at least use it right away in the grace period.
4 Comments
Hi,
Very good article, and I completely agree with you. I can understand why they’re doing it, but if their activation process is not 100% then you’re probably losing more customers than your gaining. Each customer that’s unhappy with the activation process because of the software vendors fault is very likely to lose business…
Regards,
Stephane Grenier
Founder
LandlordMax Property Management Software
http://www.LandlordMax.com
http://www.FollowSteph.com
Thanks for the comment Stephane. Yes, I can also understand why they are doing this. I guess they had the problem that many customers purchased a single IDE license and used it with multiple developers before they introduced activation in their products.
But it shouldn’t be that hard to maintain a 24/7 server for a company of Borland’s size, so I don’t understand why they have such problems.
In the Kylix times, you also had to register, but if the 30 day grace period has expired, Kylix allowed you still run the program, but it only nagged to
register the software. Nowadays the grace period is only 14 days and if
that period expires, you were out of luck. (cry out loudly!) This is not the
only show-stopper, since during the grace period the product behaves
like the Explorer Edition for that period. (again cry out loudly!) As long as
the server at Borland are failing, Borland should go back to the Kylix
times just to keep their customers satisfied. Protecting software like this is
not bad at all, but if the means of protecting fails, it’s bad for the
customer.
If the servers are reliable enough like having back-up servers or a few
server each country, the newer acvtivation method is perfect.
Hello Tom,
I agree that the activation method would be okay if Borland could keep the servers up 24/7, but as we all know, they currently can’t (for whatever reason).
One problem that remains with software activation is the possibility of Borland going out of business. No, I don’t think Borland/DevCo will close the doors anytime soon, but IF this ever happens, customers could have real problems maintaining their applications if they can’t activate Delphi.
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