Uh-Oh. that’s not gonna make me many friends . . .
Hello again. I’ve been quiet for a while. Well, my old pal Fred Langa over at WindowsSecrets.com posted an article this week that has me juiced.
Some background:
One of the many things that adds up to “me”, professionally, is a decade or so in the press. I wrote, edited and published IYM Software Review, did some freelance for PCWorld magazine, spent five years on radio, TV and the ‘net as The Computer Answer Guy, and mixed in the middle somewhere did two years as Awards Chair, then two more as President of The Computer Press Association.
Fred’s one of the oldest (sorry, Fred) and smartest technology writers around, and he and I first met a cold February morning in 1993, at my home. We were judging the CPA awards there that year, and he was one of the hearty souls who braved an ice storm to do his thing with us.
Since it’s part of the paid-subscription version of WindowsSecrets I can’t show you Fred’s article, although this link will bring you to the the free version of this fine magazine. It covered two topics that are always at the top of my thoughts, though, and that’s what this post is about.
Fred recently visited the home of one of his readers to play techno-weanie. It’s a great story involving motorcycles, yellow leather, and a love of North America. And it boils down like this:
- Symantec’s Security Suite is a very powerful, very useful piece of software, and you shouldn’t use it
- People shouldn’t take care of their own computers
Now to be clear, Fred didn’t say any of that except the part about power and usefulness. But in reading his post that’s what I hear. Does it align perfectly with a couple of things I’ve always said, and that PC-VIP‘s clients are covered against? You bet. Now, hear me out:
The Symantec tools are among the most effective at what they do. They’ve been around for twenty years, get tweaked and updated all the time, and while they miss the occasional piece of malware (like every choice in their sector or the software business) they are overall quite solid at protecting users from the bad guys who are always trying to slide under our security doors on the Internet.
And they are too B L O A T E D to be a good idea. I never recommend this product suite, and over the years have spend many hours wrestling with computers that came with it preinstalled. There are other options out there that perform as well as or better than Norton, and don’t have the debilitating effect on your system of this over-designed nightmare.
Let’s move on, though: Fred was at the home of a reader he describes as fairly technical. And this man was running Norton, not aware that it was the culprit in the problems he was having with his computer, which had slowed to a crawl. Later in the article Fred reveals that the man didn’t know the use of PrtScr key on his keyboard.
I believe that the reader Fred was visiting was way more tech-savvy than most, and frankly, way more so than people want or should need to be. And yet he was being hobbled by the behavior of a piece of software that came pre-installed on his computer, and was unaware of one of the oldest and most useful tricks in the book that people like Fred have been writing for decades.
Computers are too hard to use.
I’ve been saying that for longer than I’ve know Fred Langa. It’s why PC-VIP exists. And every now and then I’m reminded of how true it is.
Anyone else have a problem with this?
Jeff,
Saw your blog post and wanted to take a moment to respond. We have heard user concerns about performance impact and are working hard to address the issue.
As most of our users know, over the years, the threat environment has changed drastically. Viruses gave way to worms, then came spyware, phishing, and botnets. In turn, Symantec responded by updating our consumer products each year with new features designed to protect users against these threats.
Over time, we recognized that there was a cost to add new features — usually in performance impact. We understand that use of system resources has been a big issue for our customers. That’s why we’ve made a concerted effort to add new security technologies without impacting performance. This is a balance that we are committed to getting right.
In fact, we have an entire team dedicated to addressing this issue at Symantec. Our team is dedicated to troubleshooting real time performance issues with our customers, tracking our performance against competing security products; and monitoring metrics such as memory usage, boot time impact, scan times, install time, impact on Internet download speed, and UI response speed. In fact, we re-wrote a fair amount of the code in the 2008 product line and we believe the latest generation is among the top in the industry with regard to low system impact. Our internal testing shows that compared to Norton Internet Security 2007, the 2008 user interface responds 22 percent faster and completes a quick scan up to 39 percent faster. Also, compared to nine of our competitors, Norton Internet Security 2008 leads across five key performance areas including boot time (20 percent faster), memory usage (69 percent less), full scan (12 percent faster), user interface response (54 percent faster) and download speed (31 percent faster).
I would encourage our customers to try the 2008 product line. We recognize that there is always room for improvement, yet we feel confident that we’ve made significant improvements fueled primarily by user feedback and requests. Norton Internet Security 2007 users with an up-to-date subscription are entitled to an upgrade to 2008 and can use their existing Norton Internet Security 2007 product key to unlock the free trial.
We would love to hear from customers regarding their experiences with the 2008 product line. We are dedicated to working together to provide the most innovative security technologies without impacting performance.
Regards,
Tom Powledge
VP, Product Management
Symantec Corp.
OK, Who am I to argue?
More than anything, I’m really gratified that Tom took the time. Will this really improve going forward? let’s hope so!
Thanks, Tom!