シチュエーション

ABC Corp.はPCウィルス対策ソフトMalwarepoliceを開発・販売している。ある日、XYZ株式会社が、社内50台のパソコン用にMalwarepoliceをまとめて購入してくれた。その数日後、 XYZ社のシステム部のスタッフから、パソコンの動きが不安定になったり、操作が遅くなったりするという苦情がABC Corp.に寄せられた。技術支援でXYZ社を訪れたABC Corp.のサポートエンジニアは、問題のパソコンには別のPCウィルス対策ソフトが併存していることを発見した。これは、XYZ社がこれらパソコンを購入した際に各装置に予めインストールされていた他社製ものである。ABC Corp.のエンジニアは、ウィルス対策のようなセキュリティソフトウェアは、1台に2個以上インストールしてはいけないという暗黙のルールを守っていないのが原因であり、新しくインストールする前に古いものをアンインストールするのが常識であると説明したが、XYZ社のシステム部スタッフ（Phil Watsonシステム部長）は納得せず、そんなことはウェブサイトや製品マニュアルのどこにも書いてないから、この問題に起因して浪費した費用 (人的工数) と再インストールの費用をABC Corp.が負担するようメールで要求してきた。

Dear Mr. Watson:

Frankly, we are stunned by your recent email in which you blame the problem of your PCs on us. It is a well-established fact that security software by nature accesses sensitive areas of the operating system and unexpected problems may occur if two different anti-virus programs reside inside one PC. This is common sense in the computer world that everybody is aware of, and no software companies bother to warn about it in their manuals. In fact, we have never received complaints about the omission of such warnings even from novice users. We also hope you will understand that it is simply impossible to thoroughly check how other companies’ products would behave in the presence of ours. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to accept a claim for damages resulting from users’ negligence, which is outside of our responsibility. I would appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely yours,

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Dear Mr. Watson,

Thank you very much for choosing our anti-virus product. We are sorry to hear about the technical issues you are experiencing after the purchase.

Upon examining the phenomena and usage environment, our support engineer believes that the issues are most likely caused by a conflict of use between our product and a similar product from another vendor, as we previously explained. It appears that in installing our product, the general rule commonly held in the industry of: “first uninstall the existing one” was not adhered to. It is regrettable that this best practice is not explicitly mentioned in most user manuals, including ours, and was hence somehow overlooked. Therefore, I am afraid we are not in a position to accept responsibility for such incidental damage. We again suggest that now it would be best to uninstall all the anti-virus products, including ours, currently installed on your machines and then to install ours anew. We believe this suggested action will solve the problem.

As always, we weigh feedback from our valued customers such as you carefully and would be delighted if you continued to do business with us.

Sincerely yours,

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