Symantec really doesn't do itself any favours with its bloated suite of consumer and commercial products. Sure, they work, but at the cost of performance and over-complexity.

Arguably Goliath was toppled as he was so large. The ever-bloated and expensive Norton Internet Security suite is a good example; it'll bring a system to its knees with the load it puts on the client. 7 years ago it was fresh and good, now it's grown into an expensive lardy monstrosity.

The market is ready for alternative products. Particularly good-value products.

The article reads: "McAfee is a stand-alone security company, perhaps feeling pangs of vulnerability after Symantec bought Norton..."

I wonder if the writer realizes Symantec bought Peter Norton Computing in 1990 - 18 years ago. Makes me wonder how accurate & timely the rest of this article is.

...in 1990, and Veritas in 2005. It's a security company that bought a data protection company, not the other way around.

The writer appears to be completely out of the loop with Mcafee buying Secure Computing this year to.. one of the top anti-spam appliance companies in the world..

Yes, because Commvault's storage software can stand up to Veritas branded storage software, two packages mean Veritas win:

NetBackup

Foundation Suite

That is all.

..."The ever-bloated and expensive Norton Internet Security suite is a good example; it'll bring a system to its knees with the load it puts on the client. 7 years ago it was fresh and good, now it's grown into an expensive lardy monstrosity."...

As always people love to bash the big guys and base their ill-informed opinions on previous experiences and software they installed years years ago - have you actually tried the latest 2009 Norton AV or Internet Security products? 99% of the reviews I see are praising it for being virtually unnoticeable and taking up next to no resources and, lo and behold, its running on my machine and I dont even know its there most of the time.

"have you actually tried the latest 2009 Norton AV "

Yes, actually. I spent a frustrating afternoon last week doing just that, to overcome an 'Lucallbackproxy' error on a client's machine. This required a very chunky download (half an hour), the uninstallation of the previous version (20 minutes) and the installation of the new one (another 20 minutes, plus a hunt for the licence code, which is supposed to be stored by Symantec). What happens? The same error returns and Symantec's only solution is to re-install! The workaround is to disable Live Update, but of course, it flags that as an error...

Glad I don't have it on my machines (I use ClamWin, in the best freetard tradition).

The OP was commenting on the speed (or lack of) of Norton products which, fairly IMO, Norton have been slated for in the past - my comment was simply that the newest version mitigates that almost completely and also pointing out that its unfair to judge a product based on what it used to be or used to do. Im not saying its a perfect product as your post shows BUT it has finally shed its reputation for being overly resource hungry which can only be a good thing.