I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, but today I’ve ditched Norton 360. Why? Renewal of subscriptions for background services are really a function of inertia. Telephone company, anti-virus, all the same. No one wants to spend their life thinking about this unless they are made to. Recently though, it has just gotten beyond parody.

Norton’s ‘Message’ ‘Centre’ recommends I buy another Norton product

Everyone expects a little bit of upselling. That does not make it right, but many businesses do it. I saw a note in a hotel not so long ago – “Happy Upselling!” it said to the bar staff. Norton however have taken it to extremes. Their anti-virus client application actually has an email style inbox, backed with alerts when you receive an, ‘important’ ‘message’. Effectively it uses their trusted position as an anti-virus provider to put their commercial messaging in a privileged position.

I have had messages breathlessly and illiterately warning me of, “Broken registries” (meaning, “broken registry entries”). However, when I click on the link I have to pay more to find out what they are and fix them. In reality what is pointed to were minor and inconsequential incorrect entries that any Windows PC accumulates over time. They do not pose a significant threat requiring addressing. I double checked this using CC Cleaner (which is free). It identified a number of minor issues – out of date junk entries – requiring no action although to be fair some of them were inaccurate. Norton’s installed product that I had paid for had found some minor problems with no serious consequences for inaction and attempted to charge me more to fix them.

In each case they offered to bolt on around £27 a year for an extra service. I can see elderly, or technically untrained, people actually falling for this, perhaps evening being worried or frightened. I also question the wisdom of a marketing strategy involving telling people what the product they have paid for cannot do (more precisely, will not do) unless they pay extra.

So, as my subscription approached the end, I disabled auto-renewal and today I am trying Bitdefender for a year. To be fair, they tried to upsell me during the checkout. However, at least they left it there. The product does not have its own inbox for their sales material. I also saved around £60. Looking at online forums I am not the only person who feels this way.

Reviews say Bitdefender has a hair thin lead over Norton on virus detection, but for the comparable product, I noticed it does not have a reputation checking function. Aside from that they have nearly identical options just with different colour branding. So, Bitdefender get my business for a year and all they have to do to keep it is not attract enough of my attention to make me think about alternatives.

As far as I am concerned, the Norton Message Centre is an expression of contempt for customers, and in my opinion, I have removed at least one piece of Adware from my system today.