“They pretended to be an authority on it,” he said. She provided archived references to CleanMyMac and MacKeeper that, she said, show that “CleanMyMac was in existence two years prior to the MacKeeper website.”įor his part, Fowler insists that MacPaw’s attack campaign killed a percentage of the market that MacKeeper will never get back. Fowler claimed that MacPaw’s CleanMyMac is “based on the MacKeeper platform.” Not so, Petryk said. Sorting through all the claims and counter-claims is one of the things that makes this story so convoluted. The town happens to be Kiev-both Kromtech and MacPaw have Ukrainian roots, and it’s clear that the companies really don’t like each other. She said Kromtech voluntarily dismissed that lawsuit prior to the hearing.įrom what I can tell, I appear to have stumbled into something of a cross-town rivalry. Petryk referred to what was apparently a different lawsuit that Kromtech filed against MacPaw. From the very beginning, we’ve been solely focused on building our reputation, which is hard enough when you develop a Mac cleaning software.” When asked if MacPaw engaged in any of the activity that Fowler alleged, she replied, “Absolutely not. We ended up settling it out of court.”īut according to Julia Petryk, MacPaw’s PR manager, that’s nonsense. We filed suit against the hosting provider, and we caught them through billing documents that way. What we ended up doing was we hired an IP lawyer, and we found a fake reviews site that just really trashed us, and lifted up the competitor with every article. “We were screaming from the mountaintop that we were being attacked, and everybody was like, ‘Prove it,’” Fowler said. There appeared to be no question that someone was out to trash MacKeeper. Indeed, a Kromtech representative provided me with a link to a disparaging post on the Apple discussions forum, titled, “Do not install MacKeeper,” and showed that it had been reposted on the forum at least 18 more times. It already ranked high because it was an Apple domain. And then there was absolutely nothing we could do. “And then they would just fill up the thread and close it out. And they would come back with these beautifully well-written, perfect responses,” Fowler said. “They would say, ‘Is MacKeeper a scam?’ That’s what people were searching for. “But to the average person, when that shows up in the search results, the only thing they see is ‘’ and ‘MacKeeper scam.’ … So what these guys did, and they did this all over the Web, was they would create 20 or 30 fake accounts, build them up a little bit, comment here and there, get a little bit of rating on them, and they would post a question.”Īccording to Fowler, MacPaw relied on Google queries to compile statistical data to back up what it was saying about MacKeeper. “Here’s a top-level forum-this is -if you read the fine print, it says it’s not moderated by Apple, it’s moderated by community members,” Fowler said. “They hired SEO companies to comment-spam they did paid articles.” And, he said, they took advantage of the Apple discussions forum. “These guys really went above and beyond,” he said. To hear Fowler tell it, MacPaw was relentless in its attack on MacKeeper. In this episode of its telling, I want to focus on Kromtech’s claim that MacKeeper’s reputation problems stem largely from a coordinated negative publicity campaign launched by one of its competitors.Īccording to Jeremiah Fowler, a Kromtech spokesperson, that competitor is MacPaw, whose competing product is CleanMyMac. The MacKeeper saga appears to be a somewhat convoluted one, and as I previously noted, there’s more to the story than what I was able to get into that post. and the tarnished reputation of its flagship product, MacKeeper, a utility software suite for the Mac. Eight Critical Factors for Business SuccessĪ couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about Kromtech Alliance Corp.
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