Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

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re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

stefan — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:58:54 GMT

Before I published this blog article, I had asked Caphyon Ltd, makers of AdvancedInstaller, where they did get their web design from. Thinking that maybe both web sites were created from the same template that's available somewhere, or they were both created by the same web designer. Here's what they replied:

"Actually we created the whole website in-house from scratch. We have our own hired web designer and we worked together on the texts. No templates or external companies were used at any time."

They added that that "the web designer is hired full time, working exclusively for us since we started the company, in 2002."

Sally F. please contact me by e-mail

stefan — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:33:02 GMT

Sally F. - I had to edit your post. Please contact me at skrueger@installsite.org . Thanks.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Michael Nesmith — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:09:42 GMT

To fred_a: If you actually read the very post that you quoted, Rob says "It turned out to be a non-issue." In English, this means the Microsoft person who believed it to be a problem in InstallAware was wrong, and that there were no problems at all with Vista.

-MN.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Michael Nesmith — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:59:17 GMT

Chris -

Like I said, I am simply reporting issues that customers have raised about InstallShield. The fact that version 12 allegedly fixes these issues does not invalidate my report in any way, as these issues are true with older versions - the 11+ versions before v12 - by your own admission.

Also, from the first URL you sent:

"As a side effect this design change may break your existing projects under certain conditions." Which seems to echo just more of what I hear from customers - that upgrading projects to the new "holy grail" v12 just breaks them.

The other two URLs you sent do not address the COM dependency errors, they simply indicate that a setup engine does not need to be pre-installed any longer. So you have failed to comment on that point. InstallShield 12 may still have a COM dependency which still causes problems like I described.

I still don't follow how pointing out flaws in your arguments or InstallShield causes me to lose credibility. You have full freedom to turn a blind spot to everything I say, of course.

This only speaks of your personal alignment with a particular product. Unlike yourself, we will not question your credibility or integrity. We will simply correct you (and stand corrected if we are wrong in something we say).

Maybe that's too much to ask for from die-hard InstallShield fans?

Thanks...

Michael Nesmith

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Christopher Painter — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 13:43:27 GMT

Michael-

If you are going to publically make complaints about a competitors product, you owe it to yourself to know if those claims are true and accurate. I can't believe that you would say it's not your job to research if those statements are true.

I've already explained how those problems are gone ( InstallShield 12, Beta2 as seen:

http://forum.installsite.net/index.php?s=e487b75670f1a93fe84b8f48b9346c58&showtopic=14792

http://www.macrovision.com/downloads/newsletters/devletter/aug2006.htm#5

http://chrpai.blogspot.com/2006/04/installshield-12-beta2.html

I'm afraid you've lost all credibility with me so I won't be communicating with you again in the future.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Michael Nesmith — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:07:13 GMT

Christopher,

Your prejudice is astounding. I work at InstallAware support - it is not my job to keep up to date on what competing products are doing (that is maybe marketing or product development). I am simply reporting what users are telling me about their InstallShield experience before moving to InstallAware. Is it a crime to point out the deficiencies of InstallShield? Perhaps you can reply in detail which part of my knowledge is out of date, so all our readers can find out how InstallShield has solved the COM dependency, engine pre-install, and minimum Windows version problems.

Your arguments against MSIcode scripts are flawed for two reasons:

First, any kind of programming and development requires coding, plumbing, and testing. This is the case whether you're writing procedural code, OO code, or populating MSI tables. Suggesting otherwise indicates there is something "magical" about the development method used which can "read the developers mind" and automatically fix errors before they occur, which is not possible (at least with today's levels of artificial intelligence ;) ).

Second, any kind of reasonably intelligent setup requires scripting one way or the other. If not - think why InstallShield provides "InstallScript". At the point where you do need scripting, InstallAware's MSIcode is a blessing because all the work you have done in the visual designers is instantly accessible to you (and customizable) in the MSIcode script view. Want to customize where some files go based on a condition? Just do it in MSIcode. Want to add some intelligent code branching on top of the setup logic you already have? Just do it in MSIcode. With InstallShield, your setup script is clueless about what you did in the visual designers, so the work you have to do in order to get your setup working right is doubled at best (and that's double the coding, plumbing, testing).

If you're unhappy with the MSIcode script, just stick to the visual designers in InstallAware. They'll prepare your reliable MSI for you. You don't have to write script. The difference is, when you do have to write script, the result will again be a reliable MSI, produced at substantially less the effort it would take with other tools.

So we're letting you have your cake and eat it too - why is that a bad thing?

Thanks...

Michael Nesmith

Vista comatibility

fred_a — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:51:49 GMT

I don't know what others have found about Vista compatibility with InstallAware, but I found this:

"Also, during the discussion the other InstallAware representative said something that reinforced my negative impression of InstallAware. It came up that there was some rather notorious compatibility issue in Vista that was believed to be caused by InstallAware. It turned out to be a non-issue but before we knew that the InstallAware representative was happy to have a notorious bug associated with his product. He said something to the effect of, "All publicity is good publicity because after a few months people forget what you did wrong and only remember your name." That comment felt really sleazy and unprofessional."

Which is from Rob Mensching's blog at:

http://robmensching.com/blog/archive/2006/12/05/My-introduction-to-WiXAware-an-editor-for-the-WiX-toolset.aspx

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Christopher Painter — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:31:43 GMT

Michael,

It is no longer accurate to say that InstallShield installs a scripting engine. Starting with InstallShield 12 ( nearly 9 months ago ) that design was depracated and InstallScript now compiles pure Type 1 CA's. Since I am sure you already know that, I can only assume you are being dishonest when trying to make all of the claims about how your design is wonderful and InstallShield fails. You are living in the past.

The reason to hate script based installs is because it's procedural code ( with a splash of OO depending on the langauge ) that you must write ( lot's of plumbing ) and test extensively. This is true regardless of what language you implement it in.

The beauty of MSI is you don't need to write script. You have data driven patterns that result in standard actions generating script at runtime that don't require you to either a) author them or b) test them. The contract ( table ) is clearly defined and that's all you have to do. To say that standard actions and tables are too difficult to understand and that they need to be translated into a custom domain specific language that looks like good old friendly script just reaks IMHO.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Michael Nesmith — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:21:01 GMT

Hi Stefan,

I will try to answer your questions as best I can - please let me know if anything is unclear.

First about the .NET Framework EULA. We are not violating any EULA, because we are not changing a byte in the .NET Framework package, other than compression. We have multiple contacts at Microsoft who have been aware of this since 2005, and they have even published articles ragarding using InstallAware to deploy .NET applications in half the size (Barak Cohen). We are helping the .NET framework get on more computers by cutting its size in half - that doesn't bother Microsoft, to the contrary, Barak was pleased so he wrote an article about it, because it made his job of getting .NET installed on as many computers out there as possible easier. Rob is not on the .NET team and while he is entitled to his personal opinions, I do not believe they reflect the official opinion of Microsoft at this time.

About the Macrovision threat letter, their allegations were false, except for the one line of text in the training page. They alleged that we were intentionally trying to confuse users between their InstallAnywhere line and our InstallAware line, which does not make sense. InstallAnywhere is a Java product, InstallAware is a Windows Installer MSI product. If we were intending to confuse their users, we would not have picked the name of a Java installer for our product. The website design was not similar to any site they had in production at the time. We saw this as Macrovision's attempt to unfairly silence us, because back then, and still today, we are offering the only viable alternative to InstallShield products. In that regard, it is interesting that various disguised Macrovision employees and others on their payroll have once again started a campaign to misinform the public about InstallAware - how coincidental that this comes on the heels of our WiXAware announcement, and their last attempt came on the heels of our "Switch from InstallShield and win an iPod" announcement.

Finally, InstallAware has been called "a better Wise for Windows Installer than Wise itself" in an independent review (InstallWorld). This is because our MSIcode is the perfect correlate of Wise's WiseScript in the Win32 world. WiseScript generates EXE files, MSIcode generates pure MSI files. MSI Script on the other hand is a completely different and incompatible language, which is what Wise built for MSI files. So Wise had the idea on the Win32 world, but they did not carry it over to the Windows Installer world, and we are the first - and to date only - company offering an intuitive and powerful MSI authoring process. On that note, we have never received any threatening letters from Wise, or any blog posts from (disguised) Wise employees or affiliates defaming us and our products. There are doubtless some lessons in this for Macrovision regarding the nature of fair and vigorous competition.

I have been working at InstallAware for over a year now, and it saddens me to see that there is so much prejudice against our company, albeit on a site that has clear affiliations with InstallShield. I would encourage anybody who has doubts about us to visit our website, our community forums (www.installaware.com/forum), and see the hard work we are doing. Still not convinced? Call us and lets talk.

We are in business because we offer real value to setup developers. How else could we have survived - and grown - in this marketspace dominated by InstallShield?

Thanks...

Michael Nesmith

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Michael Nesmith — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:53:53 GMT

Hi Christopher,

Many of our customers are finding that MSIcode helps them describe an MSI database a lot easier, by using human readable code instead of hard to follow, interlinked databases. Could you please explain why this seems like a bad idea to you? After all, WiX itself does the same thing - it uses XML to describe an MSI package, adding a layer of convenience on top of the native database structure.

A lot of our customers are initially turned off by scripting, because they have had bad experiences with InstallShield's scripting environment. InstallShield installs its scripting runtime before beginning a setup...we don't. InstallShield scripting fails if COM is damaged in any way on the target computer...ours works. In fact, our scripting doesn't install anything at all, and runs on Windows 95 Gold. Usually most our customer concerns are centered around these issues, so please let us know if you had any other reasons as to why scripting is bad.

About .NET 3.0, yes we are the first and only company to support it, and to make that support available free of charge. To the best of my knowledge, InstallShield charges users for these updates. Of course you can write your own prereq installer - but is that really why you are purchasing an install tool? You could even build your entire installation on your own, or even make your own scripting engine. We believe our customers are paying us so they get the latest and greatest served to them - its this convenience that makes them choose an installer (and frustrates them if the expected updates are not served on time, are expensive, or buggy).

Thanks...

Michael Nesmith

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

stefan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:53:08 GMT

Sinan, I'd like to comment some of your statements here:

"We have received absolutely no complaints from Advanced Installer. If we do, we'll act on it." - That's exactly your attitude regarding other people's work that I'm criticising. In his blog, Rob Mensching also mentiones that you're violating the .NET Framework EULA (http://www.robmensching.com/blog/archive/2006/12/11/Response-to-my-WiXAware-Introduction.aspx). What's your reply to that?

"the only actual complaint we received from Macrovision was over one line of duplicated text in our training webpage" - In the legal letter Macrovision complains about three paragraphs of text (not just one line), plus the overall web site design, plus some JavaScript code, plus the similarity of the product names "InstallAware" and "InstallAnywhere".

"We invented MSIcode - arguably or most important innovation - which takes the rocket science out of Windows Installer, and lets you build intelligent MSI packages with branching codeflow and execution." - I believe that Wise has had similar functionality (they call it "MSI Script") some time before InstallAware. I don't know if they are exactly equivalent, but it looks like Wise had the idea first.

Designer's take

James — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:32:16 GMT

As the one who designed the Zero G site prior to acquisition by Macromedia (the lower left thumb, above), I find the crappy xerox-copy approach amusing, flattering and kind of sad. I have no idea what the InstallAware product is like, but they'd be alot better off with their own identity.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Christopher Painter — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:14:07 GMT

What a very entertaining thread. So many places to start. :)

I'm not sure how Stefan's status as an MS MVP obligates him to advertise InstallAware products for the `benefit` of the user community.

Also for the commment of `no complaints from Advanced Installer ... we'll act on it` that's way too funny. You already know you've done wrong, you shouldn't need to be told. Somehow I'm sure you'll action will be a repeat of the `david and goliath` pattern.

Also someone is going to really have to try hard to convince me that MSIcode is a good thing. If you consider me `divorced from script`, then I say I'm glad the *** is gone and I don't want her to ever come back. To create a new scripting language to describe the underlying MSI patterns seems like the most crazy thing in the world to me and I can see why InstallShield wouldn't be doing it.

As for all the other `we are the only ones` types comments ( like .Net 3.0 and uber-bootstrapper ) I hope everyone see's through these claims since InstallShield has setup prerequisites that enable the user to author their own prereqs without waiting on a vendor to do it.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Sinan Karaca — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:24:49 GMT

[Edit (Dec 15): I had to remove this part of the comment because it attacked a person that is not involved in this discussion. - Stefan]

@Nick: For the record, to date, we have received absolutely no complaints from Advanced Installer. If we do, we'll act on it.

Again for the record, the only actual complaint we received from Macrovision was over one line of duplicated text in our training webpage, which we were also prompt to change.

I've really enjoyed sparring here with multiple anonymous and not-so-anonymous posters, but I need to get back to working for my customers again. They're buying our products because we make *them* happy - and not VCs or other parties ;)

If anybody has a concern about where we are, call us. If anybody has a concern about our products, download them. You will find your answers there.

[Edit (Dec 15): Removed for the same reason. - Stefan]

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Panos — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:07:31 GMT

@Sally: Where exactly is the copyrighted material? And how did you come to the conclusion that InstallAWARE produces faulty MSI packages that don't run on Vista?

@all: My suggestion is that, first try the product, then express your opinion.As for the site copy, i've personally contacted Sinan, so expect a reply for him shortly.In a short his reply was that he did that because he liked the site and was amazed from it's SEO optimization.What's so bad about it?

re: Sinan hasn't got a creative bone in his body

Andy Neillans — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:29:35 GMT

@Sally; Can you give some more information on this point "...and the output is not compliant with the MSI standards - failing on Vista, for example..."?

I've been using InstallAware under Vista pretty much since I got my hands on the first Beta, and although there were problems back then, there has been nothing since RC1.

Also, the output is compliant with MSI Standards - the MSI included is actually FULLY compliant; the company that I work at, our main product is MS certified and is using InstallAware - the only way to get certification is to be compliant ...

And as for the personal attack on Sinan's creativity, well, I'd disagree, but that's not the point of this blog - we are here to discuss installers :)

Andy

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

Mike Peters — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:23:12 GMT

Is this some kind of FUD campaign against InstallAware? I guess their revenues are really beginning to piss some people off.

I met them in their SF offices just two weeks ago for a consulting project (that they did wonders with), and our setups have no problem at all running on Vista.

Keep up the great work, guys! Good to see people are beginning to notice.

re: Oops, they did it again: InstallAware "inspired" by competitor's web site

stefan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:05:56 GMT

Fred, there are valid points in Sally's post, some of which might need some prove, like "his products ... contain blatantly copied copyrighted material". But there's also rumour, such as "Nobody wanted to be associated with him", "he's got no sales to speak of". And finally: "If you were a Klingon, you'd be dead by now" has nothing to do with facts and in my opinion is inappropriate.