How is Symantec still in business?

Some companies continue to survive, despite their own best efforts. Case in point: Symantec.

When my company was looking into purchasing Symantec Enterprise Vault, I literally called their sales department 6 times trying to speak to someone to ask them a few questions. I actually left them a message that I had $20,000 ready and waiting for their software, all they had to do was call me back. No call... really...

I recently installed Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 on a computer to test. Very first thing it did was break my wireless connection. Upon searching (I love you, Google), it turns out that it's a known issue that SEP11 breaks WPA and WPA2 authentication. When I try to pull up the link to the Symantec support article to see if there's a fix (it's been known for at least 4 months now), Symantec.com is down. Down. Really. Down. They probably tried to use their own product to protect their servers.

Last Thursday, Hotmail started blocking emails from my company's server. Turns out that Symantec Brightmail, which Hotmail uses for spam filtering, seems to think that our IP has been compromised. You know, the IP that is protected by another one of their products, Symantec Endpoint Protection. Of course, after some Googling (yes, it's a verb, too) I found several blogs from people like me who were blocked recently. Probably someone at Symantec pushed the wrong button. But the irony remains that they blacklisted a mail server that was protected by them...