Obama Looking To Symantec CEO For Commerce

patentpundit writes "Word has started to circulate that President Barack Obama may be close to appointing John W. Thompson, the outgoing chief executive of network security firm Symantec Corp., to be the next Secretary of Commerce. According to the LA Times, over the last several days Thompson has spoken on the telephone and met with key senators, and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a member of the commerce committee that would hold confirmation hearings for any appointed Secretary of Commerce, is 'extremely supportive and hopeful he'll be the nominee.' The appointment of Thompson to head the Department of Commerce would be an exceptionally interesting choice given that only days ago President Obama asked Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to lead his open source charge and conduct a study and report back regarding the feasibility of the US government forgoing proprietary software and moving toward open source software solutions."

Comments

Guilty of supplying Parasitic bloatware

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Is his track record so far.

What can we now expect?

Re:Guilty of supplying Parasitic bloatware

[couchslug]

"What can we now expect?"

A Department of Commerce that adds positions throughout government which affect essential services and are difficult to remove without system damage?

Oh great-

[FredFredrickson]

The first thing he'll do is Root the country- for our own protection. We won't be able to do anything once he's in. He'll screw everything up, and won't leave when we ask him to. We'll need to find a special force of people to go in and remove him manually.

Worst of all, he won't even fix any problems while he's there, and we'll end up calling his competitors to fix the problem later.

Re:Oh great-

[Jedi Alec]

We won't be able to do anything once he's in. He'll screw everything up, and won't leave when we ask him to. We'll need to find a special force of people to go in and remove him manually.

Actually he might be a blessing in disguise. After 4 years of this guy, the only hope for the USA will be repartitioning the country and then a swift reinstall of the operating system. Looks like the hardcore liberalists will get their wishes after all ;-)

feature creep

[gandhi_2]

Obama's administration, feature creep, and bloat. Just like Symantic.

Any explanation?

[nine-times]

I don't know about John W. Thompson, but my gut response to this was, "Could he look for someone who runs a company that doesn't suck?" Thompson might not be responsible, but *someone* has been running Symantec into the ground for several years now-- at least as far as product quality is concerned.

As far as technology goes, I'd be much more pleased if I felt like the administration were looking for people with pro-freedom and pro-consumer tendencies.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Symmantec out for the count

[Anonymous Coward]

this could prevent Symmantec from providing any contracts to the white house for 2 years

I don't like Symantec either, but if this is Obama's attempt to keep NAV off his white house PC it's a bit extreme.

Re:Other industry associations

[morgan_greywolf]

Thompson had a career at ... Seagate Technology.

OMFG! Nobody reboot ANYTHING at the Dept. of Commerce!

Re:One of the worst proprietary vendors...

[nvrrobx]

Having been an engineer at Symantec for 5 1/2 years, I can tell you that what they suffer from is the inability to build new products themselves, or a management team that refuses to try (you choose).

It's a company of "buy everything you can see, who cares if you can integrate it". Very little in the way of shared components, every product looks and works different, very little interoperability, etc.

It seemed like we always bought the worst codebases we could find, then tried to fix it. It's not due to a lack of good engineering talent - there is plenty at the company.

While I think JWT is a nice guy, one only needs to look at the purchase of Veritas to find a completely failed business model, and a CEO who doesn't seem to "get it". Even after that, they continued (and still continue) to snatch up other companies with little regard to how it will really affect shareholders. Nice guys don't make CEOs.

When John Schwarz left to take the CEO spot at Business Objects and we kept Gary Bloom (CEO, Veritas) - I knew we were in trouble.

Re:It'll be news when he asks Stallman to work

[operagost]

Excuse me, I belive you mean GNU/Apocalyse.

- RMS