In a message written on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:26:56PM -0600, PC wrote:
This particular product is often used by the SMB types. This changes things a bit. While I disagree with paying for signature updates you didn't use (It's a service, and I don't care about their fixed costs, I went into it knowing I'd have a license for the signatures as they were expired), I do understand where they are coming from for software/firmware development. Unfortunately, they don't decouple the two.
Maybe I'm just a grinch, but I think they could fix this problem. If they set the software in the box so that on the day your subscription expires it no longer processes the subscription data there would be a lot less issue. The problem here is they let the system use the old signature data, and that data is useful for a while. The day after a contract expires, you're still getting 99.9% of th benefit, a week later 95%, and so on. They've essentially been too nice in letting the software be leniant with the signature data, and they they pay for it in terms of customer relations when they try to do renew. Do they let customers renew every 13 months, effectively getting one month free each year while they run on old subscription data, or do they play hardball and make them "true up" with a backdated contract. It's really a no-win choice for them. I suspect if someone came in here saying "my Baracuda stopped filtering out spam the day my contract expired" there would be no love for that person, they would be told "yeah, so renew your contract if you want the service to work". While making it stop working may seem less customer friendly, I think it actually ends up more. Everyone knows where they stand, and the poor engineer trying to get his management to renew it now has a nice club to use internally rather than the current "nothing happens if we ignore it, at least in the short term." -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/