Hi, my norton anti-virus has completely switched off, its £45 to renew online or if i go to PC world its £29.99, in the good old days it was just the updates you were paying for, now it’s completely shut off and am being held to ransom for money, please explain this paradox…
The price differences between retail stores and our online store may vary from time to time. This is because some retailers at different times of the years may have sales on where the product may be heavily discounted. The advantage of this is it allows you to shop around and find the best price. The advantage of this is that you have the ability to shop around and get the best deal. As with most things in life, we can get different prices by shopping around. It is not uncommon at all for 3rd party stores to have lower prices than we get from the manufacturer at any given time. Again, this is not unique to Symantec. At this instance, I would like to thank you for writing to us with this feedback. It is valuable to us and greatly helps us to change in a way as to how our customers would like us to be. We always recommend our customers that if you see the products for a lower price, don’t hesitate, just buy it. Said that, the only thing you need to be sure about is that the product is genuine and provides you with complete license and subscription days.
I've been using Norton products since 96 & something that I've noticed is the price for NIS has gone way up in the past year or two. I checked the price at a local well known retailer recently & it was $80. Canadian. It's not just Norton though, Kaspersky, Bitdefender & others are around the same price. And all of them charge a lot more usually if you buy direct via their online stores, this isn't new. What I do, is buy when the back to school sales are on, just before the next years versions are out. I recently bought NIS 2012 3 licence for $19.95. I still have 90 days left on my current subscription, when that licence is ready to expire, I'll use the new 2012 & update to 2013 via the "New version check". That allows some time for some of the reported bugs to be worked out, hopefully.
Edit
Regarding your question, from what I've read, the reason some security products stop working is the manufacturers came to the conclusion that by allowing such things as the firewall & anti-virus to continue past the licence expiry gave users a false sense of security. Since they could no longer download updates to the a/v etc. That's my take on it, hope it helps.