The 30 day license is very effective at discouraging competing professionals from “stealing” an application. Competing professionals have a handle on the context of the application, and are able to leverage up into the application very quickly. These kinds of users represent the “depth” market, and roughly correspond to “analysis:” spending a lot of time solving a narrow, well-defined problem.
The other class of user is the “breadth” user. This user needs to perform a one off (or very limited) quantities of something representing a minor component in a work or application spanning several subfields. These users “synthesize” a large amount of diverse information to construct something new. The breadth user typically won’t have much context for the application, and may have to spend time becoming familiar with elementary vocabulary. Without a compelling use case (e.g., client pays for licensing, or employer pays for training), 30 day demo licenses very effectively cut these users out of potential the potential customer base. Which also limits penetration into new markets.
For example, suppose your company manufactures the best software widget for Market X. A small team of developers wants to use such a thing for Market Y, which happens to be 1. potentially very large, 2. outside your current corporate strategy, 3. your demo license is unreasonably time bombed, and 4. your sales people don’t return calls to the potential customer. Guess what: you lost a customer. And if the entrepreneurs do well, you may lose that market to your competitor.
So, what?
No easy answer here. Developer time is expensive. Evaluating products for internal use is pure overhead. Punishing a potential customer with short fused time bombs and overly restrictive licenses only guards against short term loss to existing competitors.
