PageFour has been cracked.

For those of you too honest to know what cracking is, let me enlighten you. It’s when some shady hacker type character working out of a dingy bedroom in Bucharest downloads your software, hacks it in such a way that any license restrictions are overridden, and releases the ‘crack’ to the entire world.

Version 1.28 went live last Saturday evening, and by Wednesday the deed was done - downloads went through the roof; referrals from very shady sites in Hong Kong and Russia were way up; and I came within a hairs breadth of a coronary.

Team AGGRESSiON were the party responsible. Note the small ‘i’ in AGGRESSiON - I’m sure it has great meaning amongst the hacking and cracking fraternity.

I’ll be honest, I had a bit of an emotional reaction when I found out. The cursing and swearing was heard from Hampton Court Palace all the way to Putney Bridge. I spent a frantic hour adding URLs to my htaccess file and worrying over the bandwidth being consumed before retiring to a very unpeaceful rest.

But the dawn of a new day brought a whole new perspective.

Does it do me any harm?

Not that I can see. So there are hundreds of new PageFour users in China and the developing world - all churning out novels at a ferocious rate thanks to my innovative designs. Who knows, I may be single handedly responsible for a literary renaissance in the far east.

Would any of these people who downloaded the cracked software have actually bought the product? A simple no.

Will it increase the visibility of the product? Well, it won’t do it any harm.

So where’s the downside?

Honestly, these isn’t one that I can see. Downloads have continued over the past few days, though not at quite the furious rate of days 1 and 2, and my bandwidth is pretty high, so no problem there.

I choose to take it as a complement. After all, they only crack the good stuff, right?

It’s been four days since the launch of PageFour v 1.2, and things are looking promising. Downloads are modestly up, but more importantly, feedback has been excellent - I know I’m on the right track.

Over the past six years I’ve worked for two small software companies in the South East of England. Both companies designed and sold their own products; both companies considered themselves leaders in their field. In all those years I never received any indication from clients that the products were anything more than adequate to the job at hand.

Now, this is hardly surprising. If you buy a product and it does what you bought it for, most of us would be content to let it end there. We may tell our friends about it, we will almost certainly carry on using it, but why bother contacting the company?

In the past month I’ve received a handful of emails from users of PageFour telling me how happy they are with it; how it meets their needs and fits their writing requirements so well.

It’s very uplifting to receive emails of this variety, but I think the real message here is not that my product is so good, but that the alternatives out there are so weak.

All the big word processors are designed for business users - not surprising, as this is where the money lives. Much of the writer specific software I’ve looked at is far too rigid and compartmentalized to fit the real needs of more than a handful of users.

PageFour was designed to be flexible. The central element in the design was that the writer decides at all times how to structure and approach their work. It is this flexibility, more than anything else, that people seem to like.

It’s make or break time for PageFour. Version 1.2 went live at half past midnight.

One of the prevailing opinions in software development circles is to release early and release often. By doing this, you develop your product in line with your customers. Features being added to the next release should always be features existing users have asked for, or potential users have queried before deciding not to buy.

Releasing against a six monthly or even worse, a yearly development plan is catastrophic. The software market, and the IT industry in general changes too fast for such long term plans. And one year is a very, very, long time.

Small software companies have one huge advantage over the giants, and that is their ability to do things quickly. For Microsoft to release a new version of MS Word is probably a two year undertaking - for a company of one or two programmers, two or three months is not unrealistic.

I’ve been following this maxim with PageFour since day one. Version 1 was released on October 8th this year. The world did not shake, but the feedback and suggestions were inspiring. Two months later and I’m feeling very confident about the new release.

The only question now is: will the world shake? And if not, can I make it shake?