I few years ago I purchased a product called Network Magic - which is now owned by Cisco. I was very happy with this product but last year Cisco decided to stop selling it. No problem as I had a perfectly good license for the product that would surely let me use it for as long as I wanted to.
A few weeks later I decided to upgrade to Windows 8 and as part of the reinstall process I earned that I had installed Network Magic the maximum number of times I was allowed to. Given I couldn't buy a new license, this didn't seem fair as surely if I purchased a license I was still able to use the product I had purchased.
So ff to the Cisco web site and a request asking how I could get to use the license I had purchased. I explained the problem but the person responding couldn't help and referred me to someone else, who didn't know and referred me to someone else, who didn't know etc/ Nearly four months and twenty or more emails later I am being asked questions like what the mac address is for the the product I buy.
Now I have no idea who Cisco gets to answer these requests or why they are incapable of finding out who can answer my question, but in all honesty they seem to be completely unaware there is a problem. Now you would think if you sent a question to a link as Cisco says you should on their web site, that the person would know something about the product or know someone who would. But no they don't even know they have such as product or that it is software not hardware.
So after three months of talking to the wall that is Customer Service at Cisco, I was pleased to find out that a rival company Netgear had produced a free alternative Netgear Genie that does mostly what Network Magic did. Now I understand that company is also producing some of the best routers on the market at the moment, which hardly seems a coincidence after months of talking to Cisco.
So when I come to buy my next router, should I look at a Linksys (Cisco) router or a Netgear??
