Years ago, when I was stupid, I used Adobe Reader to view my PDF files. I didn’t like it, but didn’t know any better. Then, I discovered Foxit Reader. Compared to Adobe’s sluggish, bloated monster, Foxit was like a breath of fresh air. It was lightweight, snappy, and responsive. It did everything Adobe Reader did, only without mutilating your system’s resources. I happily installed it and never looked at Adobe again. Happier times were ahead.
Again, several years passed by, until Foxit rolled out version 5 of their beloved PDF Reader. I didn’t think twice about installing, as Foxit had never disappointed me in the past. Hopefully, I thought, this new version would bring along some nice fixes and features while keeping the software itself as lean as ever. But I was unpleasantly surprised by what I saw. Before version 5, Foxit Reader had always looked like an old version of Adobe’s PDF Reader. Its user interface would never win a design award, but it was functional and unintrusive and it did its job. I liked it. With version 5, the designers at Foxit had really gone to town. What had once been simple gray buttons had now been replaced with a horrible non-native GUI filled with gradients and custom controls… oh my. Not only did it look like Microsoft Office 2003 had vomited on it, it was noticeably slower as well and it didn’t behave like a native window on my desktop. On one of my machines, the Firefox plugin was suddenly broken beyond repair in an apparent attempt to spare my eyes. Foxit Reader, what have you become…
Hope you like splash screens, gradients, and non-native controls!
This brings me to the point of this rant. As I took to the web in search of a new PDF reader (I eventually settled on PDF-XChange Viewer, which has been awesome so far), I realized something: there’s really no such thing as customer loyalty when it comes to software, is there? At least not free software. Foxit Reader had been serving me for years, doing a great job, but all it needed was a single mistake for me to replace it completely. Which is possible because I have no investment in my PDF readers. There’s no money involved, nor are there any program-specific skills that I would have to re-learn when switching. As soon as I find something better, I’m gone. So here’s one piece of advise for software developers: I never started actually looking for something new until what I had did something stupid. Don’t do something stupid. All your userbase needs is one of your mistakes and one of their alternatives, and you’ve lost them.