Cross posted to macosx

From an article on Apple Insider.

Sources: Symantec to halt development of Norton Utilities for Mac

Mirroring a move made on the Windows software side, and reflecting a long-term corporate strategy, Symantec has internally declared an “end-of-life” (EOL) to Norton Utilities for the Macintosh, sources tell AppleInsider... the rest…


Please note: My comments are based on this story rumour. It is not a confirmation or verification of the story. I do know people inside and can not comment one way or another on any official policy or situations inside Symantec. My comments are based solely on observations.

Up until May of 2003 I was on this team. And I gotta say… what a waste. This is by far one of the best software teams I worked on. I had absolute faith in the product we were working on. The QA that the NUM team did was stunning. Probably, the most complete and thorough testing of any software company. Multiple machines, OS’s, regressions. And when these guys wanted to test on a bad drive, they knew how to thoroughly violate a drive.

The team was pretty much dismantled just weeks before WWDC ’03 with a few key players left scrambling to try to hold the ship together. Those of us on the outside really didn’t have a lot of faith for the team surviving 12 months. One of these key players I always had a lot of sympathy for. He was never made a software engineer and ran rings around any 5 prinicipal engineers I knew. He was always kept in quality assurance. Apple could gain a lot from this guy. He knows more about HFS+ format that just about anyone I could name in the industry.

We got a lot of flack from the public about being slow or reporting too many errors. Which always blew my mind. Okay, on a 40 meg disk running OS9… how bad could it be? But come one. On a 4 Gig drive running multi partitions with a hybrid UnixOS and Mac and Windows. The complaint, “I’m getting more errors than the competition” just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like complaining that the doctor shouldn’t have found that tumor while looking for an ear infection.

But, Oh well. A bunch of us took the axe in May… The last stragglers are now working on the Mac Virus product. Whether or not this is an intelligent business decision is not mine to evaluate. I mean, hell, you can see the scads of Mac viruses that permeate our daily lives. And I know how busy our Norton Anti-Virus for Mac team was. Me? I guess I got out (even if not by choice) when the getting was good. I’m now working on a technology I have a lot of interest in and my company supports me (at least my team does) in furthering my project. As for Norton Utilities… I raise a glass for a team and a product I respected. And I’ll be glad to drink with any of them anytime.

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