As far as I know, they still do this. Other greedy and immoral activities include buying and merging with all their competition, bashing the great work NV Access does, charging people just to continue using newer versions of Firefox and Windows 10, finally releasing a long overdue annual program that doesn't include the professional features, etc. Oh, let's not forget that this wonderful annual program isn't available to other countries besides the United States. They do that and then someone from the company has the audacity to say "NVDA is just two guys in a garage"? Remind me why people continue to support a company with such vile business practices?

Honestly, I think JAWS needs a significant reduction in price, as well as a new team of people who actually care about the product and its users. From what I can tell, Freedom Scientific is primarily interested in milking as much money out of employers, schools, and government agencies as they possibly can, while convincing the same audience that JAWS is the best, and only product to use.

From what I've heard, someone at one of those conferences said something along the lines of "NVDA is just two guys in a garage", implying that they could fail any day. The opposite is true. There are probably 4 or 5 people working on JAWS, while NVDA is supported by hundreds of people from around the world.

#4 To be fair, Freedom Scientific is a company that probably has more than 4 or 5 employees working on its products.

@7, LOL, corporations have already lost the decentralized vs. centralized battle. All you need do is look at cryptocurrencies like Zcash or Stellar XLM. And I fully agree with you.

Fun fact: Jaws at this time does not forbid the use of forty-minute mode for testing. It simply mentions what it is intended for. We could argue about old licenses and whatnot, but the text bit from a few posts back really is only saying "this is what this is intended for". There is no legal snarling about how such-and-such is forbidden, so relax.

GW Micro did do some talking down of Voiceover, but in a way they were absolutely right, and generally warning the customers. I know this because I can't remember a time where they ever talked down NVDA or other windows screenreaders (if that were true, their own software like GW Connect would've been just window eyes apps, probably.)
For those who don't remember, GW Micro said that Apple hardcoding a screenreader into the os was a grave disservice to the blind community. If you look deeper into that statement, it's not so much the screenreader itself that is a grave disservice (Voiceover itself was great at the time), but the fact it is embedded into the OS as a core service so completely, and gets so up close and personal with an OS that doesn't use any universally accepted accessibility api's. This means that no one would want to develop a gui screenreader for mac because it's next to impossible to try and communicate with their api's. So Voiceover is a definite only option. On IOS, it's not even maybe, it's a hard no. So, that being said, 6 years from that statement, in 2019 AD, Apple has essentially silently pulled the plug on Voiceover as an innovator. They spent just enough time on it to insure no one would develop a third party, and then they basked in the glory. They were at the top of the world, if only for an instant, because then everyone else (Google and MS) started catching up, to the point now where on IOS Voiceover isn't innovating anymore, and on the mac it's so far behind it's almost a joke. And there are no third party screenreader options for either, so the mac is essentially a dying platform. That, is what GW Micro predicted, and exactly what they thought would happen, happened.

JAWS bashes it's competitors because it is directly advantageous for them to eliminate any possible competition. If NVDA is given the image of being gutter trash, people will be more willing to spend a ridiculous amount on JAWS. Especially those who don't know better.

Of course it's not unique to FS but do you really believe that we should be privatizing accessibility? FS demonstrates clearly how accessibility is particularly vulnerable.

One just has to look at GW Micro conducts itself in comparison... although personally I think that accessibility is just too vulnerable to the problems of markets. Blind people have fixed incomes and rely heavily on assistance which makes privatization pretty absurd imho. Not to mention that with a distributed development team, the possibility of finding new solutions skyrockets. Also, forks of noncommercial screenreaders could be produced for specific use cases. You can see a similar sort of development with Linux, although Linux has a much larger developer community and more time to develop.

What NVDA does that is significant isn't necessarily that it's free or a good competitor - it's that the project is able to be contributed to and a fork could be made. NVDA may fall out of favour but since it's code isn't proprietary and not written for profit, it can be layer re-worked into a better engine (again hopefully OS)

Finally regarding resources. I don't know much about how NVDA is funded outside of donations, but if government support stopped sucking off FS and instead helped NVDA it probably could be more competitive.

But I know that's a bit too socialist for Americans to bear. The government supporting something that undermines the free market in a very specific edge case? Eghad!

And the professional version of Jaws, which most if not all people will eventually need, is not a direct upfront cost to you if you're lucky, but it remains expensive as ever for agencies and corporations. It's why people who request Jaws may not be getting their daisy player/gps to go along with their note taker, for example, because those are likely the same people to want a pearl despite KNFB, Google Lookout, and now VoiceDream Scanner being superior.
Rachel @Daigonite I think this topic is a good one to point out that GW Micro *conducted* itself a bit better, because they were acquired by VFO only to have Window Eyes killed off. There goes another option out the window.
Now, at the same time, Window Eyes (despite its shortcomings) had a lot more customer-focus from the start, allowing a very generous payment plan as an option, and also offering it for free for Office 2010 and up or Office365 customers, which is a package people are almost guaranteed to have with their computer or need at some point. Also taking into account that Window EYes came with no copy protection whatsoever. Your license key was embedded into the disk, but the disk wasn't hardware-ID'd (Teledisk for Jaws license diskettes anyone?) so you could carry it over to as many computers as you so choose as long as they were your own.
And with Jaws, we have a very buggy license manager (well, not exactly because now it's a complicated mess) they have the web portal now that you can actually use to deauthorize computers and manage licenses a lot easier than you used to, but the professional version doesn't come with that I believe and still uses ILM.

Thanks for the clarification, Carver.

It needs to be said here that I'm actually generally in favour of such things. I do not want either NVDA or Jaws to die, as like it or not, both are great screenreaders in their own right, with varying strengths and weaknesses. I am not in favour of Jaws's overall pricing structure and think it needs to be made more competitive if it's going to continue going forward. I won't drop that screenreader for that reason, since I prefer it to some extent, but I also won't deny its issues either. I'm not happy when companies get grabby.