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(1824622) writes "Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO.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