Slashdot Mirror
Security Software Costs More to Renew Than Buy New
Matt Whipp writes "In a story I wrote for PCPro, I explore a tip submitted by one of our readers. They pointed out how much more it costs to renew security software, rather than buying it new. In fact it cost less than half the price to buy it new than it does to renew the license because of heavy discounting. He feels a bit cross that, as a loyal customer, he is the one penalized. From the article: 'ZoneAlarm may have tripped up on this discount issue, but it's not alone. It highlights just how cynical companies can be in relying on customers' assumptions that a renewal should be cheaper than buying new. McAfee's Internet Security Suite costs just £24.99 with the current 50 per cent discount. However, should you be fool enough to already be a customer of McAfee, you'll have to pay £39.99 to renew your licence.'"
There's so much great free security software out there (Avast, for instance) that for the educated consumer, the price of Norton or McAfee should be a moot point in my opinion. Not to mention that those two products are far more resource intensive than their free counterparts.
I don't know what prices one would be looking at when it comes to commercial version of Avast, or how much actual support contracts cost a company if it wants Norton on say, 1500 desktops. But for the typical consumer, paying for security software is just a waste of money.
As for McAfee's 50% discount, the latest Norton is free with rebates at certain points in the year, so as long as you wait until then to buy it, you can even get Norton free.
Why renew a license when you can just buy a newer release in a store?
I like basketball!!1!
If you have Comcast cable internet McAfee security suite is free. Other ISPs provide security products free of charge as well. Shop for a better ISP, not for a Symantec vendor. Also, it might be a good idea not to click on things you're not sure of and stop surfing for porn so much.
My wife recently bought a new computer with Windows XP to replace her aging Windows 98 machine and asked me to help with the migration. There was really only one piece of software she wanted to migrate: Quicken. I was brooding over ways and means. When she booted up her new HP machine, she said, "Oh, look! We don't need to worry about it. It comes with Quicken."
On closer inspection, it came with something called Quicken "New User Edition." It did absolutely everything she needed to do with one small exception: it wouldn't import a file from a previous version of Quicken like, for example, the Windows 98 file with five years of our financial life in it.
But fortunately it automatically offered to sell us an upgrade. Of the alternatives on offer was something called "Quicken Deluxe Edition 2006" which could be ours at a special upgrade price of just $39.95. It did many more things than my wife needed to do, but it would import older Quicken files So I shrugged, and said, "Well, gee, I dunno, seems like a lot, I suppose, line of least resistance, what the heck."
But, when she typed in her credit card number and tried to buy it, it popped up the web browser with a message saying yes, we could get Quicken Deluxe 2006, but wouldn't we rather get Quicken Deluxe 2007, which could be ours at a special upgrade price of just $49.95? We looked at each other. My wife says, rather disgusted, "You know, I'm never going to upgrade Quicken again if I can avoid it, so I suppose I should start out with the most recent version." I said, "Yeah, I guess so, but, wait just a minute."
I hurried over to my Mac, which hadn't been contamined with any versions of the Quicken software, and when I went to their website from a virgin machine, it offered me a choice that the browser on her machine had not offered: something called "Quicken Basic," which had exactly the same functionality as "Quicken New User Edition" plus the ability to import older Quicken files. For $19.95. Full price for a brand new purchase, not an upgrade.
In other words, those bastards had not only included an artificially crippled version of Quicken Basic in the HP software offering, which was bad enough, but they deliberately programmed all the auto-update-salesware to hide the cheapest and most appropriate version of the software.
I wish I could tell you that we decided not to buy any version of Quicken, but in the end of course we bought the $19.95 version.
It's things like this that really build long-term customer loyalty. My wife had always had good feelings about Quicken itself and the company that publishes it. Now she still has good feelings about Quicken but she's quite pissed off at Intuit. (And she holds grudges. Believe me.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!