Dixons Carphone Hits Back At McAfee Lawsuit

Dixons Carphone has fired back after McAfee in legal documents, after the American security vendor surprised it with a lawsuit earlier this month.

McAfee has sued Dixons after the British electronics chain stopped promoting its antivirus (AV) software for use with Windows 10S, a variant of the operating system that was originally targeted at educational establishments.

McAfee in its lawsuit alleged that in the 12 months from June 2018, a full 40 percent of its retail sales in the UK and Ireland came through Dixons, totalling £2.7m. It claimed a further £27.9m against Dixons in “lost sales and lost renewal fees” from “future gross revenue”.

Legal action

But now according to the Register, which saw the legal findings from Dixons that alleged that not only was McAfee trying to promote AV onto devices it simply wouldn’t run on, but it also suggested that Dixons’ “Team Knowhow” staff manually install ‘numerous free apps (including Truekey and Web Advisor)’ on customers’ new hardware, while McAfee rushed to build something that would work with Windows 10S.

This was “not viable”, Dixons reportedly said in the court documents.

Windows 10S was launched back in 2017 and it is essentially a fully-fledged version of Windows 10 designed for low-cost computers as well as education-oriented PCs.

Dixons alleged that although both firms had been in talks since late 2018 about how ‘the lack of a McAfee Security Software product compatible with 10S’ meant that Dixons’ customers were ‘generally being denied the ability to purchase 10S products’ from it, McAfee only managed to develop a working AV suite for Windows 10S by June 2019.

Both parties are reportedly disputing the dates, and Dixons has alleged that its competitors at the same time were able to offer very competitive prices, as ‘they were able to take full advantage of a subsidy offered by Microsoft to hardware manufacturers selling hardware running 10S.’

The case continues.