Perhaps what we have here may be a failure to communicate. "Ed, the word for the day is obfuscate," one reader wrote recently. "Why? Have you visited any vendor websites lately to try to buy something? I'm totally confused. I am in the process of upgrading network software and hardware. I have been visiting various web sites such as McAfee, Veritas, Microsoft, and others. It seems that every site makes it almost impossible to figure out what it is they actually sell, let alone what their products actually do. For example, McAfee currently has three lines of virus software, 4.51, 7.01, and 8. Try to find out what the differences are, try to find out which one to use. All that appears on the web site is marketing lingo that really doesn't tell you anything about the product's capabilities. All it says is that it will solve all of your problems. I sometimes wonder if the people creating the web sites even know what it is they are selling. The Veritas web site is just as bad. I think I know what I need but I sure couldn't figure it out from the website. Maybe I'm just getting old and slow."

It's hard to be sure sometimes whether the vendor's packaging is obscuring the truth on purporse or not. "I thought I'd share a recent experience with you that I think fall under 'misleading' or just indifference toward the customer," wrote another reader. "I purchased an Adaptec USB2Connect adapater card, which according to the package, includes six ports, five 'external' and one (1) 'internal' USB port. That much is true. What they don't tell you, either on the outside of the package or in the inside directions, is that if you want to use the 'internal' port, you have to disable one of the external ports via tiny jumper on the adapter card. In other words, one only has 5 usable ports. Nowhere is this mentioned. Sneaky, yes? I wasted several hours trying to figure out why my 'internal' port was not working, without much success. Finally I called Adaptec support, only to be told by a recorded message that if I wanted phone support I needed to pay. They don't even give you one call free. Thus, I resorted to sending them an e-mail, and finally received a response telling me about the limitation and the switch. If this isn't arrogance on the vendor's part, I don't know what is."

An even more unpleasant surprise is when a feature that was there disappears. "I'd been usuing Zone Alarm with the beta release of XP Pro 64 for almost a year," wrote one reader. "So now I upgraded to the production version of XP Pro 64, and I get a message when I install Zone Alarm 5 that it's the wrong version of Windows. Regardless of which version of ZA I use, it doesn't work. Zone Labs sent me a very curt 'we do not yet support XP Pro 64 and it will not install.' Try to find anywhere on their website where they tell you they do not support XP Pro 64, even though the beta worked fine."