Well I hate to admit to it but occasionally I do make a mistake, and when I purchased Trillian that could have been one of them. Here is a post I recently made in their forums about how I feel on their product.

Ok let me start out with the standard disclaimer. This isn’t a troll, and it’s not an attempt to start a flame war. That said I doubt the developers will even see it so this is sort of a rhetorical venting.

I purchased (a license for) Trillian PRO on 9/2/03. As such the support portion (and major upgrade portion) recently ran out. Taking time to reflect on what I got for the money I paid I have to say I am disappointed with Cerulean Studios. When compared to other purchased shareware with much smaller user bases or even open source, Cerulean has barely kept their product functional with the changes in their operating environ. Specifically I am referring to Yahoo and their attempts to block 3rd party clients. Other than patches for those problems, in the course of a year no significant product changes have been released to the end users.

One of the reasons I purchased Trillian in the first place was the fact it supported Jabber and a 'direct' connection to yahoo. As some of you may know a Jabber server can act as a gateway to Yahoo. My company has such a jabber server however it can occasionally experience problems. Knowing a few others had Yahoo accounts I figured a multiplatform product would be a good idea. So I purchased trillian.

The Jabber functionality in Trillian is what I would consider 'barely' there. It’s the equivalent of DOS or Windows 3.x when compared to other products in its class. It works but that’s about it. Being a 1.x product I figured the support would be rough. However I mistakenly thought the Jabber transport would be given the same level of attention as the other transports in Trillian and that changes would happen over the next year to improve it. No such luck, it’s as feature barren as when I purchased Trillian.

The only saving grace for Trillian is its virtually the only alternative out there that handles this many platforms, that said its development seems to be stagnant and its licensing appears to me to border on being a purposeful rip off. After all what sense does it take to license your product for upgrades at an annual rate and then not bother to perform major updates at any rate less than a year? You’re giving yourself a wonderful reason to work slowly, why? Because you get paid twice for the poor people who want the 3.0 upgrade hoping it fixes what ails them.

I must admit I am curious about 3.0. Perhaps I will find someone who has it and interrogate them before I waste my hard earned funds on another fruitless year subscription. I pray that an open source alternative that works well with all mediums comes along, or that Cerulean gets their act together and starts producing a product worthy of payment.