First reason is so that those who may take an interest in such a project could get some idea of what they are up against and can possibly set some targets.
Second reason is for the purpose of six months to a year down the road of being able to determine if whatever course of action was taken was successful, or needs changing.
I am not sure where the privacy issue comes into play, but the commercial aspect of it could be useful in that article I brought up as a possible idea. Seems to me the number of users in a given country would be something to be proud of and not something to be hidden. And if the numbers are down for a given country, then highlighting that and getting the message out that you have a fine product would be to the advantage of the Alwil Team.
Today I read an article about the share of Japanese search-engine.
Yahoo! Japan : 53%
Google : 37%
Others : <10%
Even now Yahoo! wins against google in Japan. I see many people set Yahoo!Japan as their start-page.
BTW, when I type “avast” and search it in Yahoo!Japan, I see many ads claiming like “Is free security software reliable?” or “Pitfall of free security software”.
That page (top of the ads) says avast doesn’t have web protection and “Not recommended” (with many ads of paid software) :-\
I can’t see such ads in Yahoo! (not Japan) search… is there such ads in other language’s search engine?
As I’m sure you know, NON, misinformation and plain distortion of fact is not beyond the realm of techniques used by Japanese companies to sell a product.
The question is what can the Avast staff do about false claims that are so wrong the company that placed them wouldn’t stand a chance in court? I can assure you that if I were with the Avast staff I wouldn’t allow such bovine excrement aimed at my company to stand. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And disrespecting my company in such a manner would create some serious willpower.
I don’t pretend to know much about business models and marketing strategy, but I always thought that when a company offered both a free product and another product for purchase, that the idea was that the first one was to serve as a “loss leader” for the second one. Is that not the case here?
Looks to me like the prevailing Japanese culture has already done the heavy lifting for you. Why waste even the tiniest amount of your precious time and energy worrying about being insulted by other peoples’ foolish lies? Forget about the free product and go make a bunch of money. How hard could that be? What am I missing here?
It’s not that simple. Millions of people have Avast! free and I’m sure that at least some of them downloaded it because they couldn’t afford a antivirus software and Avast! is a good antivirus that’s free.
Everything.
The Freemium policy of avast (free product + premium one) has proved to be very effective on market share.
Today avast is one of the most used antivirus in the world. 130+ million users. A lot of them passed to the pro version.
