Have you ever heard the phrase "I care...but I don't care care." If you have, please bear that in mind as you read this blog.
The Shareware Industry Conference had its awards last week. If Len Gray, author of the excellent Microangelo, hadn't told me that WindowBlinds had been nominated last month for best "Desktop enhancement" I wouldn't have even known about it. It's not that I'm not interested in the shareware world. It's just that we've been around long enough to know that these various "awards" programs tend to be little more than a club of old guard developers who pick other club members to give awards to without any sort of recognition of the wider world out there.
For instance, for best desktop enhancement they had two icon creation utilities, WindowBlinds, and a screen saver. That's it. Let's ignore, for a moment, that icon editors are not generally considered desktop enhancements (and that they had two graphics editing utility categories already that they could have gone in). And let's ignore all the other Stardock desktop enhancements (on Download.com Stardock has 5 of the top 6 positions). What about Samurize? What about 3DNA Desktop? What about WinStep? What about Hoverdesk? What about Rainlendar? None of these types of programs have ever been nominated.
And this sort of provincialism isn't just in desktop enhancements. It's hit in miss in all the other categories too. The more you look, the worse it gets.
You can almost imagine a group of a couple dozen guys who have a very fragmented level of knowledge on the wider software world. They get together and pop off the apps that they're familiar with. No research, just what they know off the top of their heads.
That's how you can imagine programs like mIRC and WinZip (which won best OVERALL) still dominating something like this in 2004. Maybe they hadn't heard that ZIP is included with Windows and has been for some time (it's hard to believe but Windows XP is now 3 years old).
I like mIRC but let's face it, it's not exactly been evolving. It's the same program today essentially that it was in 1999. I can name a bunch of really new and popular such programs (we use Ventrilo here) that are really innovating in the area of communications. At least Trillian won that category.
It's no surprise that WindowBlinds didn't win (Microangelo Creator won "best desktop enhancement"). I hadn't expected WindowBlinds to win for the reasons I just mentioned (which was one reason I didn't bother to announce the nomination). And I'm glad that Microangelo won and not say the screen saver. But come on, why bother even having a desktop enhancements category if you can only find one desktop enhancement to include? It's not an obscure category.
Let me be clear, I don't have a problem with Shareware organizations. I just think it's a little cheeky when they start giving out "shareware industry awards" that are essentially just awards to their buddies they know about.
See here's the thing, because they've been giving out these awards for so many years they now have credibility. So when they give out these awards, they get covered in places like PC Magazine, ZDNet, CNet, etc. And it doesn't take a lot of research to realize that these guys aren't really serious.
They nominate the same apps year after year as if they're living in 1996.
Look for yourself:
2000 Winners: 
Link
2001 Winners: Link
2002 Winners: Link
2003 Winners: Link
2004 Winners: Link
Let me illustrate it plainly:
2000 nominee for best Internet utility: FTP Voyager
2004 nominee for best internet utility: FTP Voyager
Apparently not much has happened with that whole Internet thing since the last millenium.
And this is just par for the course. It's the same apps from the same tiny pool year after year. Heck, Micrangelo won in 2000! Has new software been released since 2000?
If they were just representing them and their friends, that's fine. But when they represent themselves as the "whole industry" then it just gets absurd.
One can almost envision the awards as traveling back to a distant world where it's 1996 forever. The land where Paint Shop Pro is the only graphics utility program. For in 2004, they only had 3 nominees for back graphics utility.
I guess there hasn't been much progress in graphics packages in the past decade. Forget PMView, ACDSee, Ulead, Snagit, Konvertor, FaceLifter. They apparently hadn't heard of those programs. I'm not even a graphics guy and I'm familiar with these programs.
Like I said, I care, but I don't care care about this. I wrote a shorter version of this on WinCustomize and someone thought I was really ticked off. I'm not. Winning the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award matters. Being in Newsweek today is a help. A shareware awards thing isn't a big deal. It just tingles my "fairness" bone a bit because I talk to shareware authors all the time where the recognition of something like this would make a different.
These awards make no difference to us. At least in 2004. But a legitimate shareware awards program back in 2000 would have been bloody helpful. And not just to us. And it would still be useful today to struggling shareware authors who work hard to put out neat things that go totally unrecognized because their first release wasn't in the Windows 3.0 era. Jorge at WinStep could use this kind of publicity.
I don't want to make it sound like these or other similar awards are run by bad guys. Every person I've ever met associated with any of these programs has a heart of gold. I think they're great guys. I just think they've gotten so complacent that they're not really following the shareware industry today.
If you're going to present yourself to be some industry authority, it would probably be useful to check out what's going on outside the clubhouse.
