Gone is the short-lived Norton Internet Security AntiSpyware Edition, which starting earlier this year sold for a $10 premium to the $69.95 NIS 2005. Also gone from the catalog is the $39.95 Norton AntiSpam.
Norton Anti-Spam 2005 was a separate product, but now we’re just going to sell it as a component of Norton Internet Security, because that’s how most people were buying it, said Symantec product marketing manager Kraig Lane.
The anti-spyware feature has been built into Norton AntiVirus 2006, and the anti-spam feature has been built into NIS 2006.
NIS will sell for the same price as the 2005 edition, $69.95, but NAV 2006 has had its price reduced from $49.95 to $39.99. Norton Personal Firewall’s pricing remains unchanged at $49.95.
Lane said that it allows us to treat all our customers as upgrading customers, but it’s also a big part of Symantec’s transition to a fully ratable revenue recognition model for its consumer business.
Rather than recognizing some revenue up-front with a retail sale, Symantec will be able to treat each purchase as a subscription, and recognize the revenue over four financial quarters instead of just the one.
This smoothes out revenue lumpiness, makes future revenues more predictable, and pushes more money into deferred revenue, making the balance sheet look healthier. As a rule, investors like this kind of predictability.
It will hit the earnings reports in the meantime, however. The company’s CFO said in June that the transition will reduce fiscal 2006 revenue by $92m and reduce earnings per share by three cents.
Back in June, chief executive John Thompson announced the change, saying that it will enable Symantec to deliver larger product upgrades to customers throughout the course of an annual subscription, rather than releasing separate products.
We had to completely repackage the Norton Internet Security product in its entirety rather than just shipping the spyware enhancement, and we believe there will be more things like that we have to do throughout the course of the year, he said at the time.
The move will make Symantec more responsive to new threats and more competitive, he told analysts, against existing rivals and anticipating new entrants into the marketplace.
This means Microsoft, mainly.
Quite apart from the cheaper NAV price, some of the new features in the Norton suite look remarkably like an answer to OneCare, Microsoft’s forthcoming desktop health software, currently in beta testing.
Symantec has been living under the shadow of Microsoft’s entrance to the market for over two years, since the giant bought an antivirus capability but has been limited to mild rhetoric given the lack of information about its plans.
Now that Symantec knows what Microsoft will do, the Norton 2006 products and subscription plan could reasonably be described as its response.
OneCare will combine antivirus, anti-spyware and an improved Windows Firewall. The company is planning to charge a subscription fee for the software, but it has yet to show its cards on its distribution strategy.
But OneCare will also offer users a portal into common PC maintenance functions such as backup, disk defragmentation and cleanup, and file repair. Hence the health tag Microsoft uses to describe OneCare.
A key update to the Norton suite is Protection Center, a portal into information about a PC’s security profile. The idea is to make it easier for consumers to understand whether they are protected or not, Lane said.
The job of Norton Protection Center is to say: here are the activities you are familiar with, and telling them whether it is safe to do them, he said. It has headings including Email & Messaging and Web Browsing.
But it also has links to Data Recovery and Performance, showing that Symantec is planning closer links between its security software and its system tools and backup/recovery software, in response to Microsoft and as a reflection of its merger with storage firm Veritas.
Other new features introduced with the 2006 suite include intrusion prevention. The firewall will look for attacks against known vulnerabilities and block the attack and the IP address of the attacker, Lane said.
