How can you frustrate your long term customers? There are a lot of ideas in the market to do this, but I did not expect such a surprise from this particular company.
My desktop is Windows 2000 workstation. Everything (all drivers, programs, hardware) works fine together. We use Norton Internet Security to have a certain level of data and Internet security. Furthermore Symantec offers a special licence for small office (5 licences package), hence I always did recommend this product in the past. These days we wanted to upgrade to the new version of Internet Security 2007. Since the 2006 version was quite better than the 2005 version in terms of performance, we didn’t only want to buy an upgrade for virus detection, instead we prefered to buy the new (entire) program.

During my shopping procedure I discovered that the new version 2007 runs only on Windows XP (home and professional). Wow! What is the reason that these guys want me to upgrade my entire system?

At home I went to Symantec website and found a link under the product: “If you run an older version of Windows – please click here”. The solution! But the link did not work (like most of the links there); neither in IE nor in Opera browser. That is far more than frustrating….

How did it end? Well, next to me on my desk is a program package. Its title? “Kaspersky Internet Security”. It runs on Windows 98, NT4, Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The company has a 3 licence package as well.

Hey, I guess they have got new customers!