It's been that way for many, many years now...
Many many many years. I have strongly un-recommended Symantec products
for a good decade now. Given how absolutely terrible their security
products are performance wise (which I think is their core business),
I have no idea how they maintain their position as the most recognized
Antivirus brand.
One machine I repaired (it was an older machine) was brought to its
knees when NIS was installed. It took over half an hour to boot and
another half an hour to load any applications. Removing NIS the
machine became much more responsive. I've also repaired several
machines with NAV but expired definition subscription. Not only to
they get the normal Norton performance bog, the machines aren't even
being protected!
It's a long and slow process trying to convince home users that they
don't need to pay to get quality anti-virus protection, and quality
security products. And if they want to buy security products, Norton
is not the place to do it.
I am quite sure that Symantec is responsible for damaging Microsoft's
product's reputation. While I'm no Microsoft "fanboi", IMHO WinXP is a
pretty good consumer OS. However with Symantec products the
performance and stability of XP go down the crapper in a hurry.
Frequently in pro-Mac arguments I see "MacOS X is a bazillion times
faster and more stable than my old PC ever was and Windows could ever
be. Unlike Windows, my old Macs don't become slow and useless. Plus I
don't have to keep buying those damned Norton subscriptions every year
like I used to!"
Symantec also does a good job of ruining any product they buy.
Recently they bought Partition magic and it immediately went in the
crapper. They bought out Drive Image and immediately ruined it and
Ghost (their only program worth a damn).
