Avast woos AVG shareholders with $1.3bn buyout offer Avast is offering to buy anti-virus rival AVG for $1.3bn. AVG shareholders are being offered $25.00 per share in cash, a 33 per cent mark-up on the closing share price on Wednesday. AVG, Avast and rival Avira are the three main players in the market for freebie anti-virus scanners for Windows. All make their money by offering …
Silicon Valley... or wall street, value personal invasion companies at around $60 - $100 per user account. So the valuation is no surprise.
It is however totally insane. AVG shareholders would be mad not to cash out. The software was cool in 2004. It's a total dog these days and an absolute nightmare to uninstall.
one humongous scam, trading on the ignorance, fear, paranoia, the bad behaviour of the computing public, and too often on the criminal shoddiness of the underlying OS. As with all goldrushes, it's the folk selling the shovels and the food (usually made of the most rubbish materials) who make all the money.
Just for the record: it went exactly as I intended.
None of us like being reminded that we have chosen (or even been compelled) to hitch our wagon to a three legged mule, while the person next to us is all set up with something having the optimum number of legs, the required strength and breeding, and is merrily getting the job done instead of cursing and sweating trying to get any reliable forward motion at all!
Avast turned to shit a couple of years ago when the company was sold on. Since then, most money seems to have been poured into its nagware features. Saddest part is that these also made it into the paid versions. Having the "business" client start bleating to the end users that they need to stump up to renew the license from 30 days before expiration with no way for the admin to turn that off is just idiotic.
We finally dumped them when the definition updates started to fail due to excessive RAM allocation requests by the client. For 6 months, Avast gave priority to the new free version and did absolutely nothing to address a crippling issue that made the software useless to their paying customers. It dragged on longer than that but I stopped tracking the ticket following our switch (to Vipre).
I have been an AVG Gold reseller for over a decade. I have watched many things happen with the software, and I am disappointed to say that the home edition is pure Norton-esque bloated crap. It is loaded with unnecessary crapware and constantly nagvertises additional product and features. For the business, however, it is quite top-notch. I will only sell and evangelize the business edition.
I have a particular hate-on for Avast due to prior experience with the software and its support. I have seen it bone more than one network and AVG is far more network-friendly for Exchange, PowerPoint, and file sharing environments. Should such a buy-out go through I will exit the anti-virus reselling arena.
Both were fast turning into personal-info-slurpers anyway, rather then delivering useful AV.... Let them cannibalize each other...
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"AVG defends plans to flog user data as privacy row continues • The Register - AVG argues that it has no immediate plans to monetise users’ browsing habits. However, independent security experts remain critical, arguing that the firm is putting user privacy and even trust in security firm more generally at risk. AVG let users know beforehand that it may sell “non-personal” customer data to third-party advertisers in order to bankroll its freemium security software products. This non-personal data, including browsing and search history, advertising IDs, applications on a device and ISP used, are previously reported. The revised privacy policy is due to come into effect on 15 October. - “Let's not kid ourselves, advertisers aren't interested in data which can't help them target you,” Cluley writes. “If they really didn't feel it could help them identify potential customers then the data wouldn't have any value, and they wouldn't be interested in paying AVG to access it.” - When the cure becomes part of the disease... "
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"Avast – another anti-virus big-hitter – recently announced plans to make use of anonymised user data to develop marketing analytics.... This is not quite the same thing as what AVG is doing – not least because it doesn’t involve third-party ad brokers – but it might still be seen as moving in the same direction of travel of monetising users’ data as as way of offsetting flat or declining anti-malware software sales." "However, Malwarebytes... remains committed to the freemium model and reluctant to get into data brokering in any form, at least for now."
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