Slashdot Mirror
Symantec Fires CEO Steve Bennett
wiredmikey (1824622) writes "Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO. Bennett, who also resigned from Symantec's board of directors, took the top position at Symantec in July 2012, after former president and CEO Enrique Salem was pushed out by the Board of Directors. In April 2013, Bennett, told attendees at its own Vision Conference, that the company was changing, and acknowledged that Symantec 'lacked strategy' when it came to dealing with acquisitions. His plan was to move the company forward slowly, but consistently and make Symantec easier to do business with. That strategy, or at least the execution of it, hasn't impressed the board of directors, it seems."
Ah, but how much was his severance package worth?
And has he received new offers already?
Ah, but how much was his severance package worth?
And is he entertaining new job offers already?
Have them make a product worth buying.
To quote a former boss of mine, "We don't say anything bad about the competition. so we say 'Symantec has really nice looking boxes'."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Growing sales in a shrinking market is hard enough. Doing it with Symantec software is plain impossible. Not getting a share of mobile? The mobile platforms have whitelist app stores and app isolation that make their software both unnecessary and impossible to implement.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I wish this even partially made up for the horrible way they handled the Altiris acquisition.
Any viruses you get will be limited in how much damage they can do because of how slow Symantec will make your computer.
Computer viruses and anti-virus applications are in a game of cat and mouse. Only the best virus writers can make viruses that are resource efficient enough to run on a machine with Symantec products.
I wouldn't want to be some malware trying to compete with Norton anti-virus for CPU time. It's no contest. Symantec will easily take 90-95% of the total CPU capacity, leaving you only a few cycles with which to steal credit card numbers, mine bitcoins, or try spread yourself to other hosts. You will be so marginalized that no one will even no you're there, like an unpopular girl hiding in a dark corner at a high school dance.
They have products worth buying. Namely, the whole PGP desktop/mobile IP.
If Symantec sold the desktop version with more features and with a hardware crypto token, all for a reasonable price, virtually every geek would buy it, if only for a place to store the mandatory private key, even if it never gets used.
Backup Exec and NetBackup, similar. They need to take a page from Tolis's BRU and allow complete installation of their software for restores without needing serial numbers. That way, people don't have the catch 22 of needing info stored on a backup to unlock the backup program to restore... Making a version that can compete with Retrospect would be useful for SMBs as well. Heck, just make a smaller version of the NetBackup Appliance and sell that for $599.
Symantec has a lot of cool stuff (heck, they used to be the main compiler maker for Mac until the PowerPC days.) They just need to start bringing it out and consider going for volume. A couple thousand people paying $20 for PGP desktop for personal use/security will make more money than 1-2 people paying $250 for the same program.
Lay off some job, Bennett.
Do they still sell stuff??
Jeez....I had just assumed the quality of their products would have killed off their business by now.
Wonders will never cease...
Disclaimer: I am an IT consultant and I work with multiple vendors' products, including Symantec. The biggest problem that we have with Symantec is support. It's horrible. It's so bad that Symantec has a program for it's partner resellers called TAPP. It requires certifications and training to get into, and only gives you access to more competent tech support than the general public gets. The fact that they even need such a program is telling.
Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
PGP: is it cool? Definitely, noble lineage, strong encryption for the masses, etc. Has Symantec done anything worth mentioning, aside from (perhaps, this is Symantec here) compatibility updates since they bought it? Crickets. (And, as for the hardware token, fully integrated USB ones are nice; but smartcards are pretty much 100% commodified, and designed to securely store private keys, so even a hardware token would bring little more than convenience to the table). Backup Exec is fiddly, undistinguished, and nontrivially expensive, and just isn't looking any better with age. The Altiris acquisition, while minor in the grand scheme of their operations, they utterly fucked up(take a formerly relatively niche product; but a niche product with a niche, and turn it into a shitty attempt at being a competitor to MS SMS? What could go wrong?).
Honestly, the only surprising thing about Symantec's 'strategy' is that it isn't hurting them more. They haven't developed anything worth buying out of the bargain bin in god-knows-how-long, and they manage to impart nontrivial negative value to anybody they buy almost immediately. Take them out back, shoot them, and give the money back to the shareholders...
Obviously a former McAfee boss
Reverse Midas touch? I believe you mean the Ballmer squirt.
I'll let myself out.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
they were this horrible indian-hire-indian only culture. hope they'll learn and change.
Why not use truecrypt? Free and free. If their AV is any indication on how they develop and maintain PGP I won't go near it.
At least Ballmer has the decency to sometimes attempt things in-house, Symantec is more like watching the MS acquisition of Danger/Sidekick all the time, at a slightly smaller scale.
Exactly! Everything Symantec puts its name on turns to garbage.... Company could rename itself "Reverse Midas Corp."
I agree with you. I don't know what to call it, other than a reverse Midas touch.
The ironic thing is that Symantec's PGP was the only program available for OS X that did FDE encryption before FileVault 2 came out. It was fairly messy how it loaded in, but it did work and did protect all data on the HDD.
PGPDisk also has the ability to grow/shrink an encrypted volume, which is a nice thing to have. TrueCrypt sort of has this capability, but uses sparse files (i.e. if the file gets copied via Samba, it will take up the full space given, even though most of the encrypted volume is zeroes.)
Going back earlier, Symantec also had a very well written edition of PGP for PalmOS and Windows Mobile, with encrypted volumes.
Symantec has a very kick-ass opportunity right now. They can capitalize on the general concern of both businesses and people and sell not just PGP Desktop, but a complete infrastructure going past BitLocker where a cryptographic token would be required for the OS to load. Not just a file on a USB flash drive, but a token where the key is well protected even from physical attack.
It blows my mind that they have the encryption market cornered with a solution that starts on boot, handles Samba shares, can handle files as disks similar to TrueCrypt, can function as a ZIP archiving utility, and can encrypt individual files with ease. However, they either let things sit, or price themselves out of the market.
Another example is the PGP server. This functionality is very useful for a company. It allows key recovery and ADKs, without going down the black hole of key escrow.
Symantec just has so much potential with the companies they own. Things like Ghost and Veritas's LVM replacement come to mind.
Even with compilers, they also have had things like a very solid C++ compiler for DOS and Windows 3.1 which shipped with more than 2 and a half feet of printed manuals, with every single function all described in good detail. I've not seen something that well documented outside of some IBM Redbooks.
I completely agree with the parent -- Symantec needs to "unfuck" some of their offerings and go for the target markets at a non-enterprise price. At the minimum, spin PGP out as a separate corporation and sell not just to the enterprise, but the average person. I'm sure with all the historic lineage of PGP combined with word of mouth, people would pay something like $19.95 to $29.95 for it without a second thought.
Yes, TrueCrypt can do similar, but having another commercially supported and updated encryption program that has its own independant signing system is very useful and flexible.
It wouldn't hurt to revamp Norton as well. Chasing virus/malware signatures is all but pointless. Instead, blocking by IP similar to Malwarebytes or perhaps even offering sandbox functionality for Web browsers would do far more than just having Norton be another "virus condom" utility.
and they couldn't get rid of it..
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
TrueCrypt is decent, but it can't hurt to have a utility that is updated and maintained with similar functionality. Truecrypt is going over two years without an update. It is a very good program, but PGP has a lot of functionality (public/private key exchange and upkeep, web of trust, etc.) that TC doesn't have.
Of course, one can use GNUpg and TrueCrypt. The command line works well, but GUI-wise, Symantec Encryption Desktop Professional (i.e. PGP Desktop) is just a lot easier to get around in.
One side note -- PGP Desktop isn't officially supported on Windows 8 and 8.1... but it does work.
They've been pointless since they acquired THNK technologies and ruined their products. When was that, 1992?
The good thing about symantec is I can't think of any good products they offer.
When you're a company that focuses on developing PC security software, you better make damn sure you build and maintain a reputation of keeping malicious software out. Symantec have gotten way too comfortable relying on their brand names to carry them, charging premium prices but not producing a premium product. They lost the respect and support of real techs years ago, if it wasn't for clever sales people selling Norton to anyone who trusts them to know what is best, they would have been history long before now.
Like Yahoo this company no longer has any purpose other than its own continuity.
The sooner it dies, on fire in a hole, the better.
Its really sad seeing how desperately they re-image the company every few years. Its like a sad out of shape actor that had a glimpse of fame 20 years ago...still trying to prise money from the ever stiffening corpse of rejection.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
i don't know. we went to kaperskly from symantec AV and it's the worst AV i've ever seen. Symantec was amazing compared to the crap that kapersky is.
locks up my computer every time it has to update the database
Perhaps someone should write a virus that specifically targets PCs with Norton installed. And all the virus does is: Disables all Norton software and pops up a message to the user saying:
"I am a virus that has done you a favour, I have disabled your Norton software for you. This has benefited you in 3 ways: Firstly you now know how ineffective Norton software is at protecting you (If it can't even protect its self how can it protect you?). Secondly your PC will now be running faster as I've given you some of your CPU and Memory resources back. And thirdly, you now have the opportunity to install a security software package that will actually protect you".
Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
Imagine a merger of Symantec and CA. (shudder)
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
At least Ballmer has the decency to sometimes attempt things in-house, Symantec is more like watching the MS acquisition of Danger/Sidekick all the time, at a slightly smaller scale.
You mean like the MS acquisition of Nokia?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
"What severance package?"
$14 million, apparently. See this WSJ article: Symantec Fires CEO Steve Bennett. How will he live? Should we donate some money to keep him off the street?
Have you called Symantec in the last 2 years? Or gotten emails from Symantec support? My experience was that everyone with whom I talked was amazingly disfunctional. That's what the Symantec CEO meant when he said, "Our system is just broken".
Symantec has contracts with the U.S. government. People in the U.S. government don't seem to me to understand much about the technology. I'm guessing the contracts are a waste of tax money.
Symantec is a lot like EA in that respect. They acquire companies that have a spiffy product, then milk it 'til nobody can stomach it anymore.
But be honest, what was the last GOOD thing that came out of Symantec that wasn't a direct or indirect acquisition rather than an internal development?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know whether or not it will actually save Windows Phone whatever version, markets have traditionally been rather cruel to everyone except the first one or two vendors, and the OEM cloneshops who scrape by on margins that wouldn't even keep the lights on at some fancy corporate campus; but MS' takeover of Nokia looks far better executed than their takeover of Danger.
With Danger, they shelled out substantial money for a formerly fairly vigorous company and turned it into... 'Project Pink', while simultaneously pissing off Verizon, probably the single most powerful carrier in the US, and wasting substantial amounts of time reinventing the wheel because Sidekicks didn't run WinCE and that was ideologically unacceptable. They then went on to one of the fastest launch-to-cancellation cycles in contemporary history. Then, just to add injury to insult, they lost all their existing sidekick customers' data in a high-profile fiasco that highlighted the downsides of the cloud-centric model they were hoping to promote(and probably didn't endear them any further to carriers who had been selling Danger handsets by the boatload in the past). Good job on that one, guys.
With Nokia, by contrast, they picked up a respected hardware OEM to serve as their lead design vassal for phones shipping with their OS, killed off Nokia's remaining attempts to build or modernize their own OS, and all for a relative pittance. Made Google's Motorola buy look like amateur improv comedy hour.
No, to McAfee my boss said "Well, with McAfee... you better not say anything. Even their box art sucks."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A lot of people hate Kaspersky because it tries to be proactive, but without telling the user. If you set it up right, it's probably the best AV of the horrid batch that there are. Set up wrong, it is utter crap.
The difference between right and wrong is often a check box in some random place in the configs. There seem to be about 30 different UIs for Kaspersky.
LAMO: Captcha is irritant
They sure do have the reverse midas touch, having been on the inside coming from the Symantec aquisition of Altiris I can tell you why.
They aquire a company, then have no idea what they are going to do with it. Eventually they sack all the developers and anyone else with a vision for the product, put the product into maintence mode and offshore the developement of it to India. All the while telling the customers that the product has a future. I have seen it with Ghost, PC tools and Altiris....
They have great marketing tho...
Backup Exec is fiddly, undistinguished, and nontrivially expensive, and just isn't looking any better with age.
Not only is it not looking any better, it is looking much worse with age. Backup Exec 2012 is such a steaming pile of shit. Symantec has lost a lot of customers because of the drastic changes in UI and functionality. I still use Backup Exec 2010 on the few servers I can't virtualize, for everything else it's Veeam ftw.
I'm looking forward to learning more about which companies did what when approached by the NSA about including (damaging) their own products that customers purchased from them in good faith..
Just speculation on keyboard.
Symantec: where software goes to die.
Symantec is such a bad ass, you see he fired this cocksucker CEO Steve Bennett.
FFS.
"Symantec Board Fires CEO Steve Bennett".
I am so tired of this shit.
Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
Imagine a merger of Symantec and CA. (shudder)
Just think of it as being like hazmat cleanup: anything too dangerous to neutralize, you concentrate for easier sequestration...
Back in the day, Backup Exec was by far the most intuitive and easiest backup product going. Of course, that was before Symantec. Funny how that works.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They can't use that, CA got there first.
"At least Ballmer has the decency to sometimes attempt things in-house, Symantec is more like watching the MS acquisition of Danger/Sidekick all the time, at a slightly smaller scale."
When Peter Norton still ran the company, the Norton Utilities were "the shit", as people say. I bought a license for the Symantec version of Norton Utilities + Antivirus, after they bought Peter out. The "subscription" to the Antivirus updates was good for a year. I let it expire. I didn't bother to continue updating the other tools. They just weren't my time.
I used the original character-based Norton Commander as my file manager as long as I was running Windows, up through Vista. I still keep a copy around for XP machines, and I have its successor on my telephone right now. But Symantec bought up Norton Utilities, bloated and gunked it up, and I dropped them right there. I tried to use their antivirus product a couple of times after that but even when most features were turned off, it used up so many system resources I always ended up turning it off anyway.
I think they should go back to their consumer PC security & utility roots and hire John McAfee.
...and BackupExec will still not install on Windows 2012 (and only supported backing it up mid-last year). It's not just AV holding them back.
Yuck...just yuck. Your own description shows why to never use their software, bits like "needing info stored on a backup to unlock the backup program to restore" shows the company is being run by accountants and not engineers.
For Antivirus? Buy Comodo, their enterprise software is pretty damned solid and reasonably priced, for hard drive backup and recovery go Paragon, again solid and reasonable. There is a REASON why Symantec has such a bad rep, its a badly run company. If you want to bet the farm or your data to a company with such dumbass designs? Better you than me friend..
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Even with compilers, they also have had things like a very solid C++ compiler for DOS and Windows 3.1 which shipped with more than 2 and a half feet of printed manuals, with every single function all described in good detail. I've not seen something that well documented outside of some IBM Redbooks.
A bet the compiler was _non-free_, and that you don't use it anymore. You should only use free software compilers like the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) along with its free documentation.
Well, even McAffee has nothing good to say about McAffee.
Truecrypt is going over two years without an update.
Truecrypt doesn't try to serve every unrelated encryption need you might ever possibly have. It does securely encrypted disk-like things on a variety of underlying mediums, and nothing else. And in that regard, it hasn't needed an update in two years - I don't mean to sound like a zealot here, but honestly, Truecrypt comes just about as close to "perfect" software as I've ever seen.
And in that regard, Symantec (and Microsoft, and Gnome, and Apple, and Mozilla, and plenty of others as well) could take a lesson: Don't fuck with a good thing. Bugfixes? Great. Want to add optional features that don't break core functionality and see if your users like the? Great. But when you have an XP, just keep selling and supporting the damned thing, don't intentionally kill it off because of some delusion about merging phones and the desktop.
Regarding Backup Exec for restores... ... just load the trial version. Restores work fine. No serial number needed.
Let us not forget this is the same company that takes over a YEAR to support a new OS release. How long has Windows 2012 been out and you still can not install BackupExec on it. Yes you can back it up but you loose allot of features, and they still do not support Windows 2012 R2 at all outside of a limited beta. Symantec is just a company circling the drain with a lack of any future vision.
This is now the 3rd or 4th CEO they have terminated in the last few years and there product support suffers more and more each time with there incompetence.
Don't fuck with a good thing?
TrueCrypt doesn't work on Windows 8 or 8.1. Understandable that there are UEFI boot issues, but containers will give permission errors that can only be rectified by using a command line running. Can't use icacls to change permissions to fix it either.
So, all my TC volumes are attached to a Windows 7 box I RDP into.
TC needs some updates, and it isn't just to add worthless features. One can say the same thing about PGP Desktop as well... it doesn't support anything north of 7 either.
I agree. Their malware products don't detect malware and they consume a large percentage of machine resources doing it. You have to buy Malware Bytes AntiMalware to get good malware detection.
Yep, because all CEOs are psychic and know whether a reorg is going to work before they initiate it.
So Symantec bought two encryption company's, SEE and the PGP, what do they do with it? run for some time, telling they costumers, yea we will integrate both of our encryption product down the road. What do they do after two years? They kill the SEE and tell they consumers, you switch to PGP or find some other product. How about the SSIM, that's another good joke that was just recently killed. Symantec just suck.
I could run Symantec better than it's been run the last decade... or two.
As a former 4 year management employee under this man he was shrewd and cut off people to the quick in small and large settings. You were gone. Mean bastard. Sorry but no leader needs to act that way. And get millions in comp. Hope the parachute doesn't get tangled.
Symantec has a very kick-ass opportunity right now. They can capitalize on the general concern of both businesses and people and sell not just PGP Desktop, but a complete infrastructure going past BitLocker where a cryptographic token would be required for the OS to load. Not just a file on a USB flash drive, but a token where the key is well protected even from physical attack.
Huh? PGP Desktop has long supported using a token or smart card to authenticate to an encrypted disk at boot. Yes, it supports the "file on a flash drive" approach as well but also supports cryptographic tokens from a lot of different manufacturers.
Enigma
TrueCrypt is decent, but it can't hurt to have a utility that is updated and maintained with similar functionality. Truecrypt is going over two years without an update. It is a very good program, but PGP has a lot of functionality (public/private key exchange and upkeep, web of trust, etc.) that TC doesn't have.
Of course, one can use GNUpg and TrueCrypt. The command line works well, but GUI-wise, Symantec Encryption Desktop Professional (i.e. PGP Desktop) is just a lot easier to get around in.
One side note -- PGP Desktop isn't officially supported on Windows 8 and 8.1... but it does work.
Recent releases of PGP Desktop do support Windows 8/8.1: Symantec Encryption Desktop 10.3.2 compatibility with Microsoft Windows 8/8.1
Enigma
I should have stated differently.
What I meant to state is that is a very good thing that PGP supports more than just a file on a USB flash drive. Having something like a smart card + reader, eToken or a similar USB based device is a lot better than a file on media, just because an attacker can't just copy the contents off, which is a possibility if the USB flash drive was left plugged into the machine.
One of my laptops still uses an Aladdin eToken (before they were bought out by Safenet) as a means of booting. That way, I know that if I have the token on my physical keyring, the laptop isn't going to be decrypted anytime soon... and if someone does get the token and types the PIN wrong more than three times, the token will physically lock... blocking brute force attempts completely.
PS: Thanks for the release notes on your other note. I hit the Symantec site, and they were behind on what was supported. I definitely stand corrected there.
The PGP server was one of the worst pieces of software out there. A series of execs tried to fix it and have been unsuccessful so far.
But beyond that, Symantec has this knack of acquiring companies and letting them rot internally either due to negligence (PGP/GuardianEdge), mismanagement (Altiris, their application virtualization product), infighting (the 2 competing compliance products they acquired), etc. While Enrique Salem and now Bennett are blamed (rightly) for the dysfunctional nature of the company, you cannot absolve John Thompson, who started the rot years ago, nor the senior execs who recently left, who were in charge of these acquisitions in the highly dysfunctional enterprise software division.
I hope you get herpes.
Having worked for a former acquiree; can confirm.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Because that was a piece of shit.
Th wounds go back to 2004-05.
Call JT to come back and undo the mess.