Jody Gibney, senior product manager for Norton Internet Security, affirmed Trollope's thoughts about what consumers want in security. She admitted that in earlier years the NIS team was shooting for the wrong target.
"We focused on being the best and fastest of our competitors, but if the whole category is too slow it doesn't matter," she said.
Gibney noted that a survey from last August showed performance is the biggest reason consumers switch security suites, more than price and more than functionality. Rather than work on incremental improvements, her team hashed over every line of code in NIS looking for ways to make it as fast and efficient as possible.
Gibney observed that in every age group consumers report the computer is as much or more of an entertainment device as the TV.
"They bring that TV attitude with them. They don't like commercials, they don't like interruptions, and they have no tolerance for anything slow or boring," she said.
Yet many home computers are seriously underpowered. Of the million people that contact Symantec for support each month, forty percent have 512MB or less RAM and 75 percent memory utilization. A security suite must tread very lightly in order to avoid bogging down those older computers.
