Yesterday at the RSA conference a group of Symantec executives and technologists met with industry influencers to discuss a broad collection of topics, ranging from innovation to reputation to virtualization. It was a pretty interesting discussion and I'd like to focus on one particular aspect that is near and dear to me—the importance of maintaining innovation momentum in a down economy. There are plenty of historical examples that show that companies that innovate through tough times emerge with a strong and sustainable advantage over those that don't. An interesting point, but I think there is more compelling evidence that sustained innovation is the smart thing to be doing right now.
Someone once said that there are two kinds of products in the world: those that cost a dollar but help you earn five dollars, and those that cost a dollar but help you save five dollars. Both are valid value propositions, but in this economy it's not too surprising that people are...
Last week's Cutting Edge event was an absolute blast. Cutting Edge is our internal technical conference where we gather top engineers, architects, and researchers from across Symantec globally to share ideas, best practices, technologies, imagination and energy. The goal is to keep Symantec at the cutting edge of technology, which we view as critical to winning in the marketplace. Besides that, it's just tremendously stimulating to be around four or five hundred really smart people.
The theme of this year's conference was "How We Win." In a way, everything we discussed boiled down to one thing: we win by making our customers win. We win by helping to solve their problems, adding value to their businesses, and making their lives more secure. Sounds obvious, but how do we do that? We touched on a number of approaches, from the macro down to the micro. For example, at the macro scale we talked about our Open Collaborative Architecture which uses open standards and...
