These days McAfee seems to trail Symantec in most things, and -- perhaps not surprisingly -- that includes the number of gripes the companies generate. But just because McAfee's a distant second in the customer complaint department doesn't mean we should ignore them completely.
One way McAfee appears to be trying to catch up with Symantec in terms of gripe production is by arbitrarily changing the way its products work. "There's been a brouhaha in the McAfee Spamkiller 6 support forums recently about the company changing how the program works without warning and without regard to what its customers think about it," wrote one reader. "I bought Spamkiller 5 about a year ago and was relatively happy with it as it worked the most like what I wanted in a spam-protection program. So when my subscription to the automatic updates ran out, I just bought the upgrade to Spamkiller 6. But after installing it and downloading the first update, I immediately noticed several things were not working the way they used to. For example, it was now impossible to keep Spamkiller from deleting my e-mail from my ISPs as I used to be able to do, and e-mail that goes to your 'accepted' folder can't be deleted automatically. From reading the forums, support personnel have stated that McAfee changed the behavior of the program on purpose to make it easier for novice users and distributed it as an automatic update without any notice. The only way to get the program to work as it used to is to reinstall and then disable automatic updates."
Another reader expressed insecurity about McAfee's procedures for downloading security updates. "I subscribe to McAfee antivirus and firewall products, and last night I realized it had been a while since I'd seen the McAfee 'Updates Available' pop-up," a reader recently wrote. On checking, he discovered it had been months since he'd received an update, and he soon saw why. "Since I've been using Firefox for some time, I had gone into IE and set its security level to high, disabled loading ActiveX or executing files and things like that. Since I wasn't generally going to be using IE anyway, I decided to leave it in as secure a position as possible. After spending a long time at the McAfee site, I discovered a page of instructions telling me how to unsecure Internet Explorer so that the McAfee update process would work. Yes, you read that right -- I had to relax the tight security I prefer in order to access and load the new security updates from McAfee. Now, I've been in the IT business since the early 80's, and this is lamest excuse for a security system update delivery method I could even imagine. In order to keep my security up-to-date, I can't have tight security?"
One area where McAfee seems to be holding its own is in the deadbeat rebate category. "The McAfee Rebate Program is the scam of the century," wrote one somewhat upset reader a while back. "I sent in everything but a blood sample, and of course it was not enough. The worst part, however, is VirusScan did absolutely nothing. Perhaps we should just turn the country over to the mob. At least we would have someone to go to when we get hijacked. We have to stop companies from doing this, or we will ALL be on 'the little purple pills' simply to exist in this country."
Still, if McAfee really wants to be in Symantec's league when it comes to generating gripes, there's no question what it needs: product activation. By not going for copy protection in a big way, McAfee is missing out on all sorts of opportunities to annoy its customers. However, McAfee does employ one technique that Symantec/Norton hasn't caught on to yet -- automatic subscription renewals.
"I got my McAfee subscription renewed and my credit card debited without my
consent," wrote one reader recently. "I wrote e-mails to billings@mcafee.com and subscriptions@mcafee.com, but did not get answers. I read your article on the automatic renewal policy of McAfee subscriptions and realized that I am not alone. Thank you warning others about this bad policy. I guess I will switch to Norton, I hope they do not practice automatic renewals?"
Which just goes to show why the race for this much-unwanted title is one that McAfee can't win. Until more customers realize that there are many fine alternatives to both Symantec and McAfee, every McAfee gripe that causes a customer to switch is just another Symantec gripe waiting to happen.
Read and post comments about this story here.
1:03:40 AM 
|
|
