Symantec trims targets as subscriptions put off payday

Symantec's customers are cutting back on purchases and the company's revenues are going to be lower this quarter. Why is demand for its products lower? The company announced preliminary results for its fourth fiscal 2011 quarter as there is an unexpected shortfall. It announced expected revenues of $1.68bn – below the issued …

[Tom from the States]

Microsoft Security Essentials isn't helping matters.

Besides being free for home users, MSE is now free for business with up to ten computers. I tell all my friends to use MSE and dump SAV or VirusScan off their home systems once their subscription has expired.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Microsoft Security Essentials isn't helping matters.

How true this is. I have a dozen or so clients that still have single core XP machines which simply don't run under the current version so they have SE installed. This in turn means I reduce the overall licenses to the minimum 5 for their server so at least they have AV / AS protection.

Saying that I used to expect a license renewal to be around £30 per desktop, its now around £14.

[Anonymous Coward]

Code

At some point, a few years back, NAV/SAV was terrible. I switched at that time and never looked back. I understand that they went through a full recode. Is SAV better now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code

No.

[Skinny]

Re: Code

Hell No! Our Enterprise licence just expired, and have ditched it for another product entirely now. Although it was a bit of a project to remove Symantec from all the machines, a project we could have avoided if we had just renewed, we actually ended up spending about the same if not a little more for it's replacement.

ALL our staff are so happy with the performance improvements to their workstations now SAV isn't installed on them!

[elreg subscriber]

"Anti virus" is an oximoron

AV has all the hallmarks of a virus except one: it is installed on purpose by the (misguided) user.

AV is software that:

- Comandeers full control of your computer

- Keeps updating ever-growing black-lists (the opposite of a sane "allow only what's known and kosher" security policy)

- Keeps increasing CPU usage

- Keeps taking more and more memory

- Inerjects itself into the system call path, making your programs slower, and sometimes breaks them completely (e.g. cygwin)

- phones home for regular updates

Why are people still falling for this scam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Symantec Rootkit DRM

Got rid of Symantec when it kept failing to install over an old copy, and the old copy could not be removed without massive manual intervention in Windows Registry plus running some special "uninstall" code (and it took several hours with the Symantec tech support to get this far).

Apparently the CEO at that time drank the DRM KoolAid(r) and broke honest users... and this one got fed up and left. This DRM is idiocy, without the AV signatures the product is marginal, the code and remote servers only need verify the subscription not the base code. No, I guess that concept is too difficult for the executive suite to understand...