Microsoft dropped the ball with lack of App Store. With all app store's drawbacks, that's the place where regular user can pay easily without thinking will someone steal his/her credit car number, the place where applications should be harmless, and the place where (and this is important) the user can compare prices between similar applications.
Windows doesn't have the app store. And nobody (read: very, very small percentage) is willing to type the credit car number on some unknown site to pay for some utility. So shareware died, and shareware authors went to the dark side.
The one who dropped the ball is CNet. They could have used their good name to establish a curated software marketplace and done subscription, app sales, freemium... anything at all other than giving their reputation a giant flush for a few bucks and earning themselves a 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file of computers I work on.
Windows store is not a real store which you can download regular windows apps. I think they only want to use it for metro apps and I think their functionality are far from native apps.
When I finally left Windows for Linux on my desktop, this was why. The $0 app market on Windows was terrible.
Even if it wasn't installing malware, everything was implicitly user hostile. I remember in the early 2000s, the form this took was every application eventually tried to steal your media file associations.
The last straw was when I had to do a fresh install, and the Nero CD burning software was 200mb, because the CD burner had decided it also needed to be a media player.
Hah! I'd forgot about all those annoyances. Back then I had a modem and a crappy phone line with a maximum transfer speed of 25 kbits/second. I had to be really careful about what software I'd install from the Internet. In fact, most of the software that I installed came from CDs packaged with trustworthy computer magazines.
Aside from the pre-yum dependecy hell, Red Hat Linux was a breath of fresh air.
> And nobody (read: very, very small percentage) is willing to type the credit car number on some unknown site to pay for some utility. So shareware died, and shareware authors went to the dark side.
HAHAHA. Oh, jeez... /wipes a tear. You clearly have no idea how the shareware model actually works.
Shareware is very very far from being dead. Yes, some of the devs take the lazy path of bundling crap, but it is an absolutely common knowledge in shareware circles that doing so will essentially kill your product, the goodwill and any hopes for any natural growth. It will also create problems with Google ranking and a headache with antivirus positives. With few exceptions only very desperate devs do that and typically only with throw away projects.
There are, of course, companies whose entire business model is based on scamming and scaremongering people, and generally treating them like a gray mass of idiots that always click on Next. But this has very little to do with the validity of the shareware model, and much more with simple "get rich quick" appeal of the bundleware.
The matter is not whether or not shareware model is dead. The matter here is that CNET traded its past reputation and ethics for the affiliate fees from the scamware vendors. Don't over-extrapolate, it just looks ... ridiculous.
Shareware involved two different ideas: the method of distribution, and the trial to paid purchase model.
Shareware was genius in encouraging users to copy programs around to each other in the primitive days of computer connectivity. But that's just no longer needed with distribution on the Internet.
The trial to paid purchase model is alive and well everywhere. Freemium games, time limited trialware, in-app purchases. It's not even noticeable as a success story any more, since so much of the entire software industry works that way. The Commander Keen of 2015 is League of Legends.
Shareware today is basically a trialware from smaller/indie developers. As such, there's a plenty if you look beyond the company facades.
Just go to Softpedia, pull up a Windows app section and filter in Paid apps. The vast majority of what you see is shareware. NetBalancer, Syncovery, AX64, various PDF viewers, drive emulators for cloud storage services, etc. - all of these are made either by a single person or smaller teams. There are TONS of them; you just didn't realize it :)
Then if you extend the definition to just "trialware" and include larger companies, then pretty much all commercial Windows software is now shareware. You try it and then you buy it. Kaspersky, Acronis, Norton bloatware. Microsoft Office is offered under this model. Heck, even Windows itself is.
I don't think there's any way to get there from here, as it were. Win32 apps running on the same desktop by the same user can't really be protected from one another. The only way is a migration to a new system; Metro, Android-on-the-desktop, or iOS-on-the-desktop.
That's market. You can say the same for various toothpaste brands lumped together on the shelf.
Besides, it's true that the race to the bottom more or less ruined the phone market, but on Mac app store I see good (and popular) applications priced $50 or $100.
It's also about awful marketing. If app devs (and the devs running the app stores, for that matter) knew a thing or three about marketing and sales, this race to the bottom wouldn't be occurring -- or at least not as fast.
So, if I understand you correctly, you wanted Microsoft to bundle MORE things and not less? You could have been Microsoft's star supporter in the anti-trust trial.
Windows doesn't have the app store. And nobody (read: very, very small percentage) is willing to type the credit car number on some unknown site to pay for some utility. So shareware died, and shareware authors went to the dark side.