Yeah it kinda is. To be honest, I really find it disturbing to hear people (and even IT professionals) state that only the paid antivirus programs are to be trusted. Yesterday I had a client that had over 200 virus infections on his pc, using AVG. The "IT professional" that was there too kept blaming AVG. I said it's simply NOT true that AVG was the reason for the infection, but simply the way AVG was setup (no auto updates). I recommended the client to install Avast (or a new version of AVG for that matter) but he didn't believe me and insisted on buying Norton AV2005.
That is also the reason for this thread, because this client kept asking me: "well, if Avast is that good, why do the makers send it out for free? How can they make money like this, while Norton and McAfee earn millions of dollars by distributing their AV programs in boxes. There's no way Avast can spend as much money in R&D as McAfee/Norton do...".
I also kept reminding this client that Norton and McAfee (while not being bad at all) usually take up way more resources than Avast does, but NOOOO, it HAD to be a paid AV, because the free ones are simply 'rubbish'.
Guess it's hard to convince a customer who alreade made up his mind right? Same goes for urging users to use an alternative browser (or at least an auto-updated IE). And then people wonder why I'm almost completely grey haired at age 32