Paying To Support the Good Fight

Hi!

With a range of packages on the market, each with different strengths, different prices, different levels of effectiveness, and different licence terms we all have the ability to make choices while respecting that some of those choices cost money. (In the case of distributed Enterprise antivirus a LOT more money than you and I have paid!)

I am troubled by the lack of ethics of many members of the online community who rather than choosing a free option or paying to support the developers will choose to abuse a licence or misuse software or use warez. I myself used to work for a software house and know that those licence fees are vital to keep operations going. I know that paying for new developments is expensive and that companies develop first and then need to gather licence and support payments in order to continue development.

Many, probably most of you will agree with me. However perhaps even some of those who agree with me will have a copy of MS Office on their machines and feel that it is fair game. There may have been an arguement in the past that Office was fair game, when there were no alternatives and the cost (as it still is) was ridiculously high. However now there are some very impressive cheap and free alternatives so this market resembles the AV Market. (Anyone looked at OpenOffice 2.0 prerelease, amazing!)

I hope I haven't broken the rules by posting here, but I would like to hear what peoples views are on puting their money where their mouth is. NOD32 users like me will probably think that it is money well spent for example, and be comfortable knowing that they got the level of protection that they paid for. Do you use free AV and think you got a better deal? Do you pay for an AV package that gives additional flexibility? (There used to be and may still be the option to pay a bit more to use Norton *cough* on a second machine.)

Love and goodwill,
Fairy

 

As I have stated in another thread on the NOD forum already:

I will support companies that have liftetime licenses to sell more often than the others. NOD isn't one of them, alas. So I have tried to get that as cheap as possible and I succeeded with NOD32USA.

But what I heard about Eset kind of shocked me. Eset prohibits resellers to sell NOD32 cheaper than what Eset wants. That is in my opinion totally riduculous! The free market is a good thing, what Eset does smells like monopolism. Resellers must have a chance to, for instance, sell a product with a lifetime key for a cheaper price. Just as Agnitum is doing right now with Outpost. What eset is doing with their resellers looks like what Microsoft does with their sofware. Luckily enough MS gets more and more lawsuits against, which they loose. The latest fight they lost was against the European Unity. Nice

 

Kind of goes without saying, no?

Yeah, sure. Too bad 99.9999% of the rest of the world still uses Office. I made the mistake once of editing a Word file with OpenOffice. It looked fine in OpenOffice, but it was formatted all wrong in Word. So someone who opened it in Word would think I was on drugs or just utterly careless. And unfortunately, the DOC I'm talking about was a resume. So much for OpenOffice as a direct replacement for MS Office.
-

 

For you and I sure. Others think that companies are "ripping them off", "overcharging", etc. The software I used to sell started at £50k and went up to £1m+ and it was good value for money. However some people reckon $30 is too much to pay.

OpenOffice 2.0 is a huge improvement compatability wise with Office. Also if you want portability how about sending your CV in PDF or maybe even RTF :-S

The compatability has now reached a point when you have to ask if the price of Office is worth the benefits. I suppose it does supply a great framework for Macro viruses ;-)

 

NOD resellers know what they are getting into before they sell. If they don't like the reseller terms, (which are more generous than MOST av's offer, I can assure you) then they don't have to sell the product.

"Smells like monopolism" is a ridiculous statement to make in this context, IMO.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by a lifetime licence. However NOD32 is a fair price for such a great quality product. Sure a little cheaper would be nice. However if that is the price of quality then great.

"mo·nop·o·ly
1. Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service: “Monopoly frequently... arises from government support or from collusive agreements among individuals” (Milton Friedman)."

ESET are a minority player in the market and as such cannot possibly be guilty of "monopolism" as their are many other suppliers of fundamentally the same service. They would be guilty of "price fixing" if it could be shown that a "cartel" of operators had set a price for all antivirus products to prevent competition from eroding their price and therefore margin. However clearly ESET are not doing anything like this and the market is free as is demonstrated by the variety of products and prices. Manufacturers may encourage their distribution channels to sell at a recommended price and this is not illegal. They cannot force (in the EU at least) a price to be charged.

IMHO ESET are a great company and I am a happy customer. I also shopped around but decided that their UK distributor would be available for support and the couple of pounds of savings the dollar price would give me at that time was not worth it.

I have used their UK support when XP SP2 caused me some problems and they supplied a fix instantly. Already I felt as if I had received good value for money. In fact I like this product so much I bought it even though my licence for Trend had yet to expire.

It's for the software house to decide what licence models fit their business model and which markets they are targeting. I think their model is reasonable for most people. However if you feel that ESET isn't effectively targeting your market their are other vendors in the market.

I have some sympathy with the two machines situation and perhaps this is something that ESET would like to consider creating a cheaper option for. However if they choose not to then it is for us to respect the terms of their licence and go elsewhere.

Love,
Fairy