McAfee Black Eye

Written October 2011 by Cliff Feldwick

Probably not their original intent, but McAfee, certainly one of the major anti-virus vendors, has found another way to tick people off and make them leave their service.

It’s always fun when people ask what anti-virus to use. I continue to believe that Norton 360 is one of the most intrusive, badly written programs out there, so that’s not really an option. Of course, there are (seemingly) dozens of Norton variations, including the “free” version if you’re a Comcast subscriber. (I “air quote” free because nothing on Comcast is free – it may be included, but that’s not the same as free. And besides, wasn’t McAfee offered by Comcast not that long ago? Maybe Norton has upped the payoff to them.). So I’m not a Norton fan. Having said that, if you have a recent vintage computer with a good amount of memory, the Comcast Norton is fine. Not great, but fine.

There are a number of actually free programs out there, such as AVG, avast!, and even Microsoft’s Security Essentials, an often overlooked choice. Each of these can be found by Googling their names – just beware of “sound-alike” choices, and download AVG or avast! only from a trusted site such as CNet.com. If someone asks you for money, then you’ve clicked the wrong button.

But back to McAfee. My brother had an invasion by a Trojan that messed up his computer, and I used a number of tools to rid him of this pestilence. But McAfee still would not update. Since he had a subscription, I suggested that he call them and use their expertise. But it seems that McAfee has recently outsourced their support to iYogi, a group in India (what a shock). The woman there immediately said she needed to examine his computer to see why, and downloaded some diagnostics that she ran. What followed was a classic shuck-and-jive, with rapidly recited tales of junk files, “program fragments”, “registry errors”, etc, followed by an offer for a “certified technician” to clean everything up for a cost of $179 a year.

Note that they still have not fixed the original problem of the program not updating, even though he had paid for a subscription. He was smart enough to blow off the hype, and asked me about alternatives. Using a tool from McAfee’s website, we were able to remove all the traces of McAfee and he downloaded the free AVG. So far so good, except for the wasted money for McAfee.

Not that long ago, McAfee was acquired by Intel, who has made their fortune selling ever-faster and more powerful hardware. There has been speculation as to why, but one reason may be that Intel had developed a technology called vPro that allowed system administrators to remotely debug and troubleshoot PC’s, and thus to cure some security problems – but nobody was using it. Having a security company that could build on this technology could foster its use by others.

Intel has always been challenged in chipmaking by AMD, a rivalry that has helped produce many cost and speed benefits for most users. If, however, there was a compelling reason for commercial users, especially large-scale companies, to adopt Intel as their preferred standard, it could be quite an advantage. McAfee could have helped this happen.

None of this will work, however, if they make their customer base think of them as scam artists. I’m assuming that McAfee found some commercial advantage to sending their consumer users over to iYogi, including paybacks. Destroying confidence in your brand, however, is seldom worth it.

Speaking of cheap

An interesting tidbit in a Forbes article on (what else, it’s Forbes) Microsoft’s stock price was the information that MS sells its Office Suite in China for $29. Part of this is because emerging markets such as China and India are extraordinarily cost sensitive, and free alternatives such as Open Office and Google Apps are out there. But the primary reason for “cheap in China” is the widespread prevalence of software piracy there. If MS tried to sell Office at anything like prices here, they’d be buried by bogus products and completely ignored. So it’s better to sell at a sharply reduced profit than not to sell at all.

MS will continue to push everything “cloud” with Office 365, an entirely Internet based offering. While it can be fairly cheap (as low as $6/month for a basic, no-support subscription), it still has the problem of needing to hook to the web to do anything. How many times have Comcast or Verizon left you high and dry, but you were able to do something semi-useful like write a column because Word still worked just fine? Just sayin’ …

Not what he had in mind

Thanks to my friend Roy for passing on this quote from Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup: “I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.”