In this post, Rod discusses the failure of Symantec to address the complaints of the user community and the negative commentary that has been generated as a result.

Being a McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator administrator, I'm not in a position to speak about Symantec's products.  But I can speak about McAfee's offerings...

VirusScan 8.0i has had 11 patches released for it since it was first RTM'd.  The most recent of which, patch 11, caused many clients to stop reporting to servers, locked up Domain Controllers, and generally caused havoc during deployment.  Sadly, this is not a isolated case, and neither has been their response: this patch was released 9/9/2005, and the fix for patch 11 was due for inclusion in patch 12.

9 months later the patch still has not materialized, and documents on the support portal indicate that patch 12 has been abandoned altogether in favor of a new patch 13 build.  Of course, none of this has stopped them from developing a new version of VirusScan...

Another example: recently they overhauled the support portal used for opening cases - this had been the subject of much fanfare from McAfee for many months.  After the new portal goes live, it becomes apparent that:

1.  The portal does not accept the new logins (or our old ones) - for ANYONE, ANYWHERE.
2.  It takes OVER A WEEK to get it fixed so anyone can login.
3.  During this week, since no customer can open cases online, everyone calls the call center instead -- resulting in hours of hold time just to REPORT an issue.
4.  After fixing this, the portal now only works with IE (for a company that supports Unix and Mac, etc - how are they supposed to use this?)

Any other McAfee admins out there with similar thoughts?