In a message written on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 10:54:55AM -0800, Michael Thomas wrote:
At that point why should they sell iron at all? Seems like you get all of the downside of owning the iron, and all of the downside of paying for a cloud based service. Either you own what you own, or you pay for service that somebody else provides. This "you bought useless hardware unless you pay up" is really what's infuriating.
I didn't say the box should stop working, but that it should stop processing the subscription data. For instance Barracuda boxes do local bayesian filtering, which does not require a subscription, and should continue to work. But I'm also not sure why this is any more or less infuriating than other things in the real world. When my home was built I had to buy an electric meter, at my cost, so I could get electric _service_. If I don't pay the bill they turn me off, that hardware is now useless and I don't get to recoup that cost. Barracuda has bundled a hardware product with a service. Some people want it priced like a hardware product, some people want it priced like a service. That is fundamentally why they are in a no-win position from a customer relations perspective. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/