My colleagues and I cannot believe that WireTap Anywhere (herein called WTA) still costs $129!! Please consider that Jack OS X 0.82 was just released 3 days ago on April 6, 2009, and it's a very high-quality but FREE open-source WTA competitor app which, like WTA, has been in development since at least 2003. Knowing that, one could conclude that Ambrosia Software (WireTap XXXX's author) is unsupportably greedy for asking $129 for WireTap Anywhere 1.0.4. Oddly enough, v. 1.0.4 inexplicably was the second version the company released today, after v. 1.0.3! I'm guessing that Ambrosia included in v. 1.0.3 some real improvements that have been in the works for some time, and then they decided they wanted to save those upgrades for a version they could release later, when they were all alone in the spotlight without any FREE competitors exposing their greed. I am quite certain that Ambrosia only released this new version of WireTap XXXX (this redacted app name is explained below) today because they wanted to limit the damage done (again) to their market share by the recent FREE release of Jack 0.82, which has really come into its own in the last few versions, and which makes their WTA asking price of $129 seem quite ridiculous to anyone who remembers that Jack OS X is also a great app, so maybe they should download and compare the two!

Ambrosia is infamous for these cheesy business shenanigans, but in this case they're made even more shameful and obvious by the lame justification they offered in the "What's New In This Version" section of their VersionTracker.com posting for WTA 1.0.4, which unbelievably reads as follows: "These updates prepare our core Ambrosia productivity tools for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5.7, as well as improve compatibility with Apple's latest hardware." Does any Mac developer ever release a new version of their software for that first BS reason? And do they ever release updates to fix a hardware incompatibility that NO ONE has complained about on any software review website since their last version was released (which, in this case, was September 2008)? Clearly they just wanted to stop the bleeding that the recent release of Jack OS X inflicted on their market share, and given their dishonorable past business practices, they had no compunction against releasing another pointless update and frivolously marketing WTA on those very same software review websites (which, as you'll see below, are key to their contemptible business plan). Gosh, Ambrosia didn't even claim to fix some of the previous version's bugs, or add one or two new capabilities to this latest version because they're waiting to do that in a future release without their potential customers constantly being reminded that there's a new version available of a FREE app that does the very same things that WTA charges $129 for! Couldn't Ambrosia hide their unscrupulousness any better than that?

If you investigate the past of all FOUR VERSIONS of WireTap XXXXX, you'll discover that Ambrosia has a long history of greedy upgrade policies that piss off their existing customers, but that's how they keep adding new customers every year. And just to preempt the character assassination that I expect from Ambrosia after I write this expose, let me first explain that I have never met and I am in no way related to the makers of ANY of the apps mentioned here (other than my use of Jack instead of WTA because it's a great and FREE program), and I am NOT some disgruntled former Ambrosia employee or customer -- I have never bought any of their software because I caught on to their scummy software renaming scheme (explained in a minute) a couple of years ago when I first compared WireTap Pro against Jack and another great audio-input app called Audio Hijack (which charges $16 and $32 for the two versions of their WireTap competitor app).

You see, TODAY AMBROSIA SELLS AN AUDIO RECORDING APP CALLED WireTap Studio, AND AN AUDIO-INPUT APP CALLED WireTap Anywhere, WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY CALLED WireTap Pro, WHICH ONLY SHORTLY BEFORE WAS CALLED SIMPLY WireTap! To help you fully understand Ambrosia's distracting, dishonest and entirely shameful marketing strategy, just surf over to MacUpdate.com (a company that does not cozy up to the software industry as shamefully as VersionTracker) and look at Ambrosia's posting about its WireTap Studio app (which has customer reviews and other types of feedback going back only to 2007, and which, to be honest, was an outstanding audio recording app -- not an audio-INPUT app like WTA -- when I tested it in 2008). Then check out Ambrosia's MacUpdate posting for WireTap Anywhere, the quality of which I cannot conscionably review here because when it was "originally released" (which really means RENAMED) in 2007, I refused to fully test it because of the unethical marketplace behavior that I describe here, and because I could afford to ignore WTA because of the availability of a truly outstanding and FREE alternative in the form of Jack OS X. When you look at WireTap Anywhere's MacUpdate posting you'll see that THE FEEDBACK GOES ALL THE WAY BACK TO 2003 -- 4 years before Ambrosia's own website claims that WireTap Anywhere was first released. This is because WireTap Anywhere was not really a new product in 1997 but was just a RENAMED VERSION OF WireTap Pro, WHICH IN TURN WAS JUST A RENAMED VERSION OF WireTap. Part of Ambrosi's strategy has been that very time they changed the name of their main app Ambrosia used that new name to claim that it was "really a whole new version that was completely rewritten and has a totally new set of capabilities!" In this way they repeatedly justified CHARGING ALL THEIR OLDER (and therefore more professionally settled/rich) CUSTOMERS A SECOND SHAREWARE FEE (if the customer wanted to obtain the newest version), and it gave the company a NEW OPPORTUNITY TO MARKET THEIR "NEW" MAIN APP, and it gave them a new opportunity and (specious) justification to DUPE THE SOFTWARE UPDATE WEBSITES LIKE MacUpdate.com (which first fell for it, then didn't fall for it) AND VersionTracker.com (which originally and to this day turns a blind eye to it) INTO LETTING THEM START OVER WITH A CLEAN HISTORY OF USER FEEDBACK IN ORDER TO ERASE ALL THE OLD NEGATIVE FEEDBACK, AND TO HELP THEM GIVE POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS THE IMPRESSION THAT IT REALLY IS A NEW AND DIFFERENT APP (when all the old users but none of the new users know that, in fact, it is the same old app but with perhaps one more new capability, or maybe even just a different method of graphically organizing it). Non-critics of such disgusting business practices (like probably Ambrosia) call this "cross-grade" marketing, which is the production of several versions of one type of app that all have overlapping capabilities in order to justify a constant though confusing product upgrade cycle which enables the company to force some customers to pay repeatedly while still attracting a bevy of new customers every year. A lot of scumbag companies use this marketing "philosophy," though I'll let you decide which ones they are. Of course, for this to work, the company's apps have to be of sufficiently higher quality than their competition's apps or customers wouldn't put up with that sh!t and your company would slowly whither and die.

So, now you know.