“Laughter is a valuable exercise for health,” said Aristotle a good handful of centuries ago. The developers of WinRAR file compression and decompression software must be thinking something similar, who over the last few weeks have shown a fine sense of humor in the face of adversity. In bad weather, you know: a good face… and a healthy smile, as the wise man from Stagira used to say.
They made their last show of humor just a few days ago, via Twitter, to thank Luca D’Amico, a developer who had just shelled out $25.57 for his license. “Finally a paid member of the WinRAR family”, published the company next to the emoji of a smiley face with the military salute.
To understand the message and what is special about D’Amico’s gesture, it is necessary to remember what WinRAR is, a tool that in reality has little new: its origins go back to the the 90’sat the time of 32-bit Windows, when it was launched as an efficient way to compress and decompress files of multiple formats, such as ZIP, TAR, Gzip or of course RAR.
Faced with challenges… sense of humor
Yours is not the only software that does it. There are other equally or more popular alternatives, such as 7Zip, although due to its characteristics WinRAR has managed to gain a community of unconditional fans, as explained in 2021 in Genbeta.
If the tool has a peculiarity, it is not its greater or lesser capacity to retain users, but something much more curious and practical: once the 40-day free trial has passed, WinRAR reminds you with a friendly popup that you must go through the box to get a license.
Of course, unlike other programs it does not go further.
Said in plain Romance: WinRAR allows you to continue enjoying its functions without further repercussion than seeing how, every time you open the program, the same, insistent and tireless little message pops up that reminds you that you haven’t paid yet: “Note that WinRAR It is not free software. After 40 days of trial, you must purchase a license or remove it from your computer.” Nothing else. Nothing less.
Hence, over the years, the payment for the WinRAR license and the everlasting window have become almost a joke. Pulling irony, there are even those who have come to compare the users who go through the checkout with a kind of “mythological beings”. After all… Why take out your wallet and, as D’Amico just did, let yourself almost 30 euros if there are other free alternatives or you can even use the same service completely free?
Well then. D’Amico is not alone.
There are those who have preceded himlike our colleague Marcos Merino, who in this interesting report published in 2021 in Genbeta explains the reasons that at the end of 2018, after around a decade and a half using WinRAR, led him to spend 20 euros to buy his license at a discount of fifty%.
Not so long ago, another user even bought a CD with a copy of the program, as reported in LGR Blerds, although in this case the outlay seems to respond more to a joke than to a real desire to support the developers. WiNRAR is still, after all, a fully useful tool in 2023, but it is much less popular to buy software on CDs.
With such a backdrop, it is better understood that when D’Amico uploaded a photo of a WinRAR invoice for $25.57 to Twitter a few days ago, a price, all things being said, that includes a 22% discount, the company decided to celebrate adding irony: “Finally a fully paid member“.
The wink does not mean, of course, that in WinRAR they are waiting for their users to get fed up with their messages and finally check out. Its managers boast of having close to 500 million users worldwide, to whom it offers a service compatible con Windows 10 y 11 and, they have found an interesting source of income in another arena: the corporate market.
An individual may find it more or less easy to ignore your warning messages; When it comes to a business, however, continuing to use software after the trial period has expired is more problematic.
Hence, a few days ago, when Microsoft announced that it would offer native support for RAR files in Windows 11, one of the first companies that came to mind for many was WinRAR, which sees its competition increase.
The response of its creators when they found out about Redmond’s plans nevertheless exudes the same fine sense of humor that they used to thank D’Amico for buying an official copy. published a simple tweetbut forceful: the famous dog meme that proclaims “This is fine” while the flames roam around him along with a phrase: “Us right now #Windows11”.
The healing power of the smile, which Aristotle already said.
Via: Genbeta
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