The story of WinZip is a case study for what can happen to a business that is built on top of an inefficiency. I stopped using WinZip when bandwidth and storage got cheap and I no longer needed to worry about sending large files and I had 60gb of free space on my hard drive. Even though SAP has firewall limits on sending large files, it’s easier to use a service like YouSendIt to get around that limit. WinZip went from being an essential utility to “oh yeah, I remember that thing”.

Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise » Corel completes destruction of WinZip:

But WinZip also lost me because somewhere along the way they turned from a scrappy little underdog that sold a necessary product at a reasonable price into a faceless corporation that tried to maximize its revenue stream by squeezing its longtime customers.

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