? First there was the “we are God, we’ll do what we want, when we want” mentality that has persisted in some form to the present day.
? Then there was the “we need to start charging, though we don’t know the first thing about running a real business” stage that was marked with high prices and some of the worst customer support in the world.
? Then there is the current stage of “we’ve got all these gobs of cash from charging people so much in our market monopoly but now we’re being under-cut, so we’d better use all that money to bludgeon everyone with high-priced marketing ploys instead of improving the value of our products and services” that has only slightly improved with the better-late-than-never enhanced web account tools.
The only reason I still use Verisign Secure Certificates is because competing certificates don’t yet have enough browser support and the general public is uninformed about web security.
(in the final bit of irony, a couple years later, Verisign’s own root certificates lost all browser support all over the world – requiring every single web master to modify their server setup to make up for this error in planning)