Who’s biting the CRM donut?
Hooray! I’ve learned from one of those newsletters written by my beloved e-journalists, writing about anything from middleware to cameras, that I can get an antivirus for free. You know, if you have Windows and you go to Windows update site, you can see those “protect your computer…1-2-3″. (I’m not visiting Windows Update site, since it gave me an 0×800$$$$ error on IE and another one on WindowsUpdate.log; I have contacted a Microsoft Support Professional that told me to use msconfig.exe on my Windows 2000, an impossible-to-do thing).
So I got this AV, eTrust EZ AV from CA, but after downloading it I’ve changed my mind. I read there that it is free for an year and that I’ll have to uninstall any other AV. They asked me about my billing address and I thought that, as in porn scums, they will offer me one year free and then they will force me to pay some 1000$/year for the rest of my life. After all, there wasn’t any saying about being a trial version, which means I’m about to purchase it and getting, as a gift, one year for free. As you know (I’ve learned from Petzold), There’s No Such thing As A Free Meal.
So I tried to learn from CA’s site about this. At the entry point in the Support section you can see this animal (I came a long way from Z80 and linux console to actually watch this smart-ass software support):
He asked me to insert my question in a natural language, so I’ve typed it, although I knew what should I expect, from the “natural language understanding” included in MS Office.
The results were catastrophic. They had some kind of Knowledge Base DB, which in fact seemed more like a forum. Since you, my reader, are not afraid to pay sometimes 100$ for a text editor, nobody has asked my question, but someone was in fact already worried about what is PayPal.
My last remark was that the domain contained “CRM” in its name. So I suppose they paid lots of $$$ for a forum with another name. Way to go, CA!