Security software's a booming market. Why is Symantec stumbling? Worldwide security software revenue totalled $21.4bn in 2014, a 5.3 per cent increase from 2013's revenue of $20.3bn, according to the serious bean counters at Gartner. A decline in consumer security software and endpoint protection — areas that together account for 39 per cent of the market — was more than offset the strong …
Symantec's Norton Internet Security has proven to be a huge frustration and a complete waste of time. Just the most spiteful and horrid garbage-ware ever written. Wasted many months of my life doing endless troubleshooting on multiple PCs and laptops. Finally figured out NIS was the fundamental problem, removed it from all the household PCs, and suddenly household IT support became a trivial exercise.
Anyone involved with the creation of Norton Internet Security should be punished by the Gods of Karma.
In the enterprise lots of others providing the same services for less money or just more favourable licensing terms. Looks at Sophos, free licences for schools and employees.
Plus tbh most of the big boys just aren't that good at catching stuff now.
At home plenty of free security stuff around that does the job well. Why would you pay?
Symantec is big enough, even after their eventual split, to not do anything dynamic or game changing. They have a long development cycle, changes to the UI that would make the product "prettier," would take 3-5yrs if not more to actually see the light of day in production.
Damn the corporate world and the slow train it rides on!
*Full disclosure: Former happy symantec employee. I wish them the best, but product management is the biggest impediment to their products succeeding.
Symantec is one of those companies who responds to legitimate queries regarding technical/policy issues with a letter from their corporate lawyers. And they don't address the issues.
So, no more referrals to any of my clients for them, and move to better products as the licensing comes up.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Symantec's decline is likely due to their product's efficacy and performance being terrible, and to their not updating their user interface since some time in the mid-90s. It is both buggy and excrutiatingly painful to use.
Maybe if they came out with a product that was easy to use, and that actualy worked...
We've just gone through a vendor/product selection process, to be fair Symantec did at least have a stab at responding to the RFP and attended a reasonably productive meeting (he says, glaring at two other major players), but too many things counted against them:
- Added-value bits are cost items, unlike for example, Sophos, who bundle HIDS etc
- The company is big enough that feature requests etc from a medium-size enterprise are ignored
- The senior execs in the US can't work out what strategy/direction they want, so the leadership is in turmoil (and crucially, the presales team got comically nervous when this was brought up)
- They've removed themselves from all the independent performance tests (avcomparatives.org, etc) - hmmm, I wonder why
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