A tale of two products

Ten years or so ago, the Norton anti-virus product swept all before it. Everyone used Norton. Symantec Corp bought it from its eponymous originator and made it fatter…and fatter ….and fatter …. and buggy… and it slipped way down the industry ratings for virus identification. It became a bit of a joke. But around 2009, an apparently ground-up rebuild was released. It was regularly near the top of the virus identification league; it was still a bit fat but it worked well (with the odd hiccup such as identifying Spotify as a Trojan Horse). It also sold (and apparently still sells) well, in spite of Microsoft giving away Malicious Software Removal Tool, Windows Defender, Windows Firewall and so on.

Pre-2009, I – like many others – had long switched to ZoneAlarm. Bloated perhaps, but it has good ratings. Then it was bought by hardware firewall people Check Point. Slowly the slide began. Ratings slowly fell but more importantly hugely buggy versions were released. ZoneLabs forums were awash with users tearing their hair out with frozen or BSODing PCs. The product fell enough down the rankings for the PC press (in the UK at least) not even to bother include it in comparative trials.

Anti-virus/anti-spyware software, which because of its nature intercepts (filters) e.g. file access at a low level and thus has great capacity for disruption if buggy or slow, has much similarity with backup/restore packages that go below the Windows HAL level to gain speed. And Microsoft will be there giving away a comparable if more basic product. There is quite obviously a market for something offering additional USEFUL functionality or ease of use or both, but not at the expense of reliability. Anyone who ships a series of buggy releases becomes an industry joke and vanishes off the buyers radar. Norton, to many people's surprise, came back. Most do not.

So Acronis: what do you want TI and Backup/Restore to be - a Norton or a ZoneAlarm?