I just got a call from my mom who was trying to install Norton Anti-virus. It insisted that she must enter her proxy server to install - even though she is on a dial up and has no proxy server.
Which lead me to the question, why is Norton's software so badly written? And based on how bad the parts you see are, it makes you wonder if the anti-virus under the covers is equally as bad. Specifically:
- The install program is not signed. So you don't "know" it's from Norton. For a security product this is inexcusable.
- I've been programming for over 20 years. Yet I would estimate that 25% of the time I or my wife or daughters go to pay for the yearly upgrade, I end up having to call Norton tech support to complete the purchase/install. This not only costs Symantec a lot of money unnecessarily, but it wastes my time.
- You can't turn off notifications. I ended up turning off worm protection because it kept poping up a status message that it was scannig for worms. Don't interrupt me unless it's a problem.
All in all, its just sad that a company this large that sells so many copies of their software can't get the basics right. And it makes you wonder about the actual anti-virus code. If it's as poor as the parts that are visible, then it's pretty poor protection.
ps - I'll bet no senior executive at Norton installs or updates anti-virus for themselves.
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