Symantec under pressure to split up? Symantec faces being split up by activist investors, according to the New York Post. Symantec is viewed as still struggling to integrate its 2005, $10.5bn Veritas acquisition, and it may be undervalued as a result, based upon estimates of what individual units could fetch if they were spun off. For example, Veritas might be …
1- Sack all the senior management.
2- Bring in management that will foster an environment of responsability.
3- Listen to your customers and react accordingly. (People have been telling Symantec/Norton that their AV system was a less than capable system guzzler for years now)
Anyone with any sense has long since voted with their feet.
Unfortunately Symantec still seem to manage to sell their tat but only if they speak with their customers accountants and management.
If a SysAd gets involved in the purchase the comment is invariably "Symantec? Buy that rubbish and I quit!"
I remember, in the olden days, when Peter Norton produced some of the best Utilities for the PC. He called them his "Norton Utilities" and many is the time I found that something wasn't quite right with a PC I was using, and was able to find at least one way in NU to fix it..
This was in the late 80s, BTW, well before the likes of Windows poked their noses into the scene, and there was a 1001 ways in DOS that someone even slightly inquisitive could totally bugger their file(s). Yep, I did that, a few times.
Anyhow, I digress.
Eventually, I moved on to Windows, and wished that something as powerful as NU for DOS appeared for Windows. It did. Symantec had (in the mean time) bought out Peter Norton and released a version of Norton Utilities for Windows 95. Eagerly, I installed a legit copy on to my copy of 95. Fired up Norton. It said I had one disk drive. I thought there must be some mistake, I had two before I installed Norton, so I restarted the PC. Sure enough, both BIOS and Windows would only detect one HDD. I had lost a lot of data.
I never used Norton Utilities again.
A few years later, I was looking to purchase an AV program for my newly acquired copy of Vista. At the time, Norton AV was the only one advertised as compatible, so I bought a copy.
What a pile of shit. To get it to work with Vista, I had to install the CD copy. Ignore the warnings about incompatibility. Reboot when prompted. Then log in again, download an update for "Live Update", reboot, log in, run "Live Update", install any udates it suggested, reboot, log in and finally use the machine. And I'm not convinced it was protecting the machine well..
Like you I loved the DOS set. I didn't have the issues you had with the NU for 95, but by then the writing was already clearly on the wall. MS were going to kill all of the utility suppliers except the AV vendors. They broke the QuarterDeck QEMM memory extender every time they released a .x upgrade of DOS, and stole Stacker clean away (not that I was a big fan of Stacker, but I object to stealing even from the incompetent). They even worked hard to break Partition Magic and Drive Copy, both wonderful utilities in their prime, but no longer in my utility kit.
I have to confess that I recently spent 9 months working for a Symantec subsidiary. It was 9 months of hell. There was large amounts of mushroom management.
Demarcation disputes arose not just between divisions, but within teams in the same unit. The wrong people were in charge of projects. That is the people who made project decisions were not the people doing the work but the people who ran MS Project. The metric of success wasn't that a product sold, or was liked by customers, it was almost entirely that the project was completed without having to change the initial parameters stuffed in to MS Project.
The end result was some utterly dire program management and products that had little relevance to customer needs or of any desirable quality.
The whole organisation was one gigantic fail.
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