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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(1824622) writes "Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO.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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...