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Or, a tale of software licensing woe.
I bought a new laptop computer at the end of last year. It came with, among other things pre-installed, a free month trial version of Norton Antivirus. So far this is all good and no one has had their eyes poked out. Yet.
At the end of the trial period I dutifully give them money for another year of service; Symantec calls this a subscription.
About 10 months later my hard drive upped and died. No warning, no sniffles, coughs and strange grinding sounds, just a black screen upon booting and the dreaded error code: PXE-061. The only way to get data of the drive would have been to open the housing, extract the platter without incident, and re-install it in another housing. Not bloody likely. Very fortunately morgandawn had set me up with a free backup account at mozy.com and finagled just enough quota to get me a FULL DOCUMENT BACKUP three days before the crash. Morgandawn is psychic and resourceful. Memo to self: double her hot fudge sundae quota.
HP nicely sent me a new, blank hard drive which I installed and I'm off to the races. I found ways and means to get OS, drivers and other necessary software installed, but I couldn't re-install Norton. So I emailed Symantec and they gave me a ticket number and told me to call an 800 number.
The 800 number had a phone tree from hell and no operator support, but a second number got me a live human being at a technical call center who informed me that my choices were:
a) buy another 12 months of subscription in order to be allowed to redownload the base program.
b) cancel the remaining time on my subscription for a refund.
I handled the call with politeness throughout, but refused the offer to pay even more money in order to enjoy what I had already bought.
I then replied to my most recent email from Symantec requesting a cancellation and refund. Symantec's prompt reply was an auto-generated form informing me that all emails to that address would be ignored as they had received too much spam and such there.
My interpretation of it all is that it feels like greedy stupidity. The word extortion comes to my mind at least. I shall now use google-fu to track down a Symantec VP or two and let them know their company fails at life.
Even better than getting my special crankpants on for Symantec is that I work in the very division of HP that sells consumer laptops. And the cube town next to my aisle houses the very nice folks who make software bundling and licensing decisions. Gosh, won't I have a nice chat with them next week.
I bought a new laptop computer at the end of last year. It came with, among other things pre-installed, a free month trial version of Norton Antivirus. So far this is all good and no one has had their eyes poked out. Yet.
At the end of the trial period I dutifully give them money for another year of service; Symantec calls this a subscription.
About 10 months later my hard drive upped and died. No warning, no sniffles, coughs and strange grinding sounds, just a black screen upon booting and the dreaded error code: PXE-061. The only way to get data of the drive would have been to open the housing, extract the platter without incident, and re-install it in another housing. Not bloody likely. Very fortunately morgandawn had set me up with a free backup account at mozy.com and finagled just enough quota to get me a FULL DOCUMENT BACKUP three days before the crash. Morgandawn is psychic and resourceful. Memo to self: double her hot fudge sundae quota.
HP nicely sent me a new, blank hard drive which I installed and I'm off to the races. I found ways and means to get OS, drivers and other necessary software installed, but I couldn't re-install Norton. So I emailed Symantec and they gave me a ticket number and told me to call an 800 number.
The 800 number had a phone tree from hell and no operator support, but a second number got me a live human being at a technical call center who informed me that my choices were:
a) buy another 12 months of subscription in order to be allowed to redownload the base program.
b) cancel the remaining time on my subscription for a refund.
I handled the call with politeness throughout, but refused the offer to pay even more money in order to enjoy what I had already bought.
I then replied to my most recent email from Symantec requesting a cancellation and refund. Symantec's prompt reply was an auto-generated form informing me that all emails to that address would be ignored as they had received too much spam and such there.
My interpretation of it all is that it feels like greedy stupidity. The word extortion comes to my mind at least. I shall now use google-fu to track down a Symantec VP or two and let them know their company fails at life.
Even better than getting my special crankpants on for Symantec is that I work in the very division of HP that sells consumer laptops. And the cube town next to my aisle houses the very nice folks who make software bundling and licensing decisions. Gosh, won't I have a nice chat with them next week.
