Here at SPAMfighter, about three quarters of our development effort goes into keeping our products up-to-date, so they work better, faster and with more compatibility than ever before.
Of course, it’s a moving goalpost, and in this blog post I’d like to give some better insight into that, so you can see why you get updates and why, sometimes, it can take some time to get updates out.
In an ideal world, we’d just write some great software, release it and that would be it. Alas, life is never that simple. Things change, new updates from Microsoft and others come out, and we either have to update to make things work when something changed, or else we need to write new plug-ins for new email clients, or make our antivirus faster and less intrusive on system performance.
The very large majority of these updates and new features are planned, quite often up to a year in advance. Sometimes (rarely, thank goodness) we get caught out with an update or change to the OS which leaves us with a bug that we need to fix, and fix yesterday.
Again, in a simple world, that would be it, we’d just do our work and send it out. But, again, life is not that simple. Even with a relatively simple update or change we need to test. And that’s a big job these days. We not only need to test for each platform (and we support from Windows 2000 and upwards), but each variant of each platform, such as Windows XP, SP3, 32 bit, 64 bit, Windows 7 Ultimate, Standard, etc. Then add in different equipment manufacturers, plus multi-VM machine testing. All that takes time, and we are very grateful to our great QA folk for doing that work so well.
Why do we need to do this?
With over 7 million users world-wide, and growing, all using different OSes, systems and configurations, we simply can’t put out an update and hope for the best. Many companies have, and it very rarely works out well for the most important person in our business: you, our customers.
Why can’t we simply get it all right first time?
We ask ourselves this too. But we have very large and complex products, often involving hundreds of thousands of line of C++ code, integrated with third-party SDKs, complex Microsoft SDK integrations, simply put: the odd bug is going to creep in from time-to-time. However, this is what we do, we develop and maintain products that make your life easier, and your PC operate better, so we keep at it, building better and better software.
As 2010 draws to a close, I wanted to celebrate the hard work that our development teams, support teams, sales folk and management do to keep your PC safe and working in great condition.
We have a lot of new products coming in 2011, which will prove to be our busiest year yet, but rest assured, just releasing them is only part of our business: our teams around the world will be working hard to make sure those products are kept up-to-date and protecting you, no matter what the world throws at them.
I’ll close with a few highlights of what is to come in 2011. I can’t go into details at this point, nor can I absolutely promise release times (we won’t release any new or updated product until we’ve tested it to the best of our abilities, so you only get quality products on to your PC!) So, without further ado, here’s what you can expect from us next year:
- More rock-solid products that help keep you safe online and off, up-to-date and always protected.
- New versions of VIRUSfighter and SPYWAREfighter, with complete UI redesigns and new features to make them even better.
- We’ll release Mac products in 2011, starting with a cloud based configuration tool for our online offering (to be formally announced shortly), following up with FULL-DISKfighter and SPAMfighter for that platform too (expect Q2 shipment on FULL-DISKfighter for Mac), other products “to be confirmed”.
- We expect to do some extremely daring price promotions on our security products too. Those will come in January or February.
- Our SPAMfighter product will get major updates to keep us compatible with the latest email clients. You can expect a first update in February, maybe sooner.
- Finally, expect two or three new products from us next year. I’ll tell you more about those is a future blog update a little nearer the time of release.
If you have questions, I’d be happy to answer them. Just post in the comments, below.
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