News - Symantec security head says Antivirus "is dead"

[Wow MR Wolf]

I remember Norton back when i had Vista. Such major problems.

[ik9000]

yes my parents are still enjoying those. They know no better....

[GuidoLS]

Symantec became irrelevant when they went from making what was so-so software to begin with, back in the Win3.1 days, to buying out, deifying, and systematically destroying what was a decent legacy started by Peter Norton. They've made nothing but crappy, over-hyped, under-performing bloatware since the early/mid 90's, and if they're finally giving up, we should consider that a bonus for every consumer out there. Now, if only McAfee would disappear, imagine the performance increase of box store PC's right out of the box.

[ik9000]

Symantec became irrelevant when they went from making what was so-so software to begin with, back in the Win3.1 days, to buying out, deifying, and systematically destroying what was a decent legacy started by Peter Norton. They've made nothing but crappy, over-hyped, under-performing bloatware since the early/mid 90's, and if they're finally giving up, we should consider that a bonus for every consumer out there. Now, if only McAfee would disappear, imagine the performance increase of box store PC's right out of the box.

Welcome new user. I think we will get on well.

[spoon_]

Symantec and McAfee supporter here and both are pretty good products but not for home use really. In the Enterprise you cannot beat being able to manage thousands of endpoints with few clicks of a mouse button...

@valhar2000

Sounds like your software is trying to do something dodgy on the system of McAfee administrator doesn't know what he's doing...

[TooNice]

I haven't used Norton products after the DOS days, though I am pretty sure that whenever my parents bought a new laptop, it was either Symantec, McAfee or Kaspersky that came pre-installed. As far as I know, Antivir was pretty well regarded for a "free" product, but there is that daily pop-up..

[Attila the Bun]

Morning all,

I tend to use this website to get some initial pointers on AV maybe you will find it useful as well.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

[shaithis]

Yeah for me Symantec has been terrible and not worth looking at, especially when compared to what Norton were creating before the re-brand.

[crossy]

Symantec and McAfee supporter here and both are pretty good products but not for home use really. In the Enterprise you cannot beat being able to manage thousands of endpoints with few clicks of a mouse button...

+1 for this. Company I work for has both (depending on where in the world you are) and to be honest it's very rare that you even notice it, (McAfee for me).
Oh, and while I'm not doing a fan boy for them, please remember that Symantec have a pretty vast array of products in the enterprise arena - like for example Veritas Cluster Services and Volume Manager. So they do have software that isn't "poor".

@valhar2000: Sounds like your software is trying to do something dodgy on the system of McAfee administrator doesn't know what he's doing...

Beat me to it. Suggest speaking to McAfee support, they might be able to help. Unlike the home group, the business tech support (at least the ones I've dealt with) are pretty helpful.

Morning all,
I tend to use this website to get some initial pointers on AV maybe you will find it useful as well.
http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Thanks sent for that. I was a bit wary because all of the those kind of sites that I've come across so far have been affiliates of their "best" product - so effectively just sales sites. av-c seems to be genuinely independent (from what I've read so far) so I'll have to give it a good look over. What I've seen so far is that all the big sites, Z-D, cNet, etc seem to have one particular one that they favour and that's the one that seems to be consistently "best".

e.g. looked last night and cNet were fawning over BitDefender.

[samuraiweasel]

It's as if a million voices cried out at the same time "thank god"

techs everywhere will be happy not to encounter Norton....now what about all the rest....

[OilSheikh]

Good riddance. Door is that way !