We should all be familiar with what a “fanboy” is.  They’re someone of any gender (male, female and/or misc) who is an overly passionate fan of a certain brand.  This brand could be anything from a cereal brand, car manufacturer, band, musician, actor, actress, IT company, sports star … the list goes on.

So what term would one use to describe someone that is the opposite.  That is, someone who is overly passionate against a certain brand.  Being an IT worker I see the fanboys and antifanboys the most when it comes to software manufacturers.  Apple probably has the most passionate fanboys, who fawn over any and every product they release, have multiple versions of every product from phones to music players, computers, laptops.  The most passionate antifanboys though are shared equally between Apple, Microsoft and Adobe.  People who use any excuse they can to rip on any and all products from those manufacturers.  Just take a quick look at the iPad hate before and after its release.

Recently McAfee released a bad update for their virus definitions that put many Windows XP SP3 computers in to a reboot cycle after the patch deleted a file that was critical to the running of the operating system, and the antifanboys came out in force.

“thats why you dont use McAfee, remember a couple of years ago when McAfee fed up like this as well!!! Free Virus protection is better than paid ones”
Posted By: lbigfella | brisbane – April 22, 2010, 2:49PM

“If you use McAfee, you deserve it. This software has a long history of problems. I advise people against using it all the time.”
Posted By: Laffo | Gold Coast – April 22, 2010, 2:47PM

These are just two of many examples I came across in every story about this bad update.  However, they do not have anything even remotely resembling a point.  You see, I can’t think of a single AV vendor who has not at one point or another in their history released a bad definition that crippled machines.  Symantec, Trend Micro, Kazperski, AVG … they’re all guilty of it.  I wish I could find the news articles to show as evidence but the search engines are filled with the McAfee incident from a few days ago and little more.

McAfee is no worse than any other company when it comes to mistakes like this.  They all make them, they’ve all done it multiple times.  I’m no fan of McAfee AV.  I would much prefer it if we moved our clients on to something else but my boss prefers this one.  Despite my dislike of the product, I still feel a very strong need to defend them here in these recent events.  The anger towards them and accusations flying around are completely undeserved.  Please, don’t let the recent events misguide you and remember to take all “hate” feedback with a grain of salt.  People have short fallible memories and prejudices, sometimes that is all you’re seeing.