SecretZip
I listened (finally) to last week's Hanselminutes featuring SecretGeek's Leon Bambrick. Leon talked about the steps involved in becoming a "Micro-ISV" - that is, an independent software vendor on a small scale (with one or two commercial products). He's following up his appearance on the show with a series of blog posts detailing each step.
Anyway, at one point Scott and Leon were talking about shareware, and how so many people never bother registering and paying for their software. The example that Leon posited was WinZip, to which Scott replied, "And who doesn't use WinZip?" I actually raised my hand, sitting alone in my car on the way to work, and I was pleasantly surprised when Leon, too, admitted that he doesn't use WinZip, instead relying on the inbuilt support for zip compression in Windows.
WinZip was a great little tool in its day, but there are only a few reasons that I can think of for having it installed once you're running Windows XP:
- Support for compression formats other than zip
- Password-protected zip files
- Self-extracting (executable) zip files
If any of those reasons apply to you, then yes, you probably need (and should pay for) WinZip. Otherwise, why bother?
Comments
# Poo
31/01/2007 9:55 AM
That's all well and good if you can find in it the "send to" menu... how many "normal" users do you know use "send to"?
# Poo
31/01/2007 10:07 AM
Here's a good one on the fortunes to be made in indie software development :)
http://joeindie.com/blog/?p=253
#
31/01/2007 10:16 AM
I use the "send to" menu, but then, i'm not a normal user..........
Insert inappropriate comments here .....
# tristan
31/01/2007 10:36 AM
Pay for? Like with money and all that?
I used to use WinZip before XP, and continued using it only for the reasons you mentioned - namely other compression formats.
# mabster
31/01/2007 10:55 AM
I don't know exactly when it happened, but some time in the last five years or so I grew some sort of conscience when it comes to software. If it's not free, and I'm not willing to pay for it (which chances are I'm not) I won't use it.Strangely, this conscience doesn't extend to TV shows, which I will happily download. Having said that - I will usually buy the DVD set of a show if I like it, so nobody loses.As for other compression formats ... they're getting rarer and rarer now. I used to use LZH back in the DOS days, since it was generally better than ZIP, but the world seems to have standardized on ZIP and I'm happy with that.
# Andrew Tobin
31/01/2007 11:12 AM
I haven't grown a conscience or anything like that - I just have found the need to pirate software declining with all the good freeware out there.
There is one or two maybe I have pirated in the past that I still have around but thats seriously declined.
That said I'm happy to wait out the "You've used Winzip for 938 days" countdown the rare times I use it.
I've more or less stopped and use an urar program anyway, because those generally handle unzipping and strangely unraring when I need it.
And no hairy, you're really not a normal user, thank god you can still use a mouse without opposable thumbs, although it takes you a little longer to get to the space bar.
# lb
15/03/2007 9:46 AM
(sorry i'm late to the conversation...)
i just go 'right click --> send to --> compressed (zipped) folder'
[then i usually move to the create zip, hit F2 (rename) and type in a new name.]
sure i have a small consience, but the problem with the 'You've used Winzip for 938 days' message is just the annoyance of it. I don't like being nagged like that by anyone, let alone such a simple feature that's already in the operating system.
# mabster
15/03/2007 10:52 AM
I totally agree, Leon. WinZip's only real usefulness nowadays is the fact that it handles the other archive formats, but zip is so popular that the benefit of using another format is really limited.