back to article Symantec CEO Mike Brown ousted after nasty numbers

Symantec CEO Mike A. Brown will leave the company, after it today announced it will miss its projected Q4 2016 sales. Symantec has previously forecast sales of between US$885m and $915m. Advice released today suggested the actual result will be closer to $873m, a small but nasty miss. The company's tried to explain the miss ( …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Again? ha ha

    Could not happen to a nicer company especially after all the people who they have screwed over in the past 4 years - my only regret is this means more uncertainty and fear for the handful of people left behind who by now have managed to survive so many culls.

    Another new CEO will mean Symantec 11.0 or whatever it is on now so inevitably the axe will fall on more heads - I wonder if they will ever have a board who has the balls to actually do something bold and give a CEO a chance to actually make positive changes rather than give them a few quarters and at the first sign of a bump in the road dump them? Soon they will struggle to even get work experience kids interested in the top job......

  2. Carrion
    Mushroom

    They blew it!

    Symantec blew it big time. They missed every technology wave: mobile, cloud, IoT.. they threw away valued employees and kept the very people that ruined the company in place. To paraphrase a comment made about their incompetent CFO, they wouldn't know the golden goose if they stepped on it. BTW the CFO is the guy that miscalculated the Veritas spin off value.. and he is now part of the lead management...pretty dismal team.. please someone take them over before they become a dried out carcass

  3. silicon loki

    A 1.35% miss on lower earnings guidance. It seems that yet again we see the relative stupidity of US tech boards creating instability due to minimal short term losses, rather than focusing on the longer term gains to be achieved through proper stability and support. Stop being so scared of investors and display some courage! If you can't do that, you shouldn't be on the board.

  4. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Good!

    I hope it hurts.

  5. Doc Brown
    Big Brother

    The downward spiral

    And it keeps going downward. Like the top down structure in place at Symantec.... relentlessly top-down.

    And therein lies the problem.

    Speaking as someone who's been there, seen it, and suffered it.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This guy was brought in to separate the company, and that's what he did. In doing so, he destroyed Symantec and the cluture it once had. The senior mgmt team, on the IT side, brought moral down while over spending on out dated data center strategies -- lead by inflated egos. Their current strategy is to fire US employees and replace with off -shore bodies.

    Symantec is a case study for how to ruin a US corporation.

    Mike enjoy the time offin Hawaii, Paris, and where ever you bonus takes you.

    p.s. now you can stay at home on fridays...

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Left that annoying Brown stain on the chairs though (of blood)

    Brown came in and destroyed what Bennett had worked very hard to turn around. He carried in with him a troll army hell bent on destroying &/or kicking out anyone 1-2% higher than salary averages to fill shareholder pockets. Then the same trolls set out zapping high-performers in whom the company had a modicum of a chance of turnaround, for suck ups from Oracle and other companies. If you've ever seen the George Michael video of the poodle (Bush) bumping Blair's leg, imagine you had to be the poodle to Brown's leg to have any chance to stay.

    Under Brown's reign, it quickly became a culture of staff who would rather stab their co-workers, and give up your remote job = you must live/work in MTV or Pune to have any chance in some divisions. The only people left in most field offices are the sales/SE's and a few marketroids + the now-dictatorial HR departments.

    Fun is a word totally gone from the company -- go sit in their car park and look at the workers faces going in & out. It is of dread (will I have a job at the end of today?), fear (who do I need to watch out from being stabbed by!) and confusion (what's Mike and Co's latest lame idea for a direction?).

    The Veritas staff are lucky to have gotten out -- they've a realistic chance to fix their future. The Symantec staff are on the bus to hell if they're still there!

    Customers who I've had call me since my departure are clear they're looking for other products and will be leaving them soon! My personal prediction is that Symantec's revenues are likely to be like the NiN album "The Downward Spiral" for a long time to come.

    Symantec fucked over so many top performers in Support, SEs, Product Management, and Engineering that the shell of a company remaining now is like a kitty litter box full of brown poo. The ex-Oracle crowd who came in took no notice of key contributors and instead instituted a new level of managers who were more akin to "Merchants of Death" looking for any excuse to get rid of folks. The most trumped up of lame reasons were given when many were given notice of redundancy.

    I'm confident Brown will be in the press soon coming into a.n.other company to help fix their "challenges". I hope for those companies' staff sake they do a few searches on Google, then immediately update their CVs and start looking as "The Company Buster" will soon be up to it again.

    Those of us who were cast aside like chattels have landed in a brave new world that strangely sees us happier, no longer looking over our shoulders constantly, and having a bit of fun + looking forward to going to work. I myself now am in a company where people respect each other, can have a passionate discussion w/o HR getting involved, and jokes/humour are rampant in our office.

    There's a special place in hell for Symantec, and soon they'll all be there.

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