We hear a lot on the news about how much consumers matter: our spending is two-thirds of the economy. Congress wants to give us more credit card safeguards. We have agencies that help protect us - a Consumer Products Safety Commission, Underwriters Laboratories, the Better Business Bureau. Even some local television stations have staff dedicated to helping people having a problem with a business.
But it's still a jungle out there for consumers. Caveat emptor - Latin for "Let the buyer beware" is a mantra that everyone knows of.
I am of the belief that just about every large company doing business in our cities and towns has forgotten what it was like during those first days after they opened their doors: hoping that their products or services will spark the public's interest enough so they can make their payroll and meet their obligations. Hoping their customers will bring others through the doors via word-of-mouth. Striving to maintain the highest quality at the lowest possible price (I believe the last to practice this American approach to doing good business was the founder of Wal-Mart).
I see or hear about this more often than I would like: major corporations either neglecting or outright ignoring their loyal customer base of individual purchasers (which is what you usually start out with) in favor of the mega-contracts with other corporations or the government.
One example I can show is McAfee: a company whose sole purpose is to engineer protective software. They started out small, steadily gaining a following of loyal end-users. Things were going along fairly well: Profits rolling in, customer base content.
Then came the day they began to land mega-contracts. Things went to "hell-in-a-handbasket" fairly quickly after that. Emails from home users - once answered quickly - were either slow to get responses and sometimes no answer at all.
The facade was a good one: a home-user could even upload a suspect file directly into McAfee's anti-malware computers, and quickly receive an evaluation of your file. But even those responses magically "disappeared".
I had a registered game from a licensed vendor which was labeled a Trojan. A false positive: shouldn't be a problem, I thought. Alas, McAfee's much-lauded AVERT Laboratories (rated "Best on the Globe") flat refused to reverse the determination of their "perfect" software. I marveled at the idea that a "Trojan" - once it had an established foothold within my PC - would have as its sole purpose to run a casual game. :lol: I appealed but it fell upon deaf ears. My requests for a reversed determination now were ignored.
I couldn't perform an AV scan: couldn't boot the game either. If I did, the game would be deleted immediately. No option to mark the file as "safe". So the software was rendered inert. What use is an anti-malware application if you can't run it?
Long story short, I uninstalled the software and terminated my account. Smart move on my part: system startup times improved by a good 65%, and all-around system performance times showed a measurable improvement.
And of course I found a better anti-malware application: instead of around 300,000 blocked files, that number is now in the millions.
No longer did I have to keep "Caveat emptor" in the back of my mind: now it is "Caveat venditor" (Let the seller beware). End-users with legitimate problems do have viable options. Hopefully one day some of these CEOs, once they start to see a larger erosion of home users, will return to their roots when they first opened their doors, and run their businesses as they once did - with pride and integrity.
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