I believe this is one reason PDS has been hit, so many of their customers can't stand the thought of the dongle.
then there are the likes of others that make you take out a service plan to keep the software up to date.
PDS also created a TON of hostility with their forum practices by treating everyone that joined as crooks/pirates until they proved otherwise... IMO a sure fire way to aggravate and turn off legit PAYING customers that come to a support forum for help and are immediately accused and branded as a crook/pirate, instead of being provided the customer service they sought... I mean seriously some of the threads on their forum turned into flat out witch hunts over a blinking LED question, and to be blunt there are many desk jockey programmers that work for a company and don't know or have 24/7 access to their 'license number or purchase information' off the top of their head, but might have a legit question, to treat them is crooks is sure to backfire... I know for me personally this public in your face policy sealed the deal for me to never purchase (or even use) their software... And they continue down this destructive path of snubbing customers to this day, IMO...
What is ironic is that in the end piracy can be very beneficial to many software companies if the product can stand on it's own... The blunt reality is that those that pirate software to get it for free, were almost certainly not going to pay for it in the first place, so the imagine loss of profits is only speculative at best... Microsoft learned this long ago and was even accused by many of making it easy to pirate their software on purpose so that they could gobble up market share and become the leader only to benefit later with huge volume sells after they squashed the competition and became the industry standard, and to be blunt that is exactly what they did...
