The IT Nerd

Last night I was trying to test something for a client when I had this ad pop up in Parallels Desktop for Mac:

Here’s why this is a #Fail:

1. I have already bought Parallels Desktop. So why are they asking me to buy their product again to get all this other stuff?
2. If I was running a freeware product, I could understand nagging ads like this. But this isn’t freeware. Thus I should never ever see ads like this.

And clearly I am not the only person who feels this way based on a quick look at Twitter:

https://twitter.com/benptooey/status/966237462954733568

@ParallelsCares @ParallelsMac I saw your ad notification pop up on my Mac. It’s unwelcome, I’m disabling Parallels notifications now.

— Kerry (@Kcspaceman) February 20, 2018

https://twitter.com/Jim_Lipsey/status/965642740041166848

I pinged Parallels via Twitter on this and this is what I got back from them:

Hey, we are sorry to hear that you are not happy. Please send us a private message to see what we can do to solve this. Thanks

— Parallels (@parallels) February 21, 2018

Thanks for the offer to converse by private message. But I’ll pass.

Now while it is true that I can disable this pop up by checking the “do not show again” box, it shouldn’t be there in the first place. And I have to admit that my opinion of their software has really gone downhill because of this. Not to mention the fact that they don’t seem to offer mitigations for the threats posed by Spectre and Meltdown like their main competitor which is VMware Fusion does. Thus later this week I’ll be flipping over my virtual machine library from Parallels Desktop to VMware Fusion. It’s a bit of a shame as I have used Parallels Desktop for years. But I’m making this move because VMware Fusion has a great offering as I covered in my recent review. But more importantly, they don’t nag their users to buy stuff after you’ve already bought their stuff. I guess that VMware understands that when I want to use their software, I don’t want to be bombarded by ads. If only Parallels understood that.

UPDATE: It seems that checking the “do not show again” box will not ads like this from popping up in the future:

No, I’m asking how to get rid of all these ads. I already explained that checking the box on the last one didn’t prevent me from getting this one.

— Mark Wickens 🇮🇱 (@mwickens) February 21, 2018

Another reason for me to switch to VMWare Fusion.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2018 at 9:15 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Parallels Desktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.