Going back to 1998, Symantec was best known for Norton utilities and Norton anti-virus, says Thompson. When he arrived in 1999, right after windows 1998 was launched. Symantec had had a bad series of quarter. In his first 100 days, he looked at the company product portfolio and found products that were not of strategic value. The brightest star was Norton anti-virus. Symantec had viewed itself as a consumer oriented desktop software company. Coming from IBM, Thompson decided that Symantec would be an enterprise security company. He went about acquiring technologies around the security theme. Symantec used these acquisitions to retool the company. However, the market was not mixed enough and they couldn't get the enterprise multiple. At this point, Symantec decided to do a billion dollar transaction that became the catalyst for changing all the business processes. It finally moved to being an enterprise focused security company.

1. Changes in Enterprise Software: 2002-2004
2. Retooling the Infrastructure of Your Company
3. Customers Must Drive Your Business Model
4. Customer Diversity is Essential
5. You Cannot Stop Spending to Innovate for Customers
6. Security Business Post-9/11
7. To Hedge or Not to Hedge?
8. Envisioning the Future: John Thompson
9. Security is a Broad Domain of Technology
10. Identifying Opportunities: Intrusion Detection
11. Stick to Core Mission, Focus, and Keep It Simple
12. Pervasiveness and Execution: Staying Ahead of Competitors
13. What is the History of Security Software
14. Acquisition and Growth for Symantec
15. Competition: Network Association vs. Symantec
16. Will Symantec Expand to Include Transaction-Based Security Products?
17. Measuring Success: You Measure What Matters

W. Thompson lecture on Entrepreneurship for Stanford University students, May 23, 2003. Returning to talk at Stanford after two years, John Thompson, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Symantec Corporation, talks about the changes in the technology sector and the enterprise software space.



Course Details:

- Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture

- Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner)



Original Course Name: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture.