All your system utilites are belong to Symantec.

[Shockeye]

It looks like Symantec just can't stop buying companies. It's bad enough they took over PowerQuest but now they're taking Veritas as well. No backup software is safe.

SAN FRANCISCO - Computer security giant Symantec Corp. is buying storage and backup program maker Veritas Software Corp. to create the world's fourth largest software company. The all-stock acquisition, announced Thursday, was initially valued at $13.5 billion, but the price quickly plummeted after investors weighed in on the merger.

[Ironwood]

Fuck.

There goes any chance of a decent or stable backup system in the future.

[personman]

That last line of the quote is just beautiful.

There are exceptions of course but mergers don't usually benefit customers.  It's all about making a relative handful of people wealthier.  Case studies on mergers pretty much undermine any argument that the company emerges stronger and more fit to compete.

I'm waiting for the backlash on the Oracle/Peoplesoft buyout.  Oracle's destroyed almost as many acquisitions as IBM.

[Soukyan]

Fucking Symantec. I hope they go belly-up from growing too quickly. Their software needs a serious revamp to not put its tendrils where it shouldn't be. A large percentage of PC problems I fix for people are related in some way to Symantec products. Bleh. Luckily, I convert the user to better comparable products as I encounter them so I'm doing the Symantec boycott, one consumer at a time. ;)

[Zetleft]

Tell me about it, recently one of Norton's live updates broke peoples email, I have friends that still work in tech support so that was alot of fun I hear.  Terrible buggy software all around and you are better off using free stuff then their shit.

[DarkDryad]

Meh never had to many problems with thier stuff myself.

[HaemishM]

That last line of the quote is just beautiful.

There are exceptions of course but mergers don't usually benefit customers.  It's all about making a relative handful of people wealthier.  Case studies on mergers pretty much undermine any argument that the company emerges stronger and more fit to compete.

I'm waiting for the backlash on the Oracle/Peoplesoft buyout.  Oracle's destroyed almost as many acquisitions as IBM.

Mergers also very rarely benefit the employees of either company, as somone (or lots of someones) is usually very redundant and thus expendeble at either or both of the companies.

Great for stock price, shitty for products and shitty for employment.

[Teleku]

Out of curiosity, what do you guys hate about their products?  All I ever use is Norton Anti-Virus, which seems to work pretty well.  No real noticable problems.  I don't really use anything else.

And if I shouldn't be using Norton then what would you suggest?

[Jacob0883]

You must not use Norton 2004.  It was a bug ridden, virus inviting, shit smelling piece of software.  I lost my hard drive because Norton likes sleeping with children.

[Righ]

Out of curiosity, what do you guys hate about their products?

I don't know what they hate about Symantec products, but Symantec Enterprise Firewall is utter shite. Back in its day, Raptor Eagle was a decent proxy gateway. The company (Raptor) went through some difficult growth and acquisition. Axent did a reasonable job of maintaining a firewall that wasn't evolving with the market, but by the end of their life the product was seriously deficient in features. When Symantec acquired Axent, they renamed the Raptor firewall Symantec Enterprise Firewall, added a couple of features (HTTP 1.1 support, how... overdue) and an MMC interface.

Pray that you never have to maintain one of these POS firewalls, particularly on a Unix host.

[WonderBrick]

Norton Antivirus email scanning feature is a huge source of email-related support calls.  Norton's firewall is equally flaky.  In my experience, Norton causes more Internet related problems then all others combined(excluding user-error issues).