Have Symantec lost faith in their own products?

A great piece by Tom Pullar-Strecker from The Dominion Post talks about the auto debit of credit cards for renewals of their anti virus software.

He even says Website TechWeb has quoted former Symantec consumer-group chief Enrique
Salem saying it was also one of several \’\’revenue-generating\’\’
strategies to \’\’pump up the consumer group\’s bottom line\’\’.

This makes me think that they do not think that the quality of their product will be enough to bring in the revenue they need.

Symantec products used to be well renowned for being excellent products in the fight against viruses and stood up very well against other antivirus programs.

To the extent that it was seen as a more serious product, built for business strength use.

The main competitor was McAfee, who also produced a great product (The original DOS one I used on my first PC)

As the fight against viruses has become more and more important, both companies have targeted the consumers maket more.

I have installed Symantec products a number of times and each subsequent release was, in my opinion, a worse product than the previous one.

They seemed bloated and slow, even the interface was slow and clunky.

To the point where I changed to AVG.

While AVG is not fantastic, it seemed to do the job just as well and was much smaller and compact. (The latest version seems to have fallen victim to a bit of bloat as well)

I am currently using Avast and it looks good so far.

I have seen many horror stories about Symantec products around the operation of the program, the difficulties in getting rid of it and many billing issues as well.