Over on ExtremeTech, Loyd Case talks about his distressing result with Norton Antivirus, and the scheme for activation. It seems he has had good luck with the product until recently. I have not used any Norton products since 2003, which, coincidentally, was the last year of the product needing no ridiculous activation scheme.

Mr. Case states

Until a couple of years ago, I’d never been much of a user of antivirus software. Mostly, it was because I had been lucky. After getting a broadband connection and finding a worm on my home network, though, I decided it was time to bite the bullet.

PC Magazine has always rated Norton Antivirus [NAV] highly, so I bought it for the first time back in 2002. Actually, I bought Symantec ’s Norton SystemWorks 2002, but eventually unloaded everything except the antivirus software. It worked great. It was unobtrusive, mostly compatible with the PC games I used, and saved my bacon several times as various e-mail viruses made the rounds. Later, I upgraded to the 2003 version — mostly so I could get rid of the remaining detritus left behind by SystemWorks.

As my one-year virus definitions subscription drew to a close, it was only natural to upgrade to the 2004 version. I suppose I could have just paid for another year’s subscription, but “newer is better”, eh? Actually, some of the new features called out in PC Magazine’s review sounded useful. Symantec’s move to product activation was somewhat worrisome, but I’d grown comfortable with product activation in Windows XP, as well as a couple of high end applications, so I wasn’t too concerned.

I bought Norton Antivirus on August 26th, installed it, configured it, and promptly forgot about it. Occasionally, NAV would pop up a message telling me it had automatically downloaded new antivirus definitions. It also caught a couple of Web-based Trojans, as well as some e-mail virus attachments. All in all, I was reasonably content.

Have you ever seen those horror movies where everything is wonderful at the beginning of the movie, then little hints foreshadow the nightmare to come? That’s what happened here. My happy tale of antivirus success started coming unglued, a little at a time.

It began when I decided to manually check for a new set of definitions, as we got word of one of the numerous worms that began making the rounds in the fall. Norton refused to update, instead giving me a relatively obscure error and a link to their support site. The support page told me that NAV was either not activated or had encountered an activation problem. The fix was to reinstall. So I uninstalled and reinstalled. Of course, this step required re-activation, but Symantec seemed to accept this with no problems.

For awhile, things seemed good. The world was a happy place, and the time bomb that was NAV sat happily in my system tray. Then, like some evil boarding house resident, it began nagging at me. The NAV icon would have a little “x” in it, indicating it wasn’t working. Occasionally, it would pop up and tell me that the evaluation period had expired and I needed to activate. On all these occasions, I just clicked on the “Activate” button, the app would activate, and things would be good again.

Last Friday, NAV popped up again and asked me to reactivate. I clicked the “activate” button again, but this time, I got a message telling me I’d run out of activations. It all but accused me of stealing the software. So I called tech support, and spoke with a very nice person who gave me an interesting link to the Symantec Web site.

In case you don’t want to pay Symantec a visit, here’s the salient paragraph from their document ID 2003093015493306 (dated October 31st, 2003):

Situation:

You install Norton AntiVirus 2004 (NAV) and activate the program successfully. However, whenever you restart the computer you are prompted to activate the program again. If you enter the activation code each time, then after a number of restarts you see the message “The trial period has expired. This product has been disabled because you have not activated it.”

Solution:

Symantec is investigating this problem. The cause is unknown, and there is no solution at this time. This document will be updated when new information becomes available or a solution is found. ”

As you can see, the company is aware of the issue. So what’s the fix?

This is a continuing problem, and one I have dealt with on customer’s computers by usually admonishing them to never purchase another Norton product, as no trace of the greatness that once was ‘The Norton Utilities’  remains.  Symantec uses the same tactics as Microsoft, purchasing promising software, and branding it as their own. Sometimes the company totally screws it up, as was done with Norton products, Other times the software is quietly quashed, never to be seen again, as was done with the very fine XTree products and PCTools products. (This is not the PCTools of today, it was a very good alternative to the Norton Utilities back when, and really was very good. The parent company was called Central Point Software, another complete victim of Symantec buyout. I usually purchased both!)

Now, Symantec is getting the great reviews I’m sure they pay for in the big magazines, but everyone I know avoids their products like bubonic plague, and each customer I deal with is, as I was saying above, getting ‘he talk’.

Lotus learned its lesson about copy protection when it lost its status as the number one spreadsheet, while other companies have lost major market share due to convoluted copy protection or activation schemes. In fact, the only one company that hasn’t seen huge drops in its user base is Microsoft, though that is only due to the extreme size of their share of the market. Microsoft is starting to slide due to this, amongst other things, and it will continue to see its share erode as the market moves toward software that is not always trying to ‘catch the user in violation’.

I wonder how many dollars (millions of dollars?) are spent trying to keep one step in front of the latest crack of these activation schemes. Then there is the untold number of people unduly distressed by the problems of activation, when they are legal users of genuine software. Many of these people get tired of the fight, the calls to tech support, and simply switch to something that gives less trouble - even if it is not as effective as the troublesome product replaced.

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Tags: symantec, norton, activation schemes, microsoft, lotus, central point software