May 29, 2009 at 2:39 pmAntivirus box boom: before and after
It is unlikely that anyone remembers - once there was no retail. What an idiot in the heyday of Gorbushka and Mitino with “all software for a hundred rubles” disks could have thought of buying a licensed box for a thousand. It took some 3-4 years, and today box software is interesting to everyone - vendors, partners, the press. How to sell it, where, where to put it on the shelf, how to enter this market. The lexicon was enriched with new terminology - "pallets", "visual communications", "patency, sorry, store."
How did box retail come about? Somehow suddenly. And then one day they realized that about a third of all the antiviruses that are currently sold in stores are our boxes. People often ask what you did to become the number two antivirus in retail. It's a shame to say - they did nothing. While other companies were already spending thousands of dollars on advertising on federal networks, we were thinking about something completely different. In particular, about the high.
Definitely, the basic idea was that the antivirus is not a pack of milk, and not a loaf of bread. At a time when antivirus had not yet become a mass product, the decision to purchase it was never made spontaneously. In contrast, say, with a packet of milk or a loaf of bread, which earlier caught sight of a shelf than other loaves of bread. A person has always approached the choice of an antivirus expertly - as well as the choice of a camera, laptop, PDA and other “intellectual” goods. As an option, I called the system administrator to a friend, read something on the Internet myself on the forum, read a special IT magazine with test results, and only then, realizing myself a technology guru, went to the store for an interesting device. Therefore, not Santas, neither naked women with large advertising posters - “buy me and get a mug as a present” could not lead the technology guru from the chosen path. "Visual communications" were powerless before the intention of the guru - he passed the boxes placed for a lot of money in the premium zone (the display at eye level) and confidently found a plain box in the lower left corner of the shelf, without a second doubting the correctness of his choice. Therefore, we had no choice but to think about the high.
Then the retail exploded. Not just grown - it was like an atomic explosion. Retail began to grow at a monstrous pace, the owners of printing houses grew rich, barely having time to print the boxes, trucks - to deliver the boxes to distributors, distributors - to ship to stores. There were more stores, both large and small, both in Moscow and in the regions. People have got so much money that the cost is not just software, but laptops have become almost imperceptible. And at some point, the antivirus became a mass product.
Here, of course, everyone was thoughtful. That is, it turned out that any housewife, girl / boy emo, music teacher and even people of a million professions who have never read forums or IT magazines, and who do not even know system administrators, can now buy an antivirus. They all got computers, and in their head they thought that each computer has an antivirus (of course, thanks to all of us here, Evgeny Kaspersky, who has scared the entire population of the country with stories about terrible epidemics, the end of the Internet and other horrors for more than ten years). And all these people - were, firstly, susceptible to advertising, secondly, they asked for advice from sellers, and thirdly (horror!), They could take the first product that was laid out on a special “pallet” from the shelf. This is where it started. But about how they trained salespeople, how they first placed ads,
Well, the explosion led to numbers. The numbers surprised. Half of all antivirus sales in Russia are boxes. Indeed, there is something to think about, bite your elbows, sometimes even tear off the hair on your head, and wail where we were before (this is me about the world leaders in the antivirus market). In a word, everyone loved retail.
The anti-virus market in Russia is an extremely entertaining story. The fact is that antiviruses are, in fact, the only case in the software market where there is intense competition. It’s nowhere else (Microsoft is not competing with anyone, Nero isn’t either, ABBYY isn’t). With antiviruses, the opposite is true. There are a lot of them, and they, of course, differ in technology, color of boxes and interface design, but frankly bad products are not here - the bad ones simply can not withstand fierce competition and quickly disappear to where they came from. As a result, as usual, the strongest survive.
At the time of the box boom, the following were noticed in stores: Kaspersky Anti-Virus, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, Norton Antivirus, Dr Web, Panda and several other manufacturers' boxes that went unnoticed by the general public. The pie was divided approximately like this: Kaspersky Anti-Virus - about 45-50% of the sales of all boxes in Russia, ESET NOD32 Antivirus - about 35-40%, Norton Antivirus - 5-10%, Dr Web 5-10%, Panda - very little, the rest is even smaller.
And then, when it seemed that we had entered the "golden age" of software (and we were there), it suddenly ended one day. The crisis has come. Everyone began to think, who would be the worst? It turned out that retail. Not in the sense, of course, that he had gone somewhere, but he had worse than some. Federal networks, the most important sales channel for antivirus software in boxes, were faced with a shortage of working capital and reduced credit lines, and therefore had to refuse to sell those antivirus software in boxes that did not have the highest turnover ratio. Simply put, they stopped selling boxes that buy poorly. So in the retail antivirus has become less. Say, in some networks there are two of them, and somewhere four, but for those that are not the first two, it’s extremely difficult to stay (now not only those vendors bite their elbows,
What will happen to the boxes next? The antivirus box boom smoothly turned into a dominance of sales in the retail of two antiviruses - Kaspersky Anti-Virus and ESET NOD32 Antivirus. All the rest will smoothly disappear from the shelves.
How did box retail come about? Somehow suddenly. And then one day they realized that about a third of all the antiviruses that are currently sold in stores are our boxes. People often ask what you did to become the number two antivirus in retail. It's a shame to say - they did nothing. While other companies were already spending thousands of dollars on advertising on federal networks, we were thinking about something completely different. In particular, about the high.
Definitely, the basic idea was that the antivirus is not a pack of milk, and not a loaf of bread. At a time when antivirus had not yet become a mass product, the decision to purchase it was never made spontaneously. In contrast, say, with a packet of milk or a loaf of bread, which earlier caught sight of a shelf than other loaves of bread. A person has always approached the choice of an antivirus expertly - as well as the choice of a camera, laptop, PDA and other “intellectual” goods. As an option, I called the system administrator to a friend, read something on the Internet myself on the forum, read a special IT magazine with test results, and only then, realizing myself a technology guru, went to the store for an interesting device. Therefore, not Santas, neither naked women with large advertising posters - “buy me and get a mug as a present” could not lead the technology guru from the chosen path. "Visual communications" were powerless before the intention of the guru - he passed the boxes placed for a lot of money in the premium zone (the display at eye level) and confidently found a plain box in the lower left corner of the shelf, without a second doubting the correctness of his choice. Therefore, we had no choice but to think about the high.
Then the retail exploded. Not just grown - it was like an atomic explosion. Retail began to grow at a monstrous pace, the owners of printing houses grew rich, barely having time to print the boxes, trucks - to deliver the boxes to distributors, distributors - to ship to stores. There were more stores, both large and small, both in Moscow and in the regions. People have got so much money that the cost is not just software, but laptops have become almost imperceptible. And at some point, the antivirus became a mass product.
Here, of course, everyone was thoughtful. That is, it turned out that any housewife, girl / boy emo, music teacher and even people of a million professions who have never read forums or IT magazines, and who do not even know system administrators, can now buy an antivirus. They all got computers, and in their head they thought that each computer has an antivirus (of course, thanks to all of us here, Evgeny Kaspersky, who has scared the entire population of the country with stories about terrible epidemics, the end of the Internet and other horrors for more than ten years). And all these people - were, firstly, susceptible to advertising, secondly, they asked for advice from sellers, and thirdly (horror!), They could take the first product that was laid out on a special “pallet” from the shelf. This is where it started. But about how they trained salespeople, how they first placed ads,
Well, the explosion led to numbers. The numbers surprised. Half of all antivirus sales in Russia are boxes. Indeed, there is something to think about, bite your elbows, sometimes even tear off the hair on your head, and wail where we were before (this is me about the world leaders in the antivirus market). In a word, everyone loved retail.
The anti-virus market in Russia is an extremely entertaining story. The fact is that antiviruses are, in fact, the only case in the software market where there is intense competition. It’s nowhere else (Microsoft is not competing with anyone, Nero isn’t either, ABBYY isn’t). With antiviruses, the opposite is true. There are a lot of them, and they, of course, differ in technology, color of boxes and interface design, but frankly bad products are not here - the bad ones simply can not withstand fierce competition and quickly disappear to where they came from. As a result, as usual, the strongest survive.
At the time of the box boom, the following were noticed in stores: Kaspersky Anti-Virus, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, Norton Antivirus, Dr Web, Panda and several other manufacturers' boxes that went unnoticed by the general public. The pie was divided approximately like this: Kaspersky Anti-Virus - about 45-50% of the sales of all boxes in Russia, ESET NOD32 Antivirus - about 35-40%, Norton Antivirus - 5-10%, Dr Web 5-10%, Panda - very little, the rest is even smaller.
And then, when it seemed that we had entered the "golden age" of software (and we were there), it suddenly ended one day. The crisis has come. Everyone began to think, who would be the worst? It turned out that retail. Not in the sense, of course, that he had gone somewhere, but he had worse than some. Federal networks, the most important sales channel for antivirus software in boxes, were faced with a shortage of working capital and reduced credit lines, and therefore had to refuse to sell those antivirus software in boxes that did not have the highest turnover ratio. Simply put, they stopped selling boxes that buy poorly. So in the retail antivirus has become less. Say, in some networks there are two of them, and somewhere four, but for those that are not the first two, it’s extremely difficult to stay (now not only those vendors bite their elbows,
What will happen to the boxes next? The antivirus box boom smoothly turned into a dominance of sales in the retail of two antiviruses - Kaspersky Anti-Virus and ESET NOD32 Antivirus. All the rest will smoothly disappear from the shelves.