Why is the VCSY/Microsoft lawsuit being hushed at every corner?

Did you know that the Yahoo/VCSY site removed the VCSY/Microsoft lawsuit link?

Also I find it strange that Yahoo won't let the link to the Yahoo/VCSY page post on the Yahoo messageboards.(Try it if you don't believe me!)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VCSY.OB

Joe, it does not surprise me that Symantec feels threatened. I have been a loyal customer for 10 years. For many years they had a good product and were diligent in virus updating, however I find, more recently, they have become aloof in servicing the end-user. RTSCAN and CONDUIT can be resource hogs. I am still puzzled over why they decided to leave the Security Appliance business as that seems to be where the market is heading. It just doesn't end with their AV products though, they bought Partition Magic which was a great product and have done virtually nothing with it since. Last year they released pcAnywhere 12.0 which does not work with Vista, ok so they release 12.1 which does, but then they want to charge the full upgrade price to licensed users of 12.0, in that case they should have called 12.1, 13.0. I am hoping that their new Security enterprise product, Symantec Endpoint Protection, pulls through, otherwise I will be looking for another vendor.

Symantec has caused its own problems. It has taken a marketing approach in the short-run to increase profits while, as you noted, the space is changing to more competition. They gave up share for pricing/customer service profitability. This has an impact which is now showing up. Personally, I'm grateful for their mistakes and allowing competition to flourish.

Symantec has caused its own problems. It has taken a marketing approach in the short-run to increase profits while, as you noted, the space is changing to more competition. They gave up share for pricing/customer service profitability. This has an impact which is now showing up. Personally, I'm grateful for their mistakes and allowing competition to flourish.

Symantec can blame itself. Their products are just a bloated mess. I used to religiously buy their stuff happily. Upgrading every year.

Now their AV and Internet Security packages are so bloated they actually slow my system down. And when I would get AV "patches", the machine would have to reboot. Compared with all the Windows Updates rebooting, it just wasn't worth it.

Now I have AVG and Zone Alarm and am quite happy. As long as they don't pull a "Norton", I'll stick with them.

I think what we're seeing is a commoditization of antivirus software. There are some great alternatives to Symantec, and many of these are less intruisive and cheaper. The two keys will be the corporate licenses and the PC makers that bundle Symantec with new PCs.

At the same time, perhaps some of the woes of Symantec could be traced to the slow adoption of Vista and the growth of the Mac platforms?

What ever happened to Peter it was better before Symantec bought it and only went down hill from there. Seventeen years later we now have more bloatware. Peter taught me assembly language, what was that book. When you where done with the step by step book you had a simple sector editor written in assembly. Thanx Peter.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norton

Norton Ultilities back in the MSDOS days, it was simply the best. But somewhere along the Windows line, Norton and perhaps also McAfee, seemed to almost become like the viruses in windows computers, that they were supposed to protect it from. In that they used up all the computer resources making a powerful computer run like a snail, and became a nightmare to uninstall. Believe that Norton, like M$ today, had lost site of the computer user and was hooked on their own bit of lock in. The lock in was it was so hard to uninstall, at least some versions, for the average user.

So is M$ hurting companies like Norton and McAffee with its OneCare antivirus? Yes. Because OneCare caters to people who just buy it, instead of looking for a good solution. By good solution I mean free antivirus software that do not grind your windows computer to a crawl, or miss so many viri like OnceCare and Norton.

Bruce Schneier discussed this issue a while back. Basically, in a market where customers have less information than the vendors, they end up gravitating towards mediocre products, and this effect is well observed in the market for security software.
The only answer is to give the customers access to all the available information--which can only be done with open-source products.

Greg wrote "some of the woes of Symantec could be traced to the slow adoption of Vista and the growth of the Mac platforms?"

That might be some of the most hilarious spin I've read lately. 1)Growth of Mac platform is negligible relative to nearly everything else. 2) If anything slow adoption of Vista would HELP Symantec, because users are maintaining less secure systems.

Symantec's bloat and intractable upgrade procedures (not to mention their Chinese version deleting system files and making the host platforms unbootable). With AVG and Avast providing free/cheap, reliable services, Symantec is doubly screwed.

"ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003"

Symantec, McAfee, and other commerical security firms that write antivirus solutions, are now if the gunsights of the Microsoft corporations. Meaning that MS, in order to grow must use the power of its lock in, and monopoly to expand its offerings to other profitable software areas.

Since MS already sort of owns the commercial Office Suite area, this only leaves the areas where Adobe commands market share, games, and of course security, which will be mostly antivirus software.

The problem for Symantec and other commerical products, is that MS likes to break their software, with every new release of Windows, and even sometimes the service packs. This is at least by design, and is called lock in. While I would not lose any sleep with the disappearance of Symantec products due to future MS lock in, it does prose one problem. In that if MS gets away with that, they will not draw the line on breaking free antivirus programs as well.

And of course, we already see that MS is a producers of games, and competes in that market. Adobe, there are MS competing products for most products that Adobe makes. Silverlight being the newest kid on the block by MS to compete with Adobe Flash.

If you have a sucessfull software product that runs on MS Windows, at some point MS will get around to making an MS one. And there lock in when they use it, can many times beat a superior product. If not that, MS will give it away with the OS, to kill off the competition, and later on charge for it. Office and Internet Explorer being two past examples. At least with community Linux, each company that sells commerical software for Linux, is on an equal playing field.

I bought Norton Internet Security 2008, because it was a PC Magazine Editor's Choice. As for performance, it works just fine on my 2002 computer with only 512MB of memory. It's also a very quiet program, that doesn't annoy the user with worthless pop-ups.

Symantec needed increased competition, to give them an incentive to "debloat" their software, and otherwise improve it.

I have to agree with "anonimo", Symantec has done nothing but screw up good products everytime you turn around. I moved my customers away from Norton AV anything because of the the "Bloatware" factor and moved them to Symantec SB AV because it didn't have the slowness or overhead of the consumer products. Now "Endpoint" is nothing more than a new Internet Security that blocks everything. Since the 2005 version can you even
customize or trust it to do anything but screwup. I have been a loyal customer and reseller since 1985, when Peter Norton still owned the company. Then the products were to the point and worked, you could bank on them. I don't know if anything with their name on it is even worth considering. I guess they will mess up a great backup software (BE) too.......