Marketing 12th Edition by Charles Lamb,Charles Lamb,Joe Hair

Exercise 1

CAFEE VIRUS PROTECTION UPDATE CRASHES COMPUTERS WORLDWIDE
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, McAfee was founded is one of the world's largest dedicated security providers. McAfee's customers range from individual home users to large corporations to governments around the world. The company segments its markets into home, small business, mid-sized business, and enterprise. Annual revenue has grown to around $2 billion. The business market is about 60 percent of the company's revenue, with the remainder from the consumer marketplace. Geographically, approximately 60 percent of revenue is derived from the North American marketplace. McAfee's online subscription site, http://home.mcafee.com, provides online software delivery to over two million paid subscribers, making the site one of the largest paid subscription sites on the Internet.

The Botched Update
While the online software delivery has been a hallmark of McAfee's product design and delivery, it was almost the downfall of the company in early 2010. A faulty anti-virus update file shut down computers worldwide when the update misclassified a fundamental Windows XP system file as a malicious program. McAfee's anti-virus program deleted the "threat." Unfortunately, deleting an essential Windows XP rendered computers useless as many experienced the dreaded "blue screen of death."
The extent of the impact upon McAfee's customer base was never fully disclosed. Media reports and Twitter postings suggested that the affected users numbered in the thousands, while the company suggested that the affected group was less than half of a percent of the company's customers. While the actual number of affected home and business customers might never be known, there were notable shutdowns: a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island had to suspend treatment to non-trauma emergency room patients, state police patrol car computers in Kentucky shut down, and one large U.S. multinational company reported that 50,000 personal computers could only be repaired manually by a technician sitting at each computer.
The Aftermath
McAfee quickly removed the faulty update from its servers and eventually offered an apology, but the major fallout from the update fiasco was the revelation of inadequate quality assurance at McAfee.
According to some reports, McAfee's shoddy quality assurance procedures resulted in the faulty product's release. Critically, the faulty product had not been tested on the version of Windows XP which the product ultimately crashed. With Windows XP in use by a large number of computer users, many questioned why this configuration was left out of the testing processing. Apparently McAfee had recently changed its quality assurance process. In doing so, it allowed the faulty file to get past the test environment and onto the computers of its customers.
Ultimately, the reputation of software security providers such as McAfee hinge on their ability to prevent problems, not cause them. Despite offering to reimburse home and home office users for computer repair costs, McAffee's reputation suffered. Blog comments lambasting the companies quality control processes proliferated. One software consultant noted that 75 percent of his clients had switched away from McAfee prior to the disaster. Unfortunately, the 25 percent that hadn't switched were swamping the consultant's technicians, who were scrambling to fix the software problem in a product they had recommended to their clients. One customer summed up the concerns; a security protection product offering should not be on the list of risky software downloads!
Describe McAfee's customer service recovery process.