Re:My corporation tried to buy PGP... And couldn't (Score 1)

On the other end of the scale, I worked for a small company of 18 employees about a year ago. I was able to convince the president of the company that encryption was a Good Thing, so he gave me the go-ahead as long as we used a well-known commercial product. So we started looking around the NAI site(s) for how to buy it.

I don't know how many have tried that, but it seemed as though NAI didn't really want to sell products on their website. At that point in time, you couldn't buy PGP (or any other NAI products) over the net. If you were an individual looking to buy PGP, they wouldn't sell it to you. Your only option was to download PGP Freeware. If you were a company, you had to send mail and have a sales droid call you back.

So, we sent mail and waited to hear from the sales droid. He called back pretty quickly, but it just amazed me that they could afford the overhead of people whose only function was to call people and verify; "Yes, I really, really want to buy your product."

It took about two weeks to finally buy the product - which we couldn't get without the mail plugins, IDS, firewall and other extras that invariably broke the other applications.

I'm just surprised their stellar business model hadn't collapsed before now...