Trillian License Problems

I bought Trillian Pro in September of 2003.  Every once and a while it will alert me to an update, which I download and install.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Last week I downloaded and installed another update.  Today I log in and it tells me that my license has expired.  Huh?  I thought it was lifetime.

Nothing in the My Account section of the Cerulean Studios website mentions anything regarding licenses.  I had to dig through the site and pretend like I was going to purchase it again in order to find out what was going wrong.  Apparently the change from version 3.0 to 3.1 constituted the upper limits of my license upgradability.  Who knew?

And that’s actually my point here.  Who knew?  With all the crap that we are supposed to remember these days, I get pissed at companies that assume, due to their greatness, that you understand and remember how their policies work.  That it’s on the forefront of your mind at all times.

If their “Update Available” message mentioned something along the lines of “if you choose to download and install this update, you will be forced to use Trillian Basic from now on”, I wouldn’t have downloaded it.  And figuring out what happened after the fact was painful.

Luckily, Cerulean Studios has the foresight to maintain a download archive on their site, so I was able to re-download and re-install Trillian Pro 3.0.