Customers do NOT want things popping up on their screens all the time. The once a day popup for "Virus updated" was acceptable. BUT...
1. Broken links to get the free version again when the 3 paid version links work
2. Obfuscated way of re-registering the free version is really confusing my customers and many are asking me to remove it
3. Way too annoying and intrusive now. V5 and V6 were fine. V7 has gotten a lot worse.
We migrated all our thousands of customer to Avast back when it was ugly because it worked well. Some customers bought it anyways even though it was free which is cool. Lately, many complaints about being confused on how to re-register the avast.
Bugging people to buy it when it comes time to re-register it... fine... but it's almost "intrusive-ware" now and it's generating unwanted phone calls so... back to AVG we go.
It's been a fun few years. Decent protection against most things. AVG is pretty much the same as Avast, without the annoyances.
I even bought it for my home so I could test how well it worked on systems vs the free edition. Ah well... every company pushes the envelope to find that balance between money generated, and complaints keeping people happy. Avast is just testing the waters. We'll see how it all pans out. But, I'm sad to say - our time with Avast is over. Maybe again in the future. Who knows.