Why can’t software companies leave good programs alone?
It just keeps happening. An excellent piece of software comes out. It’s fairly lean and does it’s job well. Then it gets “upgraded” or another company buys out the original and “improves” it. The result is a bloated and often more unstable product with added “features” that I don’t want and don’t use and that costs more. Symantec is a prime example of a company that buys somebody and then ruins the product. Norton anti-virus was once a great product but got so intrusive and demanded so many resources that I stopped using it. Symantec also seems determined to ruin Ghost and Drive Image by jerry-rigging them together into one program that is full of bugs. Both were fine programs in their own right when they belonged to other companies. I used Ghost for years but now I have to find a different imaging program. Another program that I have used happily for a long time is the ZoneAlarm firewall. Then they started adding more “features” and the problems started. The parent company ZoneLabs has been taken over by CheckPoint and things are not like they used to be. Here is an evaluation from Neat Net Tricks
The Panel generally agreed that ZoneAlarm, to maintain a competitive posture in the marketplace, has evolved from a very useful (and free) basic firewall to a suite of programs (adding anti-virus, anti-spyware, parental controls, cookie controls, and so on) that likely do not collectively warrant the $50 US price tag.
And it has bugs. See Computer Gripes.
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