Well the time spent dealing with a bad infection, the possible data loss etc has never been worth the tiny effort/cost of making sure i had some basic cover. That’s my own experience on the personal computer front and also my experience when a manager of a high street internet cafe franchise ( a long time ago). Bad AV is known by most IT people, and they mostly avoid it. If your management are so bad they wont listen to their IT department on these issues, it’s probably time for a new job.
On the personal computer front i’ve had a complete data loss virus event (where the HD was not recoverable enough to be worth it), this was back when i was inexperienced and using the ‘crap-ware’ security stuff that is mostly now the domain of the ‘grandma and grandpa get a new computer’ (so yeah it was McAfee iirc) scenario.
On the business front, the worst case (which was a hack on our IP that was trying to download nasty stuff on all the shop pc’s) meant 2 days of downtime while things were fixed by the IT guys. Across our multiple stores that was a few tens of thousands of pounds worth of lost revenue. We had been relying on an ‘uncrackable’ linux server side, without individual protection on each PC for AV etc. It took a while to clean the couple of hundred systems, and we then ensured we had an individual AV protection for each PC, and had no other issues of that type. The IT guys knew the ‘crapware’ to avoid.
So no, sorry but my own experience of the worth of a good AV solution means my basic recommend is always Firewall and AV at a minimum, the internet is a minefield of hacks/malware that you really will get hit hard without protection at some point, so why risk it. Heck we even get hit here by infected advert banners from time to time (you can find the threads around here). So yeah if you want to gamble, that’s your call, but i’d never advise people too.
System usage is not that much of an issue these days is it, back when we were running P166’s and 4MB RAM maybe? But certainly the better AV products you will hardly notice on today’s systems. This is all my own opinion off course and your entitled to disagree, just as i am with your own :)