I can relate to everyone concerned...
I'd agree. In relative comparison, safer-networking doesn't have the financial capital to hold a full fledged political battle with Symantec. I personally wouldn't want them to waste the time. The only real advantage Symantec has over safer-networking, Grisoft, Lavasoft, Zonealarm really comes down to financial capital. They all have the better software, as we all know, but the one thing they don't have is the financial capital to advertise. Online is great, but not until you start to see big spreads in most mags, will you see or hear anything about these products.
Look, I talk from experience. My dad was in the computer business in the early 90's, he was doing the Dell thing at, around, or slightly before Mr. Dell dominated the market completely. (If you must know, his partners' gave him the shaft) but here's the facts. You can be told by 10,000 mags that talk about computers that safer-networking is better, but, people, that doesn't help the donation department or advertizing market to all those people, who, for better or worse make up 80-90% of the market, and most of those people, know nothing about, security protection, or which product is better. Do you honestly think PC Mag really sells to my mom? NO. She doesn't go buying PC mags. I do. I buy Maximum PC which is where I first learned about Spybot and AVG, and what not. That and the now defunct Tech TV. Facts are, people just don't in a large majority know which product is better, and when they go to the store, as all do, because freeware/shareware is to be perfectly honest, a tech/geek/nerd thing. You have to be a little Geeky to know what they are. The average person if you asked them what spybot is will look at you funny. I know, I explain to countless college students what SpywareBlaster/Spybot Search and Destroy/AVG/Ad-Aware are. Most still don't know about updating windows, or heck...the most basic of things. If you really want to get people to learn, it's going to come down to this. When this country get's it's head, slightly out of it's butt, and they realize all students need to be required to take computer classes, then will it be that you can send the ten thousand reasons why these products are better. Because until you are able to have full page ads, or tv spots during the superbowl, or what not, these products will never become well known.
Ok. if someone wants an Idea I've got one. Since most people don't know what any of these things are, someone needs to create an ad for several superbowl type events, talking about freeware/shareware/where to look for the best products, why it's important, so on and so forth. Get the understanding freeware exists, and security is increadibly important. For example, why is Mcafee getting more well known? It's new deal with Comcast and Comcast High Speed internet. The facts are, you need to have widespread coverage of your audience, because for the same reason Microsoft will never be defeated by Apple, because Microsoft owns 90% of the market, and people just don't want to switch, don't know very much, and unless you shove it in their faces at superbowl sunday, never will care to learn.
I'd say this, get the entire nerd/geek/computer/gaming/tech/hacker/cracker/opensource/everything computer releated together, get them to cough up the donation money to talk about opensource/freeware/shareware in a massive way, via a massive ad program, and the thing you will see is, people will know. Do you think people like to pay Symantec 100's of dollars a year for a product they don't even know works? NO! I would never pay for something I didn't need to pay for, legally speaking. If I could get a product that way better, that did more, that took up less system resources, and was absolutly free, do you honestly think I would pay for something that was a piece of crap and messed up my computer? No...not one bit. If you make the case big enough about freeware/shareware/opensource you will create a tsunami of interest in the GLOBAL populus. In the areas it counts. So why don't you guys go set up a donation page for support opensource/freeware/shareware/etc. and the general things Symantec doesn't fix, repair,cover get all those rich nerds interested in a good cause, and with a little kick in the butt form the base, we can kick this thing off in a way that will really make an impact. Sorry for no other ideas, but that's the only way they are going to be wide known in the next 10 years to the regular pop. People just don't know, and often are too confused to care.
-Chris