draft rant.
some of the reasons I am dumping AVG:
1. webstats are very precious to me. i've read first-hand the "egg-breaking" arrogance of the
developers. I'm not a marketer, but I use my stats to focus my activities. People who
dismiss stats obviously have never looked at them, they can tell you many things. One of
the things that analysts are trained to hate, from a very young age, is noise in their
datasets. They spend literally years of their lives scrubbing their datasets clean. And
then along comes some company and quite deliberately, thoughtlessly, pollutes them.
I can spend more hours, on top of those I have already spent, trying to block their hits,
but now they have changed their bot behaviour, so I will need to adjust my filters again,
and worst, if I look at old datasets I now need to remember that prior to AVG 8, IE6 stats
were OK, but after AVG 8 they are not. I don't want to have to write this arbitrary
rubbish into my analyser.
So I have the option of blocking all IE6 traffic, personally I think IE6 users deserve it,
but my customers may not agree, and since they own the sites I merely manage I may need to
involve them in the decision-making process.
2. bandwidth is very important to me as well. I don't have to pay for it, but that doesn't
mean I don't want to conserve it. The less traffic on my wire, the faster that wire runs.
I indeed heavily promote the speed of the server I run, the slower it goes, the less of an
edge my business has.
3. betrayal. I have recommended AVG to many people, in my position as their IT guru, and
now I am forced to un-recommend it. This will cost me some reputation, unless I can find
some ways to trash the product that end-users can relate to, if I say it's because it
skews webstats and generates mindless traffic they might not care so much. My lines of
thought here are akin to the following:
Ahh yes AVG, hmmmm, that used to be pretty good, the new version is shite tho, you should
read the comments on the net about it! It has this feature which downloads EVERY result
on your google searches, even if you don't click on them! That will kill your link speed
and tell the owners of every one of those sites that you were interested in their site,
even when you weren't! And if ANY of those sites were dodgy you'll get databased by MI5
even though you never clicked on the link! AND if there are ANY holes in the AVG feature
you have 10 TIMES the chances of getting owned!!!! Oh and if you're on a capped connection
it will also chew your allowance and cost you a packet in traffic charges! Oh and finally
yeh if you run a website it will also fuck your stats and slow down your server!
I'll bet £50 that none of my customers will let me get to the end of that para, they will
have started asking me about alternatives by the middle of the second sentence.
4. time. I now need to spend time researching an alternative to AVG I can recommend to
my customers, and it must not let me down.
5. money. this junk is running my processors hotter than they need to, that means more
cooling and that means higher power bills. This will mean higher IT spend, especially
for hosting providers, and thus feed inflation, as those costs are passed onto
consumers.
6. environment. this junk is poisoning the air, no doubt it has a carbon footprint the size
of several coal-fired power stations, that is wasting my children's heritage, and contributing
to the early demise of all life on earth.
So AVG has done the following to me:
- ruined my webstats, both all future stats and all previous, unless I write in a special
anti-AVG feature.
- slowed down my server
- cost me some reputation
- wasted a lot of my time
- cost me money
- poisoned my unborn children, and reduced their quality of life
So my action plan is as follows:
- come up with a list of reasons WHY AVG NOW SUX. This list is to be used
to dissuade people to upgrade to version 8. It essentially consists of the nastiest,
darkest potentials of Linkscanner, and fails to mention ANY possible good points about
the product.
- come up with a list of alternatives. This list will be needed once people have
been successfully persuaded that AVG NOW SUX.
- come up with a technical fix. If this takes the form of a 0-day on Linkscanner, I
personally won't be complaining, although I'd be content with an Apache rewrite rule.
- come up with legal fixes. Have I not suffered loss, both in time, and in
damage to my business and reputation? How can AVG add what appears to be approx 15%
to global internet traffic, without penalty? Surely if one company was responsible
for 15% of all motorway traffic, they would be paying a very large bill.
- post this rant far and wide, first as a comment, get some feedback and then repost
as a webpage, possibly served to all IE6 useragents and/or posted to mailing lists.
AVG, that dead Vulture is U, take a good look.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
