At Interop this week, I saw a lot of demos of products with Web interfaces of one sort or another to manage their configuration, reports, and other operational controls. As I am sitting through the 57th one, I am thinking:

Wouldn’t it be a cool thing if the vendor put a link to their actual product on their Web site, so a potential buyer could just click on that link and try out the Webtop (as we call these things) for a test drive?

You could set things up so that the default settings are restored after each user logs out, and limit the actual damage that someone could do by putting the product on its own network, so that you couldn’t get everywhere inside the product, but still get a good feel for things.

I have been asking about something like this for many years, and now with the various Ajax and Web technologies, it would seem like a no-brainer to develop. A good programmer could probably whip this up in a couple of hours.

Yet, when I mention it, I keep getting stares from various marketing folks as if this was a really new and impossible idea.

The real-world Web demo really extends the whole notion of trying something out before you buy it to a completely new level. Sure, you can download software until your DSL modem is hot enough to melt butter, but nothing replaces the ability to actually go through the screens and see for yourself if something has the couple of cool and killer features that will make or break the product for your particular situation.

So in the interest of public service, I found an example for all of you Web Informant readers to check out. They are a British Intranet hosting provider, and clearly they understand the value of what I am suggesting — not that we have ever spoken. You can tool around the product, create your own entries, and otherwise have yourself a fine time understanding what this company’s product is trying to do, and what are its limitations.

But wait, there is more. You can grab a 30-day free trial, and unlike many “free” trials, no credit card number is required to get it. And at anytime during this trial, if you like the product enough that you want to really buy it, you just click on the subscribe button and all your data that you have created for the trial is instantly preserved in the fully working version, should you so desire.

This seems like a smart sequence of events, and I wish more people would do this. Granted, some of the products that I saw at the show cost more than a couple of bucks per month, but still, this is the way to convert looky-loos into real buyers, and without expending a molecule of bandwidth from any sales force, installing any ad-ware on a user’s computer (as some ecommerce merchants tend to do), or harming any small animals in the making of this software product.