"If it is free, it must not be any good."

This statement was uttered by an imbecile. A customer of mine told me last week that he heard this quote from a tech person from some company after a discussion of AVG Free.

The week before this customer's computer was almost crippling slow primarily because it had one of the newer versions of Norton Internet Security installed. After taking Norton off the system (approximately 20-25 minutes to do so) and adding AVG, the system sped up by at least 50%.

You all know that story, however, I want to instead focus on the "free is inferior" statement. My first rebuttal is Google. Google is free and arguably one of the most useful offerings to mankind in the last 30 years. Is Google inferior?

My next rebuttal is OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice is a project supported in part by Sun Microsystems that offers an outstanding, full-featured word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and database...for free. And it is fully interoperable with computer users who spent hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office.

I could come up with dozens of other rebukes to this imbecile's childish and uninformed comment, but I will end this diatribe with just one more example of a freebie that is superior to any paid product in the tech world. The free web browser embodies this notion that free products can exceed the functionality of a paid product. Mozilla Firefox and the Opera web browser both offer superior functionality and customization than Internet Explorer. In addition to this, they both offer a tremendous security advantage over Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Again, I could come up with dozens of instances where free products exceed or match the functionality and usefulness of paid products, but I'm hoping you can help build this list by leaving a comment below of your favorite free product that either exceeds a paid products function or provides a function for you that no paid product currently offers.

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