Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.
Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.
2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.
Still pretty tiny.
Or better detection of viruses.
It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)
I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/
Awesome, so the machine I have with NO AV software at all with a detection rate of 0 must be the bestest!
Just because Antivirus A detects 99% and Antivirus B detects 85% does not mean users of Antivirus A can expect more false positives. If anything, the better designed software should yield less.
Also: Yes, I have used endpoint protection. It's forced onto my work laptop at the office. It has a tendency to KILL my systems performance randomly, even when not performing a scheduled scan. 8mb of ram, while impressive for a symantec process, is simply an arbitrary number if any type of disk access gets slowed down by the service.