While I agree that spyware is a big problem, in the tech support world, it's used as a convienient catch all if a customer's problem can't be readily solved. I've worked plenty of regional/national ISP tech support, and everything from slow throughput to corrupt TCP/IP stacks were blamed on spyware without much investigation or confirmation. While I don't doubt that 20% of Dell's support calls are resolved to spyware, I would say half of those issues were attributed to spyware just so they could bounce the call to the ISP or vice versa.
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While I agree that spyware is a big problem, in the tech support world, it's used as a convienient catch all if a customer's problem can't be readily solved. I've worked plenty of regional/national ISP tech support, and everything from slow throughput to corrupt TCP/IP stacks were blamed on spyware without much investigation or confirmation. While I don't doubt that 20% of Dell's support calls are resolved to spyware, I would say half of those issues were attributed to spyware just so they could bounce the call to the ISP or vice versa.