Symantec Fires CEO Steve Bennett 111
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(1824622) writes "Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO.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."
Re:Impossible job (Score:4, Informative)
Norton supposedly is MUCH improved and was re-engineered from the ground up in 2011. It has a good detection rate and fast performance according to av-total and other AV certification firms which release test results to the public.
However, like IE its brand is tarnished. Better is nice but it is hard to re-earn trust. I heard realnetworks fixed their player and was advertised on slashdot 4 years ago and they said they were sorry. It died fast as everyone laughed and shook their heads.
Symantec from what I see is still resource heavy on firms I work with. Perhaps they had an old version based on the older slow 360. A re-image at any other company takes 10 minutes. 3 freaking hours instead all going to install Symantec!???
They are on icore5's too!
Re:There's only one way to make biz with Sym "smoo (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Sounds like he was on the right track (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:There's only one way to make biz with Sym "smoo (Score:4, Informative)
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.