Symantec discontinues Mac Norton Utilities, SystemWorks

[Maverick]

By Peter Cohen pcohen@maccentral.com
April 14, 2004 1:30 pm ET

Symantec Inc. on Wednesday confirmed plans to discontinue the Macintosh versions of its Norton Utilities and SystemWorks packages and instead will focus its efforts on developing its Internet security software. "Symantec made the strategic decision to discontinue development of Norton Utilities for Macintosh and Norton SystemWorks for Macintosh," said the company.

Norton Utilities for Macintosh is a suite of applications that Symantec offered to help find and repair disk problems, restore lost files, rebuild damage disks and improve disk performance by defragmenting and reorganizing data. The latest major upgrade to the package occurred almost a year ago when Symantec released Norton Utilities 8.0, which finally provided a complete transition to Mac OS X compatibility.

SystemWorks is a bundle package that combines Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton AntiVirus 9.0, along with third party utilities including Dantz's Retrospect Express backup software and Aladdin Systems' Spring Cleaning utility, which helps users remove unwanted or unnecessary files.

"Symantec remains committed to the Macintosh platform and is actively working on development of enhanced Internet security solutions to support the Mac operating system," read the statement provided to MacCentral.

Symantec continues to offer Mac-compatible versions of Norton AntiVirus, Norton Personal Firewall and Norton Internet Security, which combines those two packages with other third party offerings.

Symantec also disputed published reports that it has discontinued SystemWorks for Windows. " Symantec does not have any plans to discontinue Norton SystemWorks for the PC platform and is continuing to actively develop new problem solving products and solutions for Windows users," said a Symantec spokesman.

[Adel]

I am not sympathetic. Norton has inadvertently trashed one too many hard disks of mine in its efforts to protect my data. Ironic.

Discontinue away, Symantec. You will not be missed on my desktop.

[kibs1111]

what i don't get is why apple (or microsoft) can't build norton's functions into the OS... i'm assuming since they wrote their own OS they'd be in the best position to create the best disk utility for their respective products....

i mean, they've bundled iphoto,imovie,idvd,itunes,garage band, a chess game, a kick ass browser, ical, etc.... why not a powerful disk utilitu
.

[Maverick]

[i]

i mean, they've bundled iphoto,imovie,idvd,itunes,garage band, a chess game, a kick ass browser, ical, etc.... why not a powerful disk utilitu
.

i was wondering the same thing...