AVG damage control

I wrote a few days back about AVG’s “malware”. For a tech-savvy company, I was not surprise to find that I was served the standard official climb down by its PR. [Please note that I have no information whatsoever to say the poster works for AVG or its PR firm, but reading the way the message is worded, I think it is safe to conclude it is not a random posting by a well wisher]

I welcome and encourage this type of reply as it automatically update the status of the story. And yes, I am not that stupid to believe the company actually read my post. It is more likely its PR campaigner or its dedicated PR search engine caught this and flag it as negative publicity that it has to dealt with.

In this case, I would like to congratulate AVG for its relatively fast attempt to resolve the problem. Let’s see whether the webmasters in general accept this as a resolution for this issue. I myself will continue reading TheRegister to see their view on the topic (They are one of the victims. Here is one about the changes to AVG Link Scanner).

Throughout this saga, I am not sure whether AVG’s damage control actually worked. The most famous quote in this saga is from Roger Thompson in TheRegister (Note: If you have not noticed, TheRegister is not a AVG fan in this saga):

“I don’t want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelettes, you have to break some eggs.”

Some commentators try to be diplomatic by saying you need other ingredients such as cheese on your omelettes. To me, the analogy with omelettes only work if you are an AVG software users and find you have to fork out more money for bandwidth or suffer some negative impact of AVG software since nobody tells you to install their software. The analogy does not apply to me or joe public since AVG is breaking MY eggs, not theirs.

Then, knowing that TheRegister and other webmasters were on a warpath, he made more enemies by saying that AVG will work to outwit webmasters’ workaround for their malware.

I would not had blogged if AVG announce it is to pull the malware sooner. After all, as I like to say, to err is human. I have to give AVG time to resolve the problem. But there seems to be no action. That’s is why I posted my post. So if AVG had decided to pull the malware sooner, then it simply failed to do its damage control properly, at least in this case. If it only decided to pull the malware after I had posted, I am glad to had made a contribution to their decision making process.