The story
Founded by Gary Hendrix on Mar 1, 1982, in Sunnyvale.1
1982 to 1989
Founded in 1982 by Gary Hendrix with a National Science Foundation grant, Symantec was originally focused on artificial intelligence-related projects, including a database program. Hendrix hired several Stanford University natural language processing researchers as the company's first employees.
In 1984, it became clear that the advanced natural language and database system that Symantec had developed could not be ported from DEC minicomputers to the PC. This left Symantec without a product, but with expertise in natural language database query systems and technology. As a result, later in 1984, Symantec was acquired by another, smaller software startup company, C&E Software, founded by Denis Coleman and Gordon Eubanks and headed by Eubanks. C&E Software developed a combined file management and word processing program called Q&A.
The merged company retained the name Symantec. Eubanks became its chairman, Vern Raburn, the former president of the original Symantec, remained as president of the combined company. The new Symantec combined the file management and word processing functionality that C&E had planned, and added an advanced Natural Language query system (designed by Gary Hendrix and engineered by Dan Gordon) that set new standards for ease of database query and report generation. The natural language system was named "The Intelligent Assistant". Turner chose the name of Q&A for Symantec's flagship product, in large part because the name lent itself to use in a short, easily merchandised logo. With a user interface designed by director of product management, Brett Walter, Q&A was released in November 1985.
In 1986, Vern Raburn and Gordon Eubanks swapped roles, and Eubanks became CEO and president of Symantec, while Raburn became its chairman. After this change, Raburn had little involvement with Symantec, and in a few years, Eubanks added chairmanship to his other roles. After a slow start for sales of Q&A in the fall of 1985 and spring of 1986, Rod Turner, a Symantec Sr. Executive, signed up a new advertising agency called Elliott/Dickens, embarked on an aggressive new advertising campaign, and came up with the "Six Pack Program" in which all Symantec employees, regardless of role, went on the road, training and selling nationwide in the United States. Turner named it Six Pack because employees were to work six days a week, see six dealerships per day, train six sales representatives per store and stay with friends free or at Motel 6. Simultaneously, a promotion was run jointly with SofSell (which was Symantec's exclusive wholesale distributor in the United States for the first year that Q&A was on the market). This promotion was very successful in encouraging dealers to try Q&A.
During this time, Symantec was advised by its board members Jim Lally and John Doerr that if it would cut its expenses and grow revenues enough to achieve cash flow break-even, then Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers would back the company in raising more venture capital. To accomplish this, the management team worked out a salary reduction schedule where the chairman and the CEO would take zero pay, all vice presidents would take a 50% pay cut, and all other employees' pay was cut by 15%. Two employees were laid off. Eubanks also negotiated a sizable rent reduction on the office space the company had leased in the days of the original Symantec. These expense reductions, combined with strong international sales of Q&A, enabled the company to attain break-even.
The significantly increased traction for Q&A from this re-launch grew Symantec's revenues substantially, along with early success for Q&A in international markets (uniquely a German version was shipped three weeks after the United States version, and it was the first software in the world that supported German Natural Language) following Turner's having emphasized establishing international sales distribution and multiple language versions of Q&A from the initial shipment.
In 1985, Rod Turner negotiated the publishing agreement with David Whitney for Symantec's second product, which Turner named NoteIt (an annotation utility for Lotus 1-2-3). It was evident to Turner that NoteIt would confuse the dealer channel if it was launched under the Symantec name because Symantec had built up interest by that stage in Q&A (but not yet shipped it), and because the low price for the utility would not be initially attracted to the dealer channel until demand had been built up. Turner felt that the product should be marketed under a unique brand name.
Turner and Gordon E. Eubanks Jr., then chairman of Symantec, agreed to form a new division of Symantec, and Eubanks delegated the choice of name to Turner. Turner chose the name Turner Hall Publishing, to be a new division of Symantec devoted to publishing third-party software and hardware. The objective of the division was to diversify revenues and accelerate the growth of Symantec. Turner chose the name Turner Hall Publishing, using his last name and that of Dottie Hall (Director of Marketing Communications) to convey the sense of a stable, long-established, company. Turner Hall Publishing's first offering was Note-It, a notation utility add-in for Lotus 1-2-3, which was developed by David Whitney, and licensed to Symantec. Its second product was the Turner Hall Card, which was a 256k RAM, half slot memory card, initially made to inexpensively increase the available memory for Symantec's flagship product, Q&A. The Turner Hall division also marketed the card as a standalone product. Turner Hall's third product, also a 1-2-3 add-in was SQZ! a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet compression utility developed by Chris Graham Synex Systems. In the summer of 1986 Eubanks and Turner recruited Tom Byers from Digital Research, to expand the Turner Hall Publishing product family and lead the Turner Hall effort.
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By the winter of 1986–87, the Turner Hall Publishing division had achieved success with NoteIt, the Turner Hall Card and SQZ!. The popularity of these products, while contributing a relatively small portion of revenues to Symantec, conveyed the impression that Symantec was already a diversified company, and indeed, many industry participants were under the impression that Symantec had acquired Turner Hall Publishing. In 1987, Byers recruited Ted Schlein into the Turner Hall Product Group to assist in building the product family and in marketing.
Revenues from Q&A, and Symantec's early launch into the international marketplace, combined with Turner Hall Publishing, generated the market presence and scale that enabled Symantec to make its first merger/acquisition, in February 1987, that of Breakthrough Software, maker of the TimeLine project management software for DOS. Because this was the first time that Symantec had acquired a business that had revenues, inventory, and customers, Eubanks chose to change nothing at BreakThrough Software for six months, and the actual merger logistics started in the summer of 1987, with Turner being appointed by Eubanks as general manager of the TimeLine business unit, Turner was made responsible for the successful integration of the company into Symantec and ongoing growth of the business, with P&L. There was a heavy emphasis placed on making the minimum disruption by Eubanks and Turner.
Soon after the acquisition of TimeLine/Breakthrough Software, Eubanks reorganized Symantec, structuring the company around product-centric groups, each having its development, quality assurance, technical support, and product marketing functions, and a general manager with profit and loss responsibility. Sales, finance, and operations were centralized functions that were shared. This structure lent itself well to Symantec's further growth through mergers and acquisitions. Eubanks made Turner general manager of the new TimeLine Product Group, and simultaneously of the Q&A Product Group, and made Tom Byers general manager of the Turner Hall Product Group. Turner continued to build and lead the company's international business and marketing for the whole company.
At the TimeLine Product Group, Turner drove strong marketing, promotion and sales programs to accelerate momentum. By 1989 this merger was very successful—product group morale was high, TimeLine development continued apace, and the increased sales and marketing efforts applied built the TimeLine into the clear market lead in PC project management software on DOS. Both the Q&A and TimeLine product groups were healthily profitable. The profit stream and merger success set the stage for subsequent merger and acquisition activity by the company, and indeed funded the losses of some of the product groups that were subsequently acquired. In 1989, Eubanks hired John Laing as VP worldwide sales, and Turner transferred the international division to Laing. Eubanks also recruited Bob Dykes to be executive vice president for operations and finance, in anticipation of the upcoming IPO. On June 23, 1989, Symantec had its IPO, opening on NASDAQ as "SYMC".
1990 to 1999
In May 1990, Symantec announced its intent to merge with and acquire Peter Norton Computing, a developer of various utilities for DOS. Turner was appointed as product group manager for the Norton business, and made responsible for the merger, with P&L responsibility. Ted Schlein was made product group manager for the Q&A business.
The Peter Norton group merger logistical effort began immediately while the companies sought approval for the merger, and in August 1990, Symantec concluded the purchase—by this time the combination of the companies was already complete. Symantec's consumer antivirus and data management utilities are still marketed under the Norton name. At the time of the merger, Symantec had built upon its Turner Hall Publishing presence in the utility market, by introducing Symantec Antivirus for the Macintosh (SAM), and Symantec Utilities for the Macintosh (SUM). These two products were already market leaders on the Mac, and this success made the Norton merger more strategic. Symantec had already begun the development of a DOS-based antivirus program one year before the merger with Norton. The management team had decided to enter the antivirus market in part because it was felt that the antivirus market entailed a great deal of ongoing work to stay ahead of new viruses. The team felt that Microsoft would be unlikely to find this effort attractive, which would lengthen the viability of the market for Symantec. Turner decided to use the Norton name for obvious reasons, on what became the Norton Antivirus, which Turner and the Norton team launched in 1991. At the time of the merger, Norton revenues were approximately 20 to 25% of the combined entity. By 1993, while being led by Turner, Norton product group revenues had grown to approximately 82% of Symantec's total.
At one time, Symantec was also known for its development tools, particularly the THINK Pascal, THINK C, Symantec C++, Enterprise Developer and Visual Cafe packages that were popular on the Macintosh and IBM PC compatible platforms. These product lines resulted from acquisitions made by the company in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These businesses and the Living Videotext acquisition were consistently unprofitable for Symantec, and these losses diverted expenditures away from both the Q&A for Windows and the TimeLine for Windows development efforts during the critical period from 1988 through 1992. Symantec exited this business in the late-1990s as competitors such as Metrowerks, Microsoft and Borland gained significant market share.
In 1994, Symantec acquired Central Point Software for around $60 million.
In 1996, Symantec was accused of misleading financial statements in violation of GAAP.
2000 to 2014
From 1999 to April 2009, Symantec was led by CEO John W. Thompson, a former VP at IBM. At the time, Thompson was the only African-American leading a major US technology company. He was succeeded in April 2009 by the company's long-time Symantec executive Enrique Salem. Under Salem, Symantec completed the acquisition of Verisign's Certificate Authority business, dramatically increasing their share of that market.
In 2009, Symantec released a list of the then "100 dirtiest websites", which contain the most malware as detected by Norton Safe Web.
Salem was abruptly fired in 2012 for disappointing earnings performance and replaced by Steve Bennett, a former CEO of Intuit and GE executive. In January 2013, Bennett announced a major corporate reorganization, with the goal of reducing costs and improving Symantec's product line. He said that sales and marketing "had been high costs but did not provide quality outcomes". He concluded that "Our system is just broken".
Robert Enderle of CIO.com reviewed the reorganization and noted that Bennett was following the General Electric model of being product-focused instead of customer-focused. He concluded "Eliminating middle management removes a large number of highly paid employees. This will tactically improve Symantec's bottom line but reduce the skills needed to ensure high-quality products in the long term."
In March 2014, Symantec fired Steve Bennett as CEO and named Michael Brown as interim president and chief executive. Including the interim CEO, Symantec had three CEOs in less than two years. On September 25, 2014, Symantec announced the appointment of Brown as its president and CEO. Brown had been interim president and CEO since March 20, 2014, and a member of the board of directors since July 2005 following the acquisition of Veritas Software. Brown had been on the Veritas board since 2003.
2014 information management business spin-off
On October 9, 2014, Symantec declared that the company would separate into two independent publicly traded companies by the end of 2015. Symantec will continue to focus on security, while a new company will be established focusing on information management. Symantec confirmed on January 28, 2015, that the information management business would be called Veritas Technologies, marking a return of the Veritas name. In August 2015, Symantec agreed to sell Veritas to a private equity group led by the Carlyle Group for $8 billion. The sale was completed by February 2016, turning Veritas into a privately owned company.
2016 to present
In July 2016, Symantec introduced a product to help carmakers protect connected vehicles against zero-day attacks. The Symantec Anomaly Detection for Automotive is an IoT product for manufacturers and uses machine learning to provide in-vehicle security analytics. Greg Clark assumed the position of CEO in August 2016.
In November 2016, Symantec announced its intent to acquire identity theft protection company LifeLock for $2.3 billion.
In August 2017, Symantec announced that it had agreed to sell its business unit that verifies the identity of websites to Thoma Bravo. With this acquisition, Thoma Bravo plans to merge the Symantec business unit with its own web certification company, DigiCert.
On January 4, 2018, Symantec and BT (formerly British Telecom) announced their partnership that provides new endpoint security protection.
In May 2018, Symantec initiated an internal audit to address concerns raised by a former employee, causing it to delay its annual earnings report.
In August 2018, Symantec announced that the hedge fund Starboard Value had put forward five nominees to stand for election to the Symantec board of directors at Symantec's 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. This followed a Schedule 13D filing by Starboard showing that it had accumulated a 5.8% stake in Symantec. In September 2018, Symantec announced that three nominees of Starboard were joining the Symantec board, two with immediate effect (including Starboard Managing Member Peter Feld) and one following the 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
On May 9, 2019, Symantec announced that Clark would be stepping down and that board member Rick Hill, previously put forward by Starboard, had been appointed interim president and CEO. Vincent Pilette also joined Symantec as its new CFO.
On August 8, 2019, Broadcom announced they would be acquiring the Enterprise software division of Symantec for $10.7 billion. This is after having attempted to purchase the whole company. The Norton family of products will remain in the Symantec portfolio. The sale closed on November 4, 2019, and subsequently, the company adopted the NortonLifeLock name and relocated its headquarters from Mountain View, California to LifeLock's offices in Tempe, Arizona.
In 2021, a crypto-miner was added to the Norton 360 product, called Norton Crypto. Once activated by the user, Norton Crypto mines Ethereum (ETH) using the installed machine's graphics card while idle. The program also creates a secure wallet on the same machine. Norton announced it was permanently disabling the feature on September 14, 2022, due to the Ethereum merge.
US-based NortonLifeLock and Avast, a European cybersecurity leader based in Czech Republic founded by Eduard Kučera and Pavel Baudiš in 1988 which was listed on the London Stock Exchange since its 2018 IPO there, merged in a deal announced in July 2021 and completed in September 2022, forming a new multinational company called Gen Digital. This merger created a larger cybersecurity firm with a broader portfolio of brands and products, including Norton, Avast, LifeLock and others. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority approved the merger in September 2022.
In December 2024, Gen Digital announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MoneyLion. In April 2025, Gen Digital completed its acquisition of MoneyLion in a $1 billion all-cash deal.
In February 2025, Norton's antivirus software added Genie AI functionality for fraud protection.
From Wikipedia’s article on Gen Digital, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8