Does bill work for symantec?
Or are you saying is Norton's an MS caused problem?
Because many older people loved Norton Utilities (at least up to version 6
they were great then they went the overlay route with nice graphical screen
and mice support). Version 11 got renamed back to Version 1 (so add 10 to
the current displayed version).
However Symantec bought nearly every single PC Utility company, Norton's was
one of the last to fall to them. Up till then Norton's product were sharply
focused on doing things to Disk that Dos couldn't or wouldn't. Their main
competitor was PCTools, owned by Symantec, but they were like how I'm about
to describe before symantec owned them.
They were more focused on utilities generally. Disk stuff was just one thing
they did (interestingly none of the utility companies did anti-virus and
there was no spywear). So you got a TSR Desktop Utilities as well.
As THE STANDARD OPERATING SYSTEM Dos/Windows/WindowsNT became more of a
finished product there was less need for Utility Products, or at least so
they feared (I'm unable to judge if we exclude AV, as I am, because to many
of us NU were essential, I'm not a grandparent wanting to look at photos of
kids). Both PCTools, Norton Utilities, and McAffee (anti virus) supplied
modified versions of their utilities to Dos 6 (and defrag in Windows 9x
supported all Norton Defragger for Dos command line switches, incl if you
wanted to use a mouse, what technical interface the mouse should have, whay
screen - graphical or text mode, and lots of other things.
So Symantec got into AV, they started making these hideous products, not
because they were needed, but to put features on the outside of a box for
marketing.
One example was crash guard. It's main problem is that it caused many
crashes. But it said it could uncrash programs. It is a bad idea to uncrash
programs, even more so in 16 bit windows. If Windows has crashed a program
it means something is wrong as in an ideal world the program expects the
error and has code to handle it. As computers are stupid and can't work out
a human's intent (windows cannot tell if a program has hung - it can guess
but it can't tell) then PC based computers crash as the best option to not
destroy data. A hung program may be generating errors galore, but it's their
own error so noone knows about them, or spinning in a loop, or waiting for
something that isn't going to happen. A crashed program is a program that
has given illegal instructions to the CPU, the CPU tells Windows (like
Invalid Op Code - it means the instruction list has garbage on it, or
accessing memory it isn't allowed to).
Norton's wrote their software in, to me, funny ways. In no version of
Norton's has all programs worked in the next Windows release.
There are easy ways and hard ways to program. In Windows many common things
are given to Windows to do. Like pressing keys and clicking menus, a easy
written program will only wait for a command number from windows (eg Do
command 1 - File - Open) as Windows looks after all the clicking to drop the
menu, highlight a selected item, making the menu in the first place, and
translating the command the user selects and sending that command from menu
or key to the program. The program may also be interested if you select a
menu item (but not activate it) so it can put Help text in the status bar. A
program written the hardway may write their own menus (like Office), and may
watch what happens with the keys eg key pressed then key released)
My suspicious nature made me suspect that it was delibrately written to
break to force upgrading before AV subscriptions became common and the
matter a bit moot.
Nortons and McAfee have been sucessful whereas Microsoft hasn't, yet, been
sucessful at geting rents rather than sales. Microsoft is a victim (in the
minds of short/medium term financial analysts) of lumpy revenue. Renting (is
an economic term - I use it delibrately as it gives a value free surface
meaning) is, and has been, MS's holy grail.
