In a message written on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 10:54:55AM -0800, Michael Thomas wrote: > At that point why should they sell iron at all? Seems like you get > all of the downside of owning the iron, and all of the downside of > paying for a cloud based service. Either you own what you own, > or you pay for service that somebody else provides. This "you > bought useless hardware unless you pay up" is really what's > infuriating.
I didn't say the box should stop working, but that it should stop processing the subscription data. For instance Barracuda boxes do local bayesian filtering, which does not require a subscription, and should continue to work. But I'm also not sure why this is any more or less infuriating than other things in the real world. When my home was built I had to buy an electric meter, at my cost, so I could get electric _service_. If I don't pay the bill they turn me off, that hardware is now useless and I don't get to recoup that cost. Barracuda has bundled a hardware product with a service. Some people want it priced like a hardware product, some people want it priced like a service. That is fundamentally why they are in a no-win position from a customer relations perspective. -- Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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