When Publicity Works Against You

Scoble linked off to Blogwerx’ new plagiarism detector today which is awsome publicity for them and in most situations would be a sensational boost to a new or newish product. Unfortunately for Blogwerx, their system is completely non-functional, not even the help button does anything. Nor does the all important, money making upgrade button. There’s simply no excuse for releasing software that is this badly broken to the world.

I just hope they didn’t pay out the $30000 to speak at Demo or if I were an investor I’d be seriously annoyed at them wasting that much money without having a product ready to actually sell. It sounds like the CEO may have just sidled up to Scoble without paying to do a demo so they may be lucky.

The best I can hope for them is that it only works in IE and thus the problems are just because I’m using Firefox. I’ve got to assume that Scoble at least saw a brief demo of it doing something or tried it out himself. Besides which, I find it hard to believe that anyone would manage to release an entire product that does absolutely nothing at all.

The company has lost a lot of customers today – I certainly won’t bother with them in future as I can’t have any confidence that they’ll get it right. I’d be feeling pretty bad about myself if I were involved in that company right now.