Symantec sees profits crash ahead of corporate divorce Symantec’s latest financials bear all the hallmarks of a business whose dramatic bisection is causing some uncertainty for customers and channel partners. A cleaver will be driven through the security and storage business by the end of this year to create two separate publicly traded entities. The groundwork for this is well …
... the fact that both their Enterprise and Consumer security product lines are mostly steaming piles of dung had anything to do with the results.
My company recently switched to Symantec Enterprise security. The false positives are piling up rapidly. Color me unimpressed. The Eset products we were using worked well (and still do on my personal devices).
As someone who was in field sales at Symantec from 2005 to last year, security has always been the issue - the Norton numbers hide the truth.
Norton is big revenue but next to no profit - Enterprise security has always been a joke but is conveniently bundled with Norton to make "security" look healthy when in fact it is a car crash.
The reality is that the storage business (Netbackup specifically) has been propping up the whole enterprise security business for year.
Everyone talks about Veritas being a bad acquisition for Symantec - I beg to differ! Symantec has killed Veritas - chronic underspending on engineering, support and marketing all whilst portraying the impression of the security giant has ruined most if not all of the storage portfolio.
The good thing is that, post split, security has to stand on its own two feet and it won't - it will fall flat on its face like it deserves to and, hoepfully, Veritas will have a chance of saving itself once free from the Yellow monster that has all but killed it off.
Installed ghost 14 on an XP machine about five years ago to do a full disc dump to removable external disc storage. It fucked up the exsisting NAV/IS installation to the point I had to strip is all out and re-install, the ghost nagware nearly drove me round the fucking bend whining about the fact that the external hard drive was only powered up when I needed to backup (it wanted to do diferential saves, I wanted it to be satisfied with weekly full backups) and then, to top it off, when I needed it to recover my hard drive it bleated that it couldn't find an image for the recovery to use.
So, self knackering software that wouldn't play with other software - from the same company.
So, I kicked Ghost off the machine and badmouthed it whenever anyone mentioned it, and when the subscription was up I dumped NAV/IS too.
No more Norton products for me.
My experiences with NAV for consumers and small businesses is that the software is ponderous, bloated and intrusive. The AV business worldwide has not yet consolidated, so NAV has competitors from all over the globe. No surprise that it is not doing well. Poor Peter Norton probably does not get as much in royalty payments for use of his name. Maybe he should sue Symantec for defamation of character, using his good name on their not-so-hot AV product. They sure screwed up Ghost, too. Fortunately, there are numerous alternatives to Ghost, some free and open-source.
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