Norton Zone

~ the goodbye ~

Symantec's own explanation is the most useful thing this product generated. Security is one of the company's strengths, a spokesperson said, file sharing is not, and Norton Zone had been a late entry to the market. The announcement came just under thirteen months after general release.

Norton Zone went into beta on 29 November 2012 and reached general release on 14 May 2013. You got 5 GB free and client-side encryption, with every uploaded file scanned for malware on the way in and clients for Windows, Windows RT, macOS, iOS and Android. The pitch was Dropbox with an antivirus company's instincts, and in 2013 that was not a stupid pitch. It was just arriving five years after Dropbox did.

On 3 June 2014 Symantec published the schedule, and it was unusually blunt about what losing your data would look like. After 7 July you could still reach your files from a Windows or Mac desktop and copy them out, but sharing was gone and so was mobile access. After 6 August 2014 everything was permanently deleted. Thirty days to notice, sixty to lose it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what norton meant where i was ~

In Ankara in 2013, Norton was not a brand you handed your documents to. It arrived pre-installed on a new laptop and got removed in the first week, usually while it was still nagging about a subscription nobody had bought. That reputation was largely out of date by then and completely fixed in people's heads, and it is hard to construct the version of 2013 in which a Turkish engineer looks at a Norton logo and thinks: yes, my files should live inside that.

~ the shelf it died on ~

2013 and 2014 were the two years in which consumer cloud storage stopped being a market and became a feature. Drive and OneDrive came free with accounts that hundreds of millions of people already had, while Dropbox held the one asset neither of them could buy, which was being the one everybody was already using. Anyone showing up with a paid locker needed a reason, and encryption plus virus scanning reads better in a press release than in a buying decision.

Symantec was coming apart in the same window. It had already retreated from consumer online backup, and within five years it would sell the enterprise business to Broadcom and rename the remainder after the Norton brand. The file locker went early, while the company was still working out which half of itself it wanted to keep.

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