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Symantec has outlined its plans to recapture the hearts and minds of retailers and consumers with the launch of its 2009 Norton range.
"We’ve gone and re-written the whole program," Symantec’s EMEA consumer product marketing director Con Mallon (pictured) told PC Retail. "We haven’t taken anything away, if anything, we’ve added more functionality; rather, we have taken everything that we’ve added over the past few years and vastly improved its integration into the code to make things run faster."
Indeed, a lot of the emphasis on the new editions is on them being much more streamlined and unobtrusive. "Both versions of Norton 2009 have a very small footprint and have been built from the ground up to be faster than anything we ever done previously. For example, they install in around one minute. This isn’t a minor update; we’ve put in over 500,000 development hours on these new versions," added Mallon.
However, it isn’t just the initial experience that has seen a drastic overhaul. "2009 also sees the introduction of Norton Insight, something that has provided a major speed boost compared to previous versions by using ‘Whitelighting’ technology. Instead of scanning every program and every document every single time, Insight skips scanning programs that it has scanned once and are ‘trusted’," said Mallon.
"We have also implemented a system where the software scans your system progressively when it is idle. That means, when you don’t use your PC for a while, the program begins using the spare capacity to provide security. We know that if a customer puts off an update to the program, we’ve lost them. That why a lot of what we’ve done is geared towards improving the user experience."
The vendor is also looking to improve the experience of uninstalling its programs. It’s one of the areas we hear complains about when we speak to retailers, so we asked Mallon if the company had done anything to sort out the issue. "Yes," he replied.
"We’ve overhauled the uninstall – alongside the install – and now it provides a very clean job. We’re confident that nothing will be left behind."
